A Quote by John Polkinghorne
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.
Related Quotes
When asked ... [about] an underlying quantum world, Bohr would answer, 'There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.'
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
I once pitched this show that was just like 'Quantum Leap,' in terms of the set-up, and I got a pass because they said 'Quantum Leap' didn't work, even though it was on for six or seven seasons. You can't say 'Quantum Leap' didn't work!
I never studied science or physics at school, and yet when I read complex books on quantum physics I understood them perfectly because I wanted to understand them. The study of quantum physics helped me to have a deeper understanding of the Secret, on an energetic level.
We could tell them [alien civilization] things that we have discovered in the realm of mathematical physics, but there is stuff that I would like to know. There are some famous problems like how to bring gravitation and quantum physics together, the long-sought-after theory of quantum gravity. But it may be hard to understand the answer that comes back.
Quantum physics is the physics of possibilities. And not just material possibilities, but also possibilities of meaning, of feeling, and of intuiting. You choose everything you experience from these possibilities, so quantum physics is a way of understanding your life as one long series of choices that are in themselves the ultimate acts of creativity.
Scientific realism in classical (i.e. pre-quantum) physics has remained compatible with the naive realism of everyday thinking on the whole; whereas it has proven impossible to find any consistent way to visualize the world underlying quantum theory in terms of our pictures in the everyday world. The general conclusion is that in quantum theory naive realism, although necessary at the level of observations, fails at the microscopic level.
We couldn't build quantum computers unless the universe were quantum and computing. We can build such machines because the universe is storing and processing information in the quantum realm. When we build quantum computers, we're hijacking that underlying computation in order to make it do things we want: little and/or/not calculations. We're hacking into the universe.
Ancient wisdom and quantum physicists make unlikely bedfellows: In quantum mechanics the observer determines (or even brings into being) what is observed, and so, too, for the Tiwis, who dissolve the distinction between themselves and the cosmos. In quantum physics, subatomic particles influence each other from a distance, and this tallies with the aboriginal view, in which people, animals, rocks, and trees all weave together in the same interwoven fabric.
What really matters for me is ... the more active role of the observer in quantum physics ... According to quantum physics the observer has indeed a new relation to the physical events around him in comparison with the classical observer, who is merely a spectator.
I got into physics through pop science and quantum science and ended up being such a quantum groupie.
Quantum mechanics brought an unexpected fuzziness into physics because of quantum uncertainty, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Certainly we do not need quantum mechanics for macroscopic objects, which are well described by classical physics - this is the reason why quantum mechanics seems so foreign to our everyday existence.
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.
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.
The most important application of quantum computing in the future is likely to be a computer simulation of quantum systems, because that's an application where we know for sure that quantum systems in general cannot be efficiently simulated on a classical computer.
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