Murray Gell-Mann Quotes

Old Newtonian physics claimed that things have an objective reality separate from our perception of them. Quantum physics, and particularly Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, reveal that, as our perception of an object changes, the object itself literally changes.

Quantum mechanics brought an unexpected fuzziness into physics because of quantum uncertainty, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

There certainly is a tension between the relativity of simultaneity and non-locality in quantum theory, but it's not strong enough to add up to a falsification of either side by itself.

It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.

We talk about quantum weirdness and things being in two places at once, but it all involves atoms and molecules, stuff we don't normally interact with.

In relativity, movement is continuous, causally determinate and well defined, while in quantum mechanics it is discontinuous, not causally determinate and not well defined.

Physics tells us observations can't be predicted absolutely. Rather, there's a range of possible observations each with a different probability.

The verbal interpretation, on the other hand, i.e. the metaphysics of quantum physics, is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model.

A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement.

The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world.

Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are necessarily probabilistic.

If you aren't confused by quantum physics, then you haven't really understood it

In its efforts to learn as much as possible about nature, modern physics has found that certain things can never be "known" with certainty. Much of our knowledge must always remain uncertain. The most we can know is in terms of probabilities.

Earlier in this century, the Heisenberg Principle established that the very act of observing a natural phenomenon can change what is being observed. Although the initial theory was limited in practice to special cases in subatomic physics, the philosophical implications were and are staggering.

Everyone's heard of Erwin Schrodinger's famous thought experiment. You put a cat in a box with a bottle of poison, which many people would suggest is about as far as you need to go.

If you have nothing in quantum mechanics, you will always have something.

The principle that light can be in two places at the same time is absolutely extraordinary.

We have to have a combination of general relativity that describes the warping of space and time, and quantum physics, which describes the uncertainties in that warping and how they change.

Nothing can create something all the time due to the laws of quantum mechanics, and it's - it's fascinatingly interesting.

The possibilities that are suggested in quantum physics tell us that everything that we're looking at may not be in fact there, so the underlying nature of being is weird.

Now, what that means is that there is fundamental indeterminacy from quantum mechanics, but besides that there are other sources of effective indeterminacy.

It is a curious historical fact that modern quantum mechanics began with two quite different mathematical formulations: the differential equation of Schroedinger and the matrix algebra of Heisenberg. The two apparently dissimilar approaches were proved to be mathematically equivalent.

The chaos can act as a magnifier of quantum fluctuations so that they can produce sizable effects in the world around us. But we know that that can happen often.

No one intuitively understands quantum mechanics because all of our experience involves a world of classical phenomena where, for example, a baseball thrown from pitcher to catcher seems to take just one path, the one described by Newton's laws of motion. Yet at a microscopic level, the universe behaves quite differently.

I had set out to disprove quantum field theory - and the opposite occurred! I was shocked.