“Quantum” originates from quantum mechanics, a branch of physics that deals with the behavior of particles at the smallest scales, such as atoms and subatomic particles. In physics, “quantum” refers to discrete units or packets of energy or matter. It suggests that certain physical properties, like energy, exist in discrete, tiny amounts, rather than being continuous. Quantum mechanics describes the behavior of matter and energy on the atomic and subatomic levels, often leading to phenomena that seem counterintuitive compared to classical physics.
Quantum Quotes
1. “Life is strong and fragile. It’s a paradox… It’s both things, like quantum physics: It’s a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together.”
— Joan Jett
2. “Quantum physics thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe.”
— Erwin Schrodinger
3. “Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.”
— Richard P. Feynman
4. “We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe.”
— Stephen Hawking
5. “The uncertainty principle refers to the degree of indeterminateness in the possible present knowledge of the simultaneous values of various quantities with which the quantum theory deals; it does not restrict, for example, the exactness of a position measurement alone or a velocity measurement alone.”
— Werner Heisenberg
6. “Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive.”
— Elon Musk
7. “I became an atheist because, as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn’t see any need to go beyond that.”
— Francis Collins
8. “Until computers and robots make quantum advances, they basically remain adding machines: capable only of doing things in which all the variables are controlled and predictable.”
— Michio Kaku
9. “Readers probably haven’t heard much about it yet, but they will. Quantum technology turns ordinary reality upside down.”
— Michael Crichton
10. “Future generations will know there’s nothing mystical about wetware because by 2100, Moore’s law will have given us tiny quantum computers powerful enough to upload a human soul.”
— Frank Tipler
11. “I come from a long line of below-stairs maids and gardeners. Good ol’ peasant stock. My mother and her sister made a quantum leap out of that life. Then I made another quantum leap.”
— Julie Andrews
12. “Feynman once said, ‘Science is imagination in a straitjacket.’ It is ironic that in the case of quantum mechanics, the people without the straitjackets are generally the nuts.”
— Lawrence M. Krauss
13. “The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world.”
— Alain Aspect
14. “The quantum world is still very mysterious, still seemingly very powerful, and I’m definitely attracted to the mysterious and the unknown and just the vastness of what my imagination puts on it.”
— Van Hunt
15. “When you look at the calculation, it’s amazing that every time you try to prove or disprove time travel, you’ve pushed Einstein’s theory to the very limits where quantum effects must dominate. That’s telling us that you really need a theory of everything to resolve this question. And the only candidate is string theory.”
— Michio Kaku
16. “The verbal interpretation, on the other hand, i.e. the metaphysics of quantum physics, is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model.”
— Erwin Schrodinger
17. “If someone says that he can think or talk about quantum physics without becoming dizzy, that shows only that he has not understood anything whatever about it.”
— Murray Gell-Mann
18. “Quantum computation is… a distinctively new way of harnessing nature… It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes.”
— David Deutsch
19. “I’m definitely interested by a lot of things outside of music – technology, film, quantum physics – and I’m realizing that I can put my creativity into anything I kind of choose to.”
— Frank Dukes
20. “Old Newtonian physics claimed that things have an objective reality separate from our perception of them. Quantum physics, and particularly Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, reveal that, as our perception of an object changes, the object itself literally changes.”
— Marianne Williamson
21. “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.”
— Michio Kaku
22. “The most important application of quantum computing in the future is likely to be a computer simulation of quantum systems, because that’s an application where we know for sure that quantum systems in general cannot be efficiently simulated on a classical computer.”
— David Deutsch
23. “Amplifying atoms is more subtle than amplifying electromagnetic waves because atoms can only change their quantum state and cannot be created. Therefore, even if one could amplify gold atoms, one would not realize the dreams of medieval alchemy.”
— Wolfgang Ketterle
24. “We have to have a combination of general relativity that describes the warping of space and time, and quantum physics, which describes the uncertainties in that warping and how they change.”
— Kip Thorne
25. “Quantum mechanics brought an unexpected fuzziness into physics because of quantum uncertainty, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.”
— Edward Witten
26. “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.”
— John Polkinghorne
27. “There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn’t be too surprised about that because we’re evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can’t cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.”
— Richard Dawkins
28. “I’m fascinated with quantum physics.”
— will.i.am
29. “My goal is that a girl will watch ‘The Martian’ or ‘Interstellar’ and think, ‘I want to be an astronaut or a quantum physicist.’ It’s important to show powerful women who are good at their jobs because young girls need those examples.”
— Jessica Chastain
30. “Quantum physics is one of the hardest things to understand intuitively, because essentially the whole point is that our classical picture is wrong.”
— Neil Turok
31. “If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.”
— Niels Bohr
32. “Doing is a quantum leap from imagining.”
— Barbara Sher
33. “You need virtual reality to understand high level science or high level math. It’s very helpful to explain third and fourth dimensional things that people are constantly addressing in quantum physics. But, as soon as you’re creating an avatar, and you can live and you can start to feel sensations on VR, that has gone too far.”
— Jaden Smith
34. “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.”
— Richard P. Feynman
35. “When you think about the complexity of our natural world – plants using quantum mechanics for photosynthesis, for example – a smartphone begins to look like a pretty dumb object.”
— Jeff Vandermeer
36. “Sci-fi has never really been my bag. But I do believe in a lot of weird things these days, such as synchronicity. Quantum physics suggests it’s possible, so why not?”
— John Cleese
37. “I think telepathy exists, and I think quantum physics will help us understand its basic properties.”
— Brian Josephson
38. “Einstein’s theory of relativity does a fantastic job for explaining big things. Quantum mechanics is fantastic for the other end of the spectrum – for small things.”
— Brian Greene
39. “The most important single thing about string theory is that it’s a highly mathematical theory, and the mathematics holds together in a very tight and consistent way. It contains in its basic structure both quantum mechanics and the theory of gravity. That’s big news.”
— Leonard Susskind
40. “As a theoretician, I am proud to be part of a counter revolution… discovering that quantum field theory language was not dead and finished but had not really been explored thoroughly enough.”
— Peter Higgs
41. “Unfortunately, unless we’re focused on building up our courage, which gives us our self-confidence and all that we need to make quantum change in our lives, the voice of fear will always take the lead inside our minds.”
— Debbie Ford
42. “Thinking about quantum physics is like unraveling your brain and putting it back together again upside down. Much like studying Kabbalah.”
— Rebecca Pidgeon
43. “While classical mechanics correctly predicts the behavior of large objects such as tennis balls, to predict the behavior of small objects such as electrons, we must use quantum mechanics.”
— Ivar Giaever
44. “We’re going to need a definitive quantum theory of gravity, which is part of a grand unified theory – it’s the main missing piece.”
— Kip Thorne
45. “Quantum mechanics brought an unexpected fuzziness into physics because of quantum uncertainty, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. String theory does so again because a point particle is replaced by a string, which is more spread out.”
— Edward Witten
46. “The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity.”
— Richard P. Feynman
47. “I’ve been a big astrophysics nut since I was 12. I have always had a real soft spot for the bizarreness of quantum mechanics. But I gave up on being a scientist in high school – I’m just not that good at math.”
— Kate McKinnon
48. “Now, what that means is that there is fundamental indeterminacy from quantum mechanics, but besides that there are other sources of effective indeterminacy.”
— Murray Gell-Mann
49. “I read a book called ‘The Tao of Physics’ by Fritjof Capra that pointed out the parallels between quantum physics and eastern mysticism. I started to feel there was more to reality than conventional science allowed for and some interesting ideas that it hadn’t got round to investigating, such as altered states of consciousness.”
— Brian Josephson
50. “I still pinch myself that I have a second-hand Aston Martin DBS Volante, the convertible model of James Bond’s car from ‘Quantum of Solace’ and ‘Casino Royale.’”
— Paul Hollywood
51. “The mathematics of quantum mechanics very accurately describes how our universe works.”
— Antony Garrett Lisi
52. “I do feel strongly that string theory is our best hope for making progress at unifying gravity and quantum mechanics.”
— Brian Greene
53. “But to do it professionally is a quantum leap difference and my father had to be persuaded by these kind of Ivy League professors that I should go to the Yale Drama School, another one of the stories in there.”
— Robert Klein
54. “The mathematical framework of quantum theory has passed countless successful tests and is now universally accepted as a consistent and accurate description of all atomic phenomena.”
— Erwin Schrodinger
55. “I’m a person who’s very interested in science and the universe and quantum physics and astrophysics.”
— Steve Kazee
56. “While the finish given to our picture of the world by the theory of relativity has already been absorbed into the general scientific consciousness, this has scarcely occurred to the same extent with those aspects of the general problem of knowledge which have been elucidated by the quantum theory.”
— Niels Bohr
57. “The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.”
— Robert Nozick
58. “The bedrock nature of space and time and the unification of cosmos and quantum are surely among science’s great ‘open frontiers.’ These are parts of the intellectual map where we’re still groping for the truth – where, in the fashion of ancient cartographers, we must still inscribe ‘here be dragons.’”
— Martin Rees
59. “There’s something uniquely interesting about Buddhism and mathematics, particularly about quantum physics, and where they meet. That has fascinated us for a long time.”
— Lilly Wachowski
60. “Einstein was searching for String Theory. It not only reconciles General Relativity to Quantum Mechanics, but it reconciles Science and the Bible as well.”
— Roy H. Williams
