Quantum Quotes

322 Sourced quotes

One feels that one has, at last in gravitational collapse, a phenomenon where general relativity dramatically comes into its own, and where its fiery marriage with quantum physics will be consummated.

John Archibald Wheeler

If one really understood the central point and its necessity in the construction of the world, one ought to be able to state it in one clear, simple sentence. Until we see the quantum principle with this simplicity we can well believe that we do not know the first thing about the universe, about ourselves, and about our place in the universe.

John Archibald Wheeler

Nothing is more important about quantum physics than this: it has destroyed the concept of the world as "sitting out there." The universe afterwards will never be the same.

John Archibald Wheeler

Only just the right quantum of wit should be put into a book; in conversation a little excess is allowable.

The basic idea is: shove all fundamental difficulties on to the neutron and practice quantum mechanics inside the nucleus.

Werner Heisenberg

The problem of quantum theory centers on the fact that the particle picture and the wave picture are merely two different aspects of one and the same physical reality.

Werner Heisenberg

According to quantum field theory, fields alone are real. They are the substance of the universe and not 'matter'. Matter is simply the momentary manifestation of interacting fields which, intangible and insubstantial as they are, are the only real things in the universe.

If anything like mechanics were true then one would never understand the existence of atoms. Evidently there exists another [type of mechanics — ] "quantum mechanics."

Werner Heisenberg

Only a certain probability remains of a one-to-one association of any spatial feature now with a similar feature a moment later. It is sheer luck, in a sense, that any physical apparatus stays put, for the laws of quantum mechanics allow it a finite, though small, probability of dispersing while one is not looking, or even while one is.

Lancelot Law Whyte

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined.

The choice before us is either to abandon any hope of knowing the nature of quantum reality or to accept a nonlocal universe.

Your notions of friendship are new to me; I believe every man is born with his quantum, and he cannot give to one without robbing another. I very well know to whom I would give the first place in my friendship, but they are not in the way, I am condemned to another scene, and therefore I distribute it in pennyworths to those about me, and who displease me least, and should do the same to my fellow prisoners if I were condemned to a jail.

The whole thing [quantum leap] seems a myth... but this is not supposed to happen with the electron: instead the frequency of vibration of the emitted light is said to lie somewhere between the orbital frequency before the mysterious jump and the orbital frequency after the jump. All this is sheer madness.

There are circumstances of peculiar difficulty and danger, where a mediocrity of talent is the most fatal quantum that a man can possibly possess. Had Charles the First and Louis the Sixteenth been more wise or more weak, more firm or more yielding, in either case they had both of them saved their heads.

Charles Caleb Colton

I am an old man now, and when I die and go to Heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am rather more optimistic.

Quantum mechanics — the theory that explains phenomena on the size of atoms — is right. It is also so conceptually weird that physicists to this day feel uncomfortable with it.

Trying to capture the physicists' precise mathematical description of the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catcher's mitt on the other.

George Johnson (writer)

In quantum mechanics, we are not dealing with an arbitrary renunciation of a more detailed analysis of atomic phenomena, but with a recognition that such an analysis is in principle excluded.

Physicists do not believe quantum mechanics because it explains the world, but because it predicts the outcome of experiments with almost miraculous accuracy. Theorists kept predicting new particles and other phenomena, and experiments kept bearing out those predictions.

John Horgan (journalist)

Gertrude Stein said of modern art, "A picture may seem extraordinarily strange to you and after some time not only does it not seem strange but it is impossible to find what there was in it that was strange." Quantum physics isn't like that. The longer you look at it, the stranger it gets.

Indeterminism does not confer freedom on us: I would feel that my freedom was impaired if I thought that a quantum mechanical trigger in my brain might cause me to leap into the garden and eat a slug

By the end of this book, you too will know how God weaves the universe out of a web of interlocking fields. I would like to change Dirac's statement "God is a mathematician" to "God is a quantum fiel theorist".