Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn Quotes

“Wheeler wasn’t the first to point out that quantum mechanics slips into paradox the minute you introduce a second observer. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner, for one, had emphasized it with a Schrödinger’s-cat-style thought experiment that became known as “Wigner’s friend.” It went something like this: Inside a lab, Wigner’s friend sets up an experiment in which an atom will randomly emit a photon, producing a flash of light that leaves a spot on a photographic plate. Before Wigner’s friend checks the plate for signs of a flash, quantum mechanics shows that the atom is in a superposition of having emitted a photon and not having emitted a photon. Once the friend looks at the plate, however, he sees a single outcome—the atom flashed or it didn’t. Somehow his looking collapses the atom’s wavefunction, transforming two possibilities into a single reality. Wigner, meanwhile, is standing outside the lab. From his point of view, quantum mechanics shows that until his friend tells him the outcome of the experiment, the atom remains in a superposition of having emitted a photon and not having emitted a photon. What’s more, his friend is now in a superposition of having seen a spot of light on the plate and not having seen a spot of light on the plate. Only Wigner, quantum theory says, can collapse the wavefunction by asking his friend what happened in there. The two stories are contradictory. According to Wigner’s friend, the atom’s wavefunction collapsed when he looked at the plate. According to Wigner, it didn’t. Instead, his friend entered a superposition correlated with the superposition of the atom, and it wasn’t until Wigner spoke to his friend that both superpositions collapsed. Which story is right? Who is the true creator of reality, Wigner or his friend?”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

“Einstein said, “This huge world stands before us like a great eternal riddle.” Why couldn’t any of my teachers have told me that? “Listen,” they could have said, “no one has any idea what the hell is going on. We wake up in this world and we don’t know why we’re here or how anything works. I mean, look around. Look how bizarre it all is! What the hell is all this stuff? Reality is a huge mystery, and you have a choice to make. You can run from it, you can placate yourself with fairy tales, you can just pretend everything’s normal, or you can stare that mystery in the eye and try to solve it. If you are one of the brave ones to choose the latter, welcome to science. Science is the quest to solve the eternal riddle. We haven’t done it yet, but we’ve uncovered some pretty cool clues. The purpose of this class is for you to learn what clues we’ve already got, so that you can take those and head out into the world to find more. And who knows? Maybe you’ll be the one who finally solves the riddle.” If just one of my teachers had said that, I wouldn’t have taken meteorology.”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

“Science journalism’s express goal was to hang over the writer’s mind a veil so opaque that the reader would mistake the writer’s thoughts about the world for the world itself—the world as seen from an impossible God’s-eye view, a paradigm of objectivity and at the same time a lie. For me, hiding the writer’s thoughts strips writing of its greatest gift: its ability to grant us access to other minds. Writing has the potential to be magical because it lets us see the one thing we can never see; it opens our eyes to that feature of the world that is most profoundly invisible. Writing is the rock we can kick to refute our loneliness, to cure the claustrophobia that comes from being trapped inside a one-sided mind.”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

“Despite his mellow, Zen-like demeanor, the appearance of that bookcase betrayed an urgency. A hunger. This thing meant something to him. Of course I had always known that, but there was something about seeing it rendered in rich mahogany that gave it weight—not only the weight of the wood or the tomes on its shelves, but the weight of his ambition, an ambition that was now my inheritance.”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

“Watching the way an invisible force always guided the compass needle north had convinced Einstein that “something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” He spent the rest of his life trying to find it. My father, too, had offered me my first clue that reality is not what it seems. Only in my case the clue wasn’t an object but an idea, and instead of turning out to be Einstein I grew up to be a counterfeit journalist with more questions than answers. Still, it occurred to me now that the best gift a parent can give a child is a mystery.”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

“I thought about Wheeler’s four questions and how we might answer them after everything we’d learned. It from bit? Yes, but each observer creates different its from the same bits, bits that are themselves observer-dependent and arise from the asymmetry wrought by a finite reference frame. A participatory universe? Participatory, yes; a universe, no. It was one participatory universe per reference frame, and you can only talk about one at a time. Why the quantum? Because reality is radically observer-dependent. Because observers are creating bits of information out of nothingness. Because there’s no way things “really are,” and you can’t employ descriptions that cross horizons. How come existence? Because existence is what nothing looks like from the inside.”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

“Of course, we need stories. There's a reason "42" is not a satisfying answer to life, the universe, and everything. Structure alone doesn't quench our existential thirst. We want meaning. And for our brains, meaning comes in the form of stories.”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

“Scientific progress isn’t a parade of miraculously wrong theories—it’s an optimistic snowball, gathering the structure of reality as it rolls.”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

“Einstein had been only four or five years old when his father gave him that compass. It was one of those small tokens that somehow change the world. Watching the way an invisible force always guided the compass needle north had convinced Einstein that “something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” He spent the rest of his life trying to find it.”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

“may be more important to look for the right questions than to look for the right answers.”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

“The H-state couldn’t change because it has no outside. But from here on the inside, it could appear to change, as if something is just what nothing looks like from the inside. Here on the inside, with a finite speed of light, observers can’t see the whole thing. Their perspective is bounded. But when you put a boundary on the H-state, it’s no longer the H-state. It’s no longer nothing. It’s something.”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

“Again and again he returned to the boundary of a boundary, a clue, he was certain, to how we might build physical structure from structurelessness, using the bootstraps of a self-referential loop—a self-excited circuit carved from “airy nothingness.” “Physics,” he wrote, is “machinery to make something out of nothing.” Bit by bit, measurement by measurement, proposition by proposition, he saw that airy nothingness solidifying, and he dreamed that together we would build the world from the primordial haze from which we ourselves arose.”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

“On an average trip he brought two physics books, a few philosophy books, several volumes of poetry, and one thesaurus”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

“Fundamental physics proceeds by paradox. It always has. It was a paradox that led Einstein to relativity: the laws of physics had to be the same for everyone and, given the relational motion of light, the laws of physics couldn’t be the same for everyone. A paradox led Polchinski to D-branes: open strings had to obey T-duality and, given their boundary conditions, open strings couldn’t obey T-duality. Another paradox led Susskind to horizon complementarity: information had to escape a black hole and, given relativity, information couldn’t escape a black hole. And yet another led the entire physics community to wonder whether each observer has his or her own quantum description of the world: entanglement had to be monogamous and, given the equivalence principle, entanglement couldn’t be monogamous. There’s only one way to resolve a paradox—you have to abandon some basic assumption, the faulty one that created the paradox in the first place. For Einstein, it was absolute space and time. For Polchinski, it was the immovability of the submanifold to which the open strings attached. For Susskind, it was the invariance of spacetime locality. For everyone involved in the firewall mess, it was the idea that quantum entanglement is observer-independent. Quantum mechanics short-circuits our neurons because it presents yet another paradox: cats have to be alive and dead at the same time, and, given our experience, cats can’t be alive and dead at the same time. Rovelli resolved the paradox by spotting the inherently flawed assumption: that there is a single reality that all observers share. That you can talk about the world from more than one perspective simultaneously. That there’s some invariant way the universe “really is.”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

“A positive cosmological constant seemed to be required to ensure that nothing would look like something, but”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

“if you dropped two balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, say a bowling ball and a Ping-Pong ball, they’d hit the ground at the exact same time, assuming they were falling in an airless vacuum. You’d think the heavier one would fall faster, but it doesn’t. Because if heavier things fell faster than lighter things, you’d be able to tell whether you were in an accelerated frame or an inertial frame with gravity. How? If you found yourself in a windowless elevator and felt your weight being pulled toward the floor, you might wonder whether the elevator was accelerating upward, causing the floor to push up against your feet, or the elevator was at rest on a planet with a strong gravitational pull. To find out, you could drop a really heavy vagina and a really light vagina at the same time. If the heavy one hit the floor first, you’d know you were in a gravitational field. If they hit the floor simultaneously, you’d know that the elevator was accelerating upward, so the floor rose up to meet the hovering vaginas at the same time. It’s only because vaginas of different weights fall at the same speed that Einstein’s equivalence principle holds: you can never tell the difference between acceleration and gravitation. If you could, “space” would mean something. It would be real. But it’s not.”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

“This was London, after all. I had read somewhere that wherever you stand in the entire city, you’re never more than twenty yards from a rat. There were 50 million of them. That was like seven rats per human.”
― Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything