QM #6

I mean, the whole idea of observers - that's a pedagogical thing. It's very convenient when you're trying to understand something to imagine doing an experiment or think about an observer doing something. But that doesn't have anything to do with physical law, that has to do with the understanding of the law. A physical law is a description of nature, not a description of observers. Using the word observer in any place in physics at all - it's irrelevant. It's never part of a physical theorem. Look, they apply quantum mechanical laws to the Big Bang! There were no observers there!

Robert Serber - The Second Creation

QM #5

Above all, I hope there will eventually be a solution of the following type (but don't spread this around): That time and space are really only statistical concepts, something like, for instance, temperature, pressure, and so on, in a gas. It's my

QM #4

And I thought that, say, fifty years ago, that this would happen, that these revolutions [quantum mechanics, relativity] and advances in science would have an effect on mankind - on morals, on sociology, whatever. It hasn't happened. We're still up to the same things, or, well, I think, regressed in values. There's this terrible thing [cold war]

QM #3

With science I felt I could grab on to actual things and try to understand them. And then they turn out to be so extraordinarily mysterious! Newton's laws of motion, the laws of the electromagnetic field, relativity - they're so far removed from experience, but yet there it is. It's a measure of all the other things that I look at. It gives you an

QM #2

Quantum mechanics and relativity affected me deeply - personally. It affected my attitude toward the world. I've always thought of physics as a sort of ivory tower, from which you venture forth into all other human affairs, of all kinds. That's why I became a physicist. I could've earned more money as a lawyer.

I.I. Rabi - The Second Creation

QM #1

“At first there were very few who believed in the existence of these bodies smaller than atoms. I was even told long afterwards by a distinguished physicist who had been present at my lecture at the Royal Institution that he thought I had been 'pulling their legs.' I was not surprised at this, as I had myself come to this explanation of my experiments with great reluctance, and it was only after I was convinced that the experiment left no escape from it that I published my belief in the existence of bodies smaller than atoms.”

J.J. Thomson – Director of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, 1897.

pg. 13, The Second Creation