Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat Quotes

“Spinoza had argued that God, synonymous with nature, was immutable and eternal, leaving no room for chance. Agreeing with Spinoza, Einstein sought the invariant rules governing nature’s mechanisms. He was absolutely determined to prove that the world was absolutely determined.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“Can you imagine my joy at the feasibility of the general covariance with the result that the equations of the perihelion movement of Mercury prove correct? I was speechless for several days with excitement.
(Einstein to Ehrenfest)”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“Yarn is fundamental, knots are not. Similarly, Hilbert and Mike envisioned a natural order in which the geometry of fields is foremost and twists manifest themselves as particles.”
― Paul Halpern , Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“objects were governed by their interactions”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“Patience is not a hallmark of the press, especially in the Internet age of rapid fire news reports. The media hungrily gobble content as long as they can make the case that it is new and interesting to the public. Unpublished reports, speculations, preliminary review process sometimes become as newsworthy as meticulously verified conclusions.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“The subcomponents were at first called different things, but eventually the physics community settled on the term 'quarks' chosen by Murray Gell-Mann for the way it sounded to him. He spotted the word in a passage from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, "Three quarks for Muster Mark's". As there are three quarks each in protons and neutrons (and in all particles in the category called baryons), the moniker seemed appropriate.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“The lives of Einstein and Schrödinger inform is that even the most brilliant scientists are human”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“In the early hours of April 18, Einstein's world line reached its final point- life's ultimate singularity.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“Wheeler's brilliant student Richard Feynman had developed a unique approach to quantum mechanics, called 'sum over histories', that generalized Hamilton's least-action principle to the study of how photons transfer between electrons and other charged particles to generate the electromagnetic force. In creating a force, the photon acts as what is called an 'exchange particle'. (Its existence is required through Weyl's gauge theory of electromagnetism.) Unlike in classical mechanics, in which particles travel along unique paths, Feynman showed how in quantum interactions all possible paths are taken, weighted by their probabilities to create a net result.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“What God has put asunder, man should not join together,
(Pauli to Weyl)”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“They searched for unity almost in unison. (Einstein and Schrodinger)”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“That May, Einstein excitedly informed a friend, "In the tranquility of my sickness, I have laid a wonderful egg in the area of general relativity. Whether the bird that will hatch from it will be vital and long-lived only the gods know. So far I am blessing my sickness that has endowed me with it.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“Hence, Einstein's equations beautifully connect the stuff of the universe with the shape of the universe.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“Einstein was doggedly persistent about his ideas but would abandon them in a flash if he could see a more economical way forward.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“Compared with this problem, the original theory of relativity is childish.
(Einstein to Sommerfeld on the gravitational problem)”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“Einstein brilliantly realized that it would be possible to patch together a comprehensive theory of gravity from free falling reference frames, treating each as it were at rest. Within each framework, he noted, each object would move in a straight line unless deflected by external forces. However, when viewed from another framework, those straight lines might appear curved. That is why we see bodies taking curved paths because of gravity- because we are viewing their motion from our framework, not theirs.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“Einstein brilliantly realized that it would be possible to patch together a comprehensive theory of gravity from free falling reference frames, treating each as it were at rest”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“By framing the special theory of relativity as a four-dimensional theory set in spacetime, Minkowski showed how time dilation and length contraction could be constructed as rotations that transform space into time.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“By introducing non-Euclidean geometry to theoretical physics, Einstein would transform the field in extraordinary ways. The twelve-year-old clutching the geometry book would have no ways of knowing that his very hands would someday rewrite physical laws in a way that made the book obsolete.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“The relationships (Maxwell's equations) are the epitome of mathematical consieness, compact enough to fit on a T-shirt yet powerful enough to describe all manner of electromagnetism.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“In short, believers in the standpoint that the entire universe runs like a perfect clock dismiss the notion that anything is fundamentally random.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics