Quantum Quotes

“After Elsa’s death, Einstein established a routine that as the years passed varied less and less. Breakfast between 9 and 10 was followed by a walk to the institute. After working until 1pm he would return home for lunch and a nap. Afterwards he would work in his study until dinner between 6.30 and 7pm. If not entertaining guests, he would return to work until he went to bed between 11 and 12. He rarely went to the theatre or to a concert, and unlike Bohr, hardly ever watched a movie. He was, Einstein said in 1936, ‘living in the kind of solitude that is painful in one’s youth but in one’s more mature years is delicious’.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Marriage is,’ Einstein said later, ‘the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an incident.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Planck understood that Clausius was not simply stating the obvious, but something of deep significance. Heat, the transfer of energy from A to B due to a temperature difference, explained such everyday occurrences as a hot cup of coffee getting cold and an ice cube in a glass of water melting. But left undisturbed, the reverse never happened. Why not? The law of conservation of energy did not forbid a cup of coffee from getting hotter and the surrounding air colder, or the glass of water becoming warmer and the ice cooler. It did not outlaw heat flowing from a cold to a hot body spontaneously. Yet something was preventing this from happening. Clausius discovered that something and called it entropy. It lay at the heart of why some processes occur in nature and others do not.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Although it might be heuristically useful to bear in mind what one has actually observed, in principle, he argued, 'it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone'. 'In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“A storm broke loose in my mind’, was how he described the surge of creativity that consumed him as he produced his breathtaking succession of papers during that glorious Bern spring and summer of 1905.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“The more successes the quantum theory enjoys, the more stupid it looks’, Einstein had written as early as May 1912.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Einstein, to the surprise of his secular parents, had developed what he described as ‘a deep religiosity’. He stopped eating pork, sang religious songs on the way to school, and accepted the biblical story of creation as an established fact. Then, as he devoured one book after another on science, came the realisation that much of the Bible could not be true. It unleashed what he called ‘a fanatic freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the State through lies; it was a crushing impression’.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Einstein said years later that ‘this theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoic, concocted of incoherent elements of thoughts’.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“In a note to Einstein as they sat around the conference table, Ehrenfest scribbled: ‘Don’t laugh! There is a special section in purgatory for professors of quantum theory, where they will be obliged to listen to lectures on classical physics ten hours every day.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“The renewal of their friendship was signalled by the fact that Einstein let Bohr use his office.
One day Bohr was dictating a draft of a paper in honour of Einstein’s 70th birthday to Pais.
Stuck on what to say next, Bohr stood looking out of the window, every now and then
muttering Einstein’s name aloud. At that moment Einstein tiptoed into the office. His doctor had banned him from buying any tobacco, but had said nothing about stealing it. Pais later recounted what happened next: ‘Always on tiptoes, he made a beeline for Bohr’s tobacco pot, which stood on the table at which I was sitting. Bohr, unaware, was standing at the window, muttering, “Einstein…Einstein…” I was at a loss what to do, especially because I had at that moment not the faintest idea of what Einstein was up to. Then Bohr, with a firm “Einstein”, turned around. There they were, face to face, as if Bohr had summoned him forth. It is an understatement to say that for a moment Bohr was speechless. I myself, who had seen it coming, had distinctly felt uncanny for a moment, so I could well understand Bohr’s own reaction. A moment later the spell was broken when Einstein explained his mission. Soon we were all bursting with laughter.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“flawed. Einstein said years later that ‘this theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoic, concocted of incoherent elements of thoughts’.5”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“quantum mechanics as ‘that mysterious, confusing discipline which none of us really understands”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“The more successes the quantum theory enjoys, the more stupid it looks’,”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“verschränkung’, later translated into English as ‘entanglement’,”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“The quantum postulate, said Bohr, led to no clear separation of the observer and the observed.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Bohr had built his atom using a heady cocktail of classical and quantum physics. In the process he had violated tenets of accepted physics by proposing that: electrons inside atoms can occupy only certain orbits, the stationary states; electrons cannot radiate energy while in those orbits; an atom can be in only one of a series of discrete energy states, the lowest being the ‘ground state’; electrons can ‘somehow’ jump from a stationary state of high energy to a stationary state of low energy and the difference in energy between the two is emitted in a quantum of energy. Yet his model correctly predicted various properties of the hydrogen atom such as its radius, and it provided a physical explanation for the production of spectral lines. The quantum atom, Rutherford said later, was ‘a triumph of mind over matter’ and until Bohr unveiled it, he believed that ‘it would require centuries’ to solve the mystery of the spectral lines.36”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“When in 1827 the Scottish botanist Robert Brown peered through a microscope at some pollen grains suspended in water, he saw that they were in a constant state of haphazard motion”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“electricity and magnetism into a set of four elegant mathematical equations. On seeing them, Ludwig Boltzmann immediately recognised the magnitude of Maxwell’s achievement and could only quote Goethe in admiration: ‘Was it a God that wrote these signs?”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Just as ice, water and steam are different manifestations of H2O, Maxwell showed in 1864 that electricity and magnetism were likewise different manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon – electromagnetism.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Michael Faraday decided to see if he could generate electricity using magnetism.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“André Marie Ampère demonstrated that two parallel wires were attracted towards one another if each had a current flowing through it in the same direction.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“James Clerk Maxwell and his theory of electromagnetism. Born in 1831 in Edinburgh, Maxwell, the son of a Scottish landowner, was destined to become the greatest theoretical physicist of the nineteenth century. At the age of fifteen, he wrote his first published paper on a geometrical method for tracing ovals.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Starting at low temperatures, the poker emits predominantly long-wavelength radiation from the infrared part of the spectrum. As the temperature increases, more energy is radiated in each region and the peak wavelength decreases. It is ‘displaced’ towards the shorter wavelengths.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“It was already known that the rise in temperature would result in an increase in the total amount of energy radiated, but Wien’s ‘displacement law’ revealed something very precise: the wavelength at which the maximum amount of radiation is emitted multiplied by the temperature of a blackbody is always a constant. If the temperature is doubled, then the ‘peak’ wavelength will be half the previous length.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“They, however, never occur in practice, only in the mind of the physicist.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“struck him ‘like a revelation’ he said later, because it possessed ‘absolute, universal validity, independently from all human agency’.23 It was the moment he caught a glimpse of the eternal, and from then on he considered the search for absolute or fundamental laws of nature ‘as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life’.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“A talented pianist, he toyed with the idea of pursuing a career as a professional musician. Unsure, he sought advice and was bluntly told: ‘If you have to ask, you’d better study something else!”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born in Kiel, then a part of Danish Holstein, on 23 April 1858”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“As a perfect emitter at any given temperature, a blackbody emits the maximum amount of heat, infrared radiation. The blackbody spectrum would serve as a benchmark in calibrating and producing a bulb that emitted as much light as possible while keeping the heat it generated to a minimum.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“hundred and fifty delegates from 22 countries gathered in Paris, in 1881, for the first International Conference for the Determination of Electrical Units.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality