When We Cease To Understand The World Quotes
"An absolute silence reigns. Everything becomes alien and insignificant. I feel completely weightless, as if I were floating above my own airplane."
"If at all possible, please mail me more Pervitin."
"Faced with utter defeat, staggered by the new horror they had called down upon the world, they chose a quick escape."
"I had not expected that one could formulate the exact solution of the problem in such a simple way!"
"Everything went black before my eyes. I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blankets and pillow."
"The speed with which it acts made it a favourite of countless assassins."
"The effects of cyanide are so swift that there is but one historical account of its flavour."
"It really does me good, every few days, to be at the front, where the bullets fly. There, the only thing that counts is the moment, and one’s sole duty is whatever one can do within the confines of the trenches."
"Grothendieck was capable of creating an entire mathematical universe fit for a single equation."
"To think in such terms demanded a completely novel conception of space, as radical as the change brought forth by Albert Einstein, fifty years before."
"He could make unexpected leaps to higher categories and work in orders of magnitude no one had dared to explore before."
"My first impression on hearing him lecture was that he had been transported to our planet from an alien civilization in some distant solar system in order to speed up our intellectual evolution."
"What stimulates me is not ambition or the thirst for power. It is the acute perception of something immense and yet very delicate at the same time."
"He was generous with his possessions and gave them away without a second thought."
"A perspective is by nature limited. It offers us one single vision of a landscape. Only when complementary views of the same reality combine are we capable of achieving fuller access to the knowledge of things."
"I have an irrefutable and perhaps blasphemous sense that I know God more intimately than I do any other being in this world, even though He is an impenetrable mystery, infinitely vaster than any physical entity."
"He died at Saint-Girons hospital on Thursday, November 13, 2014. The cause of death is still unknown; he asked that it never be divulged."
"His eyes had become so used to darkness after long days shut away that he was able to proceed with absolute certainty."
"The radiance came not from the sun, but from the earth itself."
"His matrices allowed him to describe the location of an electron from one moment to the next, and how it would interact with other particles."
"Science could not only understand reality but begin to manipulate it at its most basic level."
"He felt he was looking past atomic phenomena towards a new sort of beauty."
"What Einstein abhorred was not the formulae’s hermeticism, but something far more important: the world Heisenberg had discovered was incompatible with common sense."
"Einstein sensed that if one followed that line of thinking to its ultimate consequences, darkness would infect the soul of physics."
"All matter is possessed of such dualism! Not only light but each of the atoms with which the godhead has constructed the universe is subject to this twofold nature."
"Nothing is as solid as it appears; the stone in the child’s hand, which he aims at the idle sparrow on its branch, could run like water between his fingers."
"This is the first weak beam of light to penetrate the dilemma of the quantum world, the most terrible of our generation."
"Beautiful as they were, Schrödinger’s waves were not a part of this world."
"In the course of a life, there is nothing but the rise and fall of material and mental forms, while the unfathomable reality remains."
"In every creature sleeps an infinite intelligence, hidden and unknown, but destined to awaken."
"One ghost succeeds the other like waves on the illusory sea of birth and death."
"The physicist sat down next to her, and she opened a book she held in her hands, reading the following passage: 'One ghost succeeds the other like waves on the illusory sea of birth and death.'"
"All the information one could wish to have about a quantum system was contained in the wave function."
"An electron, Heisenberg explained, did not exist in a single place, but in many, and had not one velocity, but several."
"Illuminating one of its properties necessarily obscured the other."
"The best description of a quantum system was neither an image nor a metaphor, but rather a set of numbers."
"This was the end of determinism. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put their faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised."
"In the deepest substrate of all things, physics had not found the solid, unassailable reality Schrödinger and Einstein had dreamt of, but a domain of wonders and rarities, borne of the whims of a many-armed goddess toying with chance."
"Reality does not exist as something separate from the act of observation."
"The transition from the 'possible' to the 'real' only occurred during the act of observation or measurement."
"Science can no longer confront reality in the same way. The method of analysing, explaining and classifying the world has become conscious of its own limitations."
"It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world."
"But it’s not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world."
"When they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance."