Richard P. Feynman Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Quantum physics is one of the hardest things to understand intuitively, because essentially the whole point is that our classical picture is wrong.

The qubit acts as a bridge between the microscopic and the macroscopic worlds.

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.

Nevertheless, all of us who work in quantum physics believe in the reality of a quantum world, and the reality of quantum entities like protons and electrons.

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.

When one studies the properties of atoms, one found that the reality is far stranger than anybody would have invented in the form of fiction. Particles really do have the possibility of, in some sense, being in more than one place at one time.

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

Quantum entanglement is a very intriguing issue, but it is not impossible.

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

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

So the old Copenhagen interpretation needs to be generalized, needs to be replaced by something that can be used for the whole universe, and can be used also in cases where there is plenty of individuality and history.

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.

There are a lot of mysteries about quantum mechanics, but they mostly arise in very detailed measurements in controlled settings.

Quantum theory also tells us that the world is not simply objective; somehow it's something more subtle than that. In some sense it is veiled from us, but it has a structure that we can understand.

To me quantum computation is a new and deeper and better way to understand the laws of physics, and hence understanding physical reality as a whole.

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.

If I realize that actually there's quantum mechanics happening around us all the time in some macroscopic, interconnected way, then that doesn't change my perception of it, that doesn't change my interaction with it; it just changes how I view my interaction.

If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.

If we have an atom that is in an excited state and so is going to emit a photon, we cannot say when it will emit the photon. It has a certain amplitude to emit the photon at any time, and we can predict only a probability for emission; we cannot predict the future exactly.

I am fascinated by quantum physics.

Quantum physics thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe.