Quantum Quotes

322 Sourced quotes

[Quantum mechanics requires] a final renunciation of the classical ideal of causality and a radical revision of our attitude towards the problem of physical reality.

Either the quantum of action was a fictional quantity, then the whole deduction of the radiation law was in the main illusionary and represented nothing more than an empty nonsignificant play on formulae, or the derivation of the radiation law was based on sound physical conception.

We are part and parcel of a single and all-encompassing evolutionary current that is itself Spirit-in-action, the mode and manner of Spirit's creation, and thus is always going beyond what went before-that leaps, not crawls, to new plateaus of truth, only to leap again, dying and being reborn with each new quantum lurch, often stumbling and bruising its metaphyscical knees, yet always getting right back up and jumping yet again.

Coiled serpents capture the essence of the molecule that is missing from mechanical models — the element of mystery. They remind us that just beneath the surface of the dazzling atomic landscape recorded by modern technology, the paradoxes of quantum mechanics lurk like venomous snakes.

Hans Christian von Baeyer

In Einstein's theory of relativity the observer is a man who sets out in quest of truth armed with a measuring-rod. In quantum theory he sets out with a sieve.

Arthur Eddington

[In quantum mechanics] we have the paradoxical situation that observable events obey laws of chance, but that the probability for these events itself spreads according to laws which are in all essential features causal laws.

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 quantum is that embarrassing little piece of thread that always hangs from the sweater of space-time. Pull it and the whole thing unravels.

The treatment of the indeterminacy principle as absolute and final can then be criticized as constituting an arbitrary restriction on scientific theories, since it does not follow from the quantum theory as such, but rather from the assumption of the unlimited validity of certain of its features, an assumption that can in no way ever be subjected to experimental proof.

Dick Feynman told me about his "sum over histories" version of quantum mechanics. "The electron does anything it likes," he said. "It goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time, however it likes, and then you add up the amplitudes and it gives you the wave function." I said to him, "You're crazy." But he wasn't.

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

Quantum mechanics is the imaginary square root of probability theory.

Gian-Carlo Rota

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.

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

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

Werner Heisenberg

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

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

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

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

In the everyday world, energy is always unalterably fixed; the law of energy conservation is a cornerstone of classical physics. But in the quantum microworld, energy can appear and disappear out of nowhere in a spontaneous and unpredictable fashion.

At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs-as long as no one is watching, anything goes.

Lawrence M. Krauss

I am working out a quantum theory about it for it is really most tantalizing state of affairs.

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

In the impalpable and seemingly inconsequential entities of the quantum world, one finds the true music and magic of nature.

Edward Robert Harrison

One of the consequences is that things which we used to consider as waves also behave like particles, and particles behave like waves; in fact everything behaves the same way. There is no distinction between a wave and a particle. So quantum mechanics unifies the idea of the field and its waves, and the particles, all into one.

Richard Feynman