In Search Of Schrödinger's Cat: Quantum Physics And Reality Quotes
"The best things in science are both beautiful and simple."
"I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order ... 'But it's true,' I said to myself. 'It's very beautiful. And it's true.'"
"Science does not claim to have all the answers, and that it is religion, not science, that depends essentially on absolute faith and conviction that the truth is known."
"The only existing things are atoms and empty space; all else is mere opinion."
"Every object stays at rest, or moves with constant velocity, unless an outside force acts on it."
"For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."
"The atomic decay has neither happened nor not happened, the cat has neither been killed nor not killed, until we look inside the box to see what has happened."
"Reality, in the everyday sense, is not a good way to think about the behavior of the fundamental particles that make up the universe."
"Energy really does only come in packets of a definite size—the automatic teller only deals in units of £5 because that is the smallest denomination of currency that there is."
"Niels Bohr was a Danish physicist who completed his doctorate in the summer of 1911 and went to Cambridge that September to work with J. J. Thomson at the Cavendish."
"Bohr didn’t worry about explaining all the details in a complete theory, but was quite willing to patch together different ideas to make an imaginary 'model'."
"What Bohr did had no right to work. The whole idea of an orbit depends on classical physics."
"An electron is simply something that sits outside the nucleus and has a certain amount of energy and other properties."
"The science of spectroscopy goes back to the early years of the nineteenth century."
"When the sun’s light is spread out in this way, the spectrum revealed is marked by very sharp, dark lines at very precise places."
"After discussing his work with Rutherford, Bohr published his theory of the atom in a series of papers during 1913."
"Thirteen years after Planck’s desperate measure of incorporating the quantum into the theory of light, Bohr introduced the quantum into the theory of the atom."
"Atoms are very small. Avogadro’s Number is the number of atoms of hydrogen in one gram of the gas."
"Atoms combine, said Bohr, in such a way that they get as close as they can to making a closed outer shell."
"The exclusion principle, and the discovery of electron spin, really arrived ahead of their time."
"The Pauli Exclusion Principle, it turns out, applies to all particles that have a half-integral amount of spin."
"The subtleties need not concern us now, but the distinction between fermions and bosons is an important one that can be easily understood."
"This was the high point of the old quantum theory. Within three years, it had been swept away."
"I had the feeling that, through the surface of atomic phenomena, I was looking at a strangely beautiful interior."
"In his autobiographical Physics and Beyond, he described his feelings as the numbers began to fall into place."
"Pauli was enthusiastic, but Heisenberg was exhausted by his efforts."
"It isn’t really surprising that he should have remembered this obscure branch of mathematics more than twenty years later."
"It was a strange experience to find that many of the old results of Newtonian mechanics could be derived also in the new scheme."
"Dirac was the only English theorist who can rank with Newton."
"In what became known as the 'three-man paper,' the Göttingen team stressed that this is the 'fundamental quantum-mechanical relation.'"
"The equations of Newtonian mechanics were replaced by similar equations involving matrices."
"The analogy is inexact but highlights the way different forms of notation describe the same event."
"Dirac, and Schrödinger similarly found different forms of mathematical notation to describe the same quantum events."
"Schrödinger’s equations include both the noncommutativity relation, and the crucial factor ħ/i."
"Born was happy enough to send Heisenberg’s paper off to the Zeitschrift für Physik."
"The important point to appreciate, however, is that it does not represent any deficiency in the experiments."
"Bohr said that both the theoretical pictures, particle physics and wave physics, are equally valid."
"The experiments are rooted in classical physics, even though we know that classical physics does not work as a description of atomic processes."
"Stars work by more complicated processes involving nuclear reactions between hydrogen and nuclei such as carbon."
"The original use of the term 'nucleus' for the central part of an atom was a deliberate echo of the already existing biological terminology."
"The more accurately we know the position of a particle, the less accurately we know its momentum, and vice versa."
"We can only see things by looking at them, which involves bouncing photons of light off them and into our eyes."
"The past is clearly defined—we do know exactly where we have come from."
"The cloud is created by the process of questioning, and in the same sense the electron is created by our process of experimental probing."
"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."
"The only things we know about the quantum world are the results of experiments."
"No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a recorded phenomenon."
"Nature herself is not above this kind of cheating."
"The direct, experimental proof of the paradoxical reality of the quantum world comes from modern versions of the EPR thought experiment."
"Fortunately, many of the peculiarities of the spin of a particle like an electron can be ignored in these experiments."
"This is a simple prediction where quantum theory and classical mechanics both agree."
"But in the quantum world, the situation is very different."
"Einstein regarded this 'ghostly' nonlocality as absurd, implying a flaw in quantum theory."
"Like the spin of a particle at the quantum level, the polarization of a photon in one direction or another is a 'yes/no' property."
"By changing the experiment we change the nature of quantum reality."
"But how does the other photon know? How can it take care to orientate itself so that it will pass the same test that the first photon passes and fail the same test that the first photon fails?"
"Following the announcement of the results from Aspect’s team...nobody seriously doubts that the Bell test confirms the predictions of quantum theory."
"We are as much parts of a single system as the two photons flying out of the heart of the Aspect experiment."
"Supersymmetry looks good, but it isn’t yet the final answer."
"Something is still missing, and physicists don’t know what it is."
"This supergravity starts with a hypothetical particle, called the graviton, which carries the gravitational field."
"Physicists face in testing the theory can be seen by considering the gravitinos."
"The problems are immense, but theories like supergravity are at least consistent, finite, and not in need of renormalization."
"The entire history of the universe becomes the proving ground for fundamental physics."
"The universe and everything in it may be no more, and no less, than one of those vacuum fluctuations."
"The chances of such a fluctuation occurring on the scale of the visible universe are tiny."
"The universe has zero energy overall, and it is not so difficult to make something with zero energy overall out of a vacuum fluctuation."
"The idea ties in very closely with the possibility that the universe may be gravitationally closed."