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If you have nothing in quantum mechanics, you will always have something.
Sep 17, 2025
No one really understands quantum mechanics.
When things get tough, there are two things that make life worth living: Mozart, and quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics, with its leap into statistics, has been a mere palliative for our ignorance
It is true that many scientists are not philosophically minded and have hitherto shown much skill and ingenuity but little wisdom.
Einstein, stop telling God what to do!
If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so.
The problem is that replacement of Quantum Mechanics by Quantum Field Theory is still very demanding.
[The Many-worlds interpretation is the] only completely coherent approach to explaining both the contents of quantum mechanics and the appearance of the world.
Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are both accepted as scientific fact even though they're mutually exclusive. Albert Einstein spent the second half of his life searching for a unifying truth that would reconcile the two.
In quantum mechanics there is A causing B. The equations do not stand outside that usual paradigm of physics. The real issue is that the kinds of things you predict in quantum mechanics are different from the kinds of things you predict using general relativity. Quantum mechanics, that big, new, spectacular remarkable idea is that you only predict probabilities, the likelihood of one outcome or another. That's the new idea.
Entanglement is not one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics.
It seems sensible to discard all hope of observing hitherto unobservable quantities, such as the position and period of the electron... Instead it seems more reasonable to try to establish a theoretical quantum mechanics, analogous to classical mechanics, but in which only relations between observable quantities occur.
It is difficult for me to believe that quantum mechanics, working very well for currently practical set-ups, will nevertheless fail badly with improvements in counter efficiency.
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.
Quantum mechanics, that brilliantly successful flagship theory of modern science, is deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Eastern mystics have always been deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Therefore, Eastern mystics must have been talking about quantum theory all along.
Nothing can create something all the time due to the laws of quantum mechanics, and it's - it's fascinatingly interesting.
It seems to me that we must make a distinction between what is "objective" and what is "measurable" in discussing the question of physical reality, according to quantum mechanics. The state-vector of a system is, indeed, not measurable , in the sense that one cannot ascertain, by experiments performed on the system, precisely (up to proportionality) what the state is; but the state-vector does seem to be (again up to proportionality) a completely objective property of the system, being completely characterized by the results it must give to experiments that one might perform.
If all people learned to think in the non Aristotelian manner of quantum mechanics, the world would change so radically that most of what we call "stupidity" and even a great deal of what we consider "insanity" might disappear, and the "intractable" problems of war, poverty and injustice would suddenly seem a great deal closer to solution.
Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.
According to inflation, the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age.
Quantum mechanics is weird. I don't understand it. Just live with it. You don't have to understand the nature of things in order to build cool devices.
[Heisenberg's seminal 1925 paper initiating quantum mechanics marked] one of the great jumps—perhaps the greatest—in the development of twentieth century physics.
Everything that can happen, does. That's quantum mechanics. But this does not mean everything happens. The rest of physics is about describing what can happen and what can't.
For the record: Quantum mechanics does not deny the existence of objective reality. Nor does it imply that mere thoughts can change external events. Effects still require causes, so if you want to change the universe, you need to act on it.
What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.
If you aren't confused by quantum mechanics, you haven't really understood it.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I’ve ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics.
When you think about the complexity of our natural world - plants using quantum mechanics for photosynthesis, for example - a smartphone begins to look like a pretty dumb object.
...quantum mechanics—the physics of our world—requires that you hold such pedestrian complaints in abeyance.
Quantum Mechanics is different. Its weirdness is evident without comparison. It is harder to train your mind to have quantum mechanical tuition, because quantum mechanics shatters our own personal, individual conception of reality
Quantum mechanics is so counter-intuitive, physicists have never been able to come up with a comfortable picture of how it works.
This book is unique. I know of no other which so artfully tackles two of the greatest mysteries of modern science, quantum mechanics, and consciousness. It has long been suspected that these mysteries are somehow related: the authors’ treatment of this thorny and controversial issue is honest, wide-ranging, and immensely readable. The book contains some of the clearest expositions I have ever seen of the strange and paradoxical nature of the quantum world. Quantum Enigma is a pleasure to read, and I am sure it is destined to become a classic.
But some of these theories are so bold that they can clash with reality: they are the testable theories of science. And when they clash, then we know that there is a reality; something that can inform us that our ideas are mistaken.
But, as we have seen, movement does not require a mover, and modern quantum mechanics has shown that not all effects require a cause. And even if they did, why would the Prime Mover need to be a supernatural anthropomorphic deity such as the Judeo - Christian God? Why could it not just as well be the material universe itself?
In the future, maybe quantum mechanics will teach us something equally chilling about exactly how we exist from moment to moment of what we like to think of as time.
Nature is one. It is not divided into physics, chemistry, quantum mechanics.
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
I've been very involved in this quantum holographic formalism and helping to explore it as explanatory of the very root of our perceptual capabilities. It is postulated, for example, that this very basic entanglement, at the quantum level, at the level of subatomic matter, is really a part of quantum mechanics.
I favour an interpretation of quantum mechanics (the 'Everett interpretation') according to which reality branches in any chancy quantum situation. On this view, Schrödinger's set-up will give rise to in two future branches of reality, one with a live cat, and one with a dead cat - and the talk of '50% chances' just indicates that the two branches are both equally real futures of the cat that originally entered the box.
When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.
A further aspect I should like to discuss is what I call the practice of infinite escape clauses. I believe we developed this practice to avoid facing the conclusion that the probability of self-reproducing state is zero. This is what we must conclude from classical quantum mechanical principles as Wigner demonstrated
One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.
Although quantum mechanics has been around for nearly 70 years, it is still not generally understood or appreciated, even by those that use it to do calculations.
I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among "real" mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are at present at any rate, almost as "useless" as the theory of numbers.
At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs-as long as no one is watching, anything goes.
As an adult I discovered that I was a pretty good autodidact, and can teach myself all kind of things. And developed a great interest in a number of different things from how to build a street hot rod from the ground up to quantum mechanics, and those two different kinds of mechanics, and it was really in the sciences, quantum mechanics, molecular biology, I would begin looking at these things looking for ideas, but in fact you don't read it for ideas you read it for curiosity and interest in the subject.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Unless a thing can be defined by measurement, it has no place in a theory. And since an accurate value of the momentum of a localized particle cannot be defined by measurement it therefore has no place in the theory.