Lawrence M. Krauss Quotes

Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen.

There are a lot of mysteries about quantum mechanics, but they mostly arise in very detailed measurements in controlled settings.

We talk about quantum weirdness and things being in two places at once, but it all involves atoms and molecules, stuff we don't normally interact with.

It is a curious historical fact that modern quantum mechanics began with two quite different mathematical formulations: the differential equation of Schroedinger and the matrix algebra of Heisenberg. The two apparently dissimilar approaches were proved to be mathematically equivalent.

In the future, maybe quantum mechanics will teach us something equally chilling about exactly how we exist from moment to moment of what we like to think of as time.

Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are necessarily probabilistic.

Quantum physics is one of the hardest things to understand intuitively, because essentially the whole point is that our classical picture is wrong.

It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct.

If we look at the way the universe behaves, quantum mechanics gives us fundamental, unavoidable indeterminacy, so that alternative histories of the universe can be assigned probability.

Nothing can create something all the time due to the laws of quantum mechanics, and it's - it's fascinatingly interesting.

In relativity, movement is continuous, causally determinate and well defined, while in quantum mechanics it is discontinuous, not causally determinate and not well defined.

The chaos can act as a magnifier of quantum fluctuations so that they can produce sizable effects in the world around us. But we know that that can happen often.

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.

If we have an atom that is in an excited state and so is going to emit a photon, we cannot say when it will emit the photon. It has a certain amplitude to emit the photon at any time, and we can predict only a probability for emission; we cannot predict the future exactly.

When one studies the properties of atoms, one found that the reality is far stranger than anybody would have invented in the form of fiction. Particles really do have the possibility of, in some sense, being in more than one place at one time.

Quantum physics thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe.

If you aren't confused by quantum physics, then you haven't really understood it

Quantum physics is quite interesting. All these tiny particles are there as much as they're not there. That to me is very, very interesting. And how our thoughts change the outcome of an experiment, I think that's all quite spiritual.

The more you study quantum mechanics, the more crazy and incomprehensible it becomes. You truly do need a Ph.D. in very high level math and science to understand it at a high, high level.

[Heisenberg's seminal 1925 paper initiating quantum mechanics marked] one of the great jumps—perhaps the greatest—in the development of twentieth century physics.

At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs-as long as no one is watching, anything goes.

The principle that light can be in two places at the same time is absolutely extraordinary.

It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.

The world is not made up of particles and waves and beams of light with a definite existence. Instead, the world works in a much more exploratory way. It is aware of all the possibilities at once and trying them out all the time. That is a hard thing to picture.

The qubit acts as a bridge between the microscopic and the macroscopic worlds.