"Within a year, Max Planck, now a professor of physics in Berlin, had found a remarkable way out of the dilemma. He told his son that he believed he had made a discovery of equal significance to those of Newton. It might have seemed a grandiose claim to make, but Planck was simply speaking the sober "
"How could all those great 19th-century insights into the wave nature of light be reconciled with these new ideas? After all, a wave is a spread-out, flappy thing, while a quantum is particlelike, a kind of little bullet. How could both possibly be true? For a long while physicists just had to live w"
"He took a piece of chalk and broke it in two. Placing one fragment on one side of his lectern and the other on the other side, Dirac said that classically there is a state where the piece of chalk is ‘here’ and one where the piece of chalk is ‘there’, and these are the only two possibilities. Replac"
"In someone like Schrödinger, the issue evoked more than perplexity. It filled him with distaste and he said that if he had known that his ideas would have led to this ‘damn quantum jumping’ he would not have wished to discover his equation!"
"Classical physics describes a world that is clear and determinate. Quantum physics describes a world that is cloudy and fitful."
"If abstract theory is to make sense of physical observations, there must be a way of associating numbers (the results of observations) with operators (the mathematical formalism)."
"Einstein, through his explanation of the photoelectric effect, had been one of the grandfathers of quantum theory. However, he came to detest his grandchild. Like the vast majority of physicists, Einstein was deeply convinced of the reality of the physical world and trusted in the truthful reliabili"