Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics!
Here another great physicist also says something that should be taken to heart by all authors and speakers who appeal to quantum mechanics to “explain” the finer points of their discourse!
“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
–Richard Phillips Feynman (American Theoretical Physicist and, in 1965, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1918-1988)
“The Character of Physical Law (Messenger Lectures, 1964)” (Richard Feynman)
Shocked by Quantum Theory
For years now I have been worried about some of the absurd self-deception of a few writers and speakers who claim to understand quantum theory and use their version of it to bolster some argument or other.
In the past I have written a fair bit about some of the more preposterous claims that had been misleading enormous numbers of people.
I thought that most of those pieces had been lost after two of my older blogs were hacked – twice! – and needed to be re-built and transferred to a new server.
So I was delighted to find that one of them – Quantum Flapdoodle – has come across.
And this short quotation rather supports what I was saying:
“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it… Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with the other system… Independent reality in the ordinary sense can be ascribed neither to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation.”
–Niels Bohr (Danish Physicist and, in 1922, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1885-1962)
Wholeness
“Relativity and quantum theory agree in that both imply the need to look upon the world as an undivided whole in which all the parts of the universe merge and unite in one totality.”
–David Bohm (American-born Theoretical Physicist and Philosopher, 1917-1992)
“RC Series Bundle: Wholeness and the Implicate Order” (David Bohm)
The Universal Flux of Events and Processes
“Indeed, to some extent it has always been necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, if we tried to deal with the whole of reality at once, we would be swamped.
However when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man’s notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives, i.e. in his world-view then man ceases to regard the resultant divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and this world as actually constituted of separately existing fragments. What is needed is a relativistic theory, to give up altogether the notion that the world is constituted of basic objects or building blocks.
Rather one has to view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes.”
–David Bohm (American-born Theoretical Physicist and Philosopher, 1917-1992)
The Holographic Universe
“Classical science has always viewed the state of a system as a whole as merely the result of interaction of its parts. However, the quantum potential stood this view on its ear and indicated that the behavior of parts is actually organized by the whole.”
–Michael Talbot (American Writer, Intellectual and Proponent of the Holographic Model of Reality, 1953-1992)
“The Holographic Universe: The Revolutionary Theory of Reality” (Michael Talbot)
Your Life Is More Than A Piece of Existence
“Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, this life of yours is not merely a piece of the entire existence but is, in a certain sense, the whole.”
–Erwin Schrödinger Austrian Physicist and, in 1933, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, 1887-1961
All Living Beings Belong Together
An extraordinary insight by one the parents of quantum mechanics:
“All of us living beings belong together, in as much as we are all in reality sides or aspects of one single being, which may perhaps in western terminology be called God while in the Upanishads its name is Brahman.”
–Erwin Schrodinger (Austrian Physicist and, in 1933, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, 1887-1961)
