After ‘Quantum Leap,’ a lot of sci-fi things came my way, and I had to say, ‘I can’t do that right now.’
Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive.
Thinking about quantum physics is like unraveling your brain and putting it back together again upside down. Much like studying Kabbalah.
‘Quantum Conundrum’ is a direct reflection, not just of me, but of our entire team. It has a little bit of all of our personalities in it.
I am fascinated by quantum physics.
I just felt that you can’t have a character fall in love so madly as they did in the last movie and not finish it off, understand it, get some closure. That’s why the movie is called ‘Quantum of Solace’ – that’s exactly what he’s looking for.
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.
If we do get a quantum theory of spacetime, it should answer some of the deepest philosophical questions that we have, like what happened before the big bang?
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.
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.
The field of quantum valence fluctuations was another older interest which became much more active during this period, partly as a consequence of my own efforts.
In subjects that physicists think of as purely quantum, classical ideas and classical computational techniques can often be powerful.
If I realize that actually there’s quantum mechanics happening around us all the time in some macroscopic, interconnected way, then that doesn’t change my perception of it, that doesn’t change my interaction with it; it just changes how I view my interaction.
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.
Since the founding of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, theoretical physics had nurtured an extremely radical tradition.
Because of recent improvements in the accuracy of theoretical predictions based on large scale ab initio quantum mechanical calculations, meaningful comparisons between theoretical and experimental findings have become possible.
I wouldn’t have thought that a wrong theory should lead us to understand better the ordinary quantum field theories or to have new insights about the quantum states of black holes.
Orwell’s ‘1984’ convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap away from tyranny. By contrast, Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ suggested that the totalitarian systems of the future might be subservient and ingratiating.
Similarly, another famous little quantum fluctuation that programs you is the exact configuration of your DNA.
The life force knows exactly what it takes to keep any particular living organism – any organism – alive. Anything in manifestation, for that matter. Even a rock is a manifestation of some sort, and you know, in physics and quantum physics, they know a rock is not dead.
After I finished my degree in India in 1980, I came to the U.S. to get a master’s, and I was teaching quantum physics to freshmen. As I got my bearings as to what goes on in labs, I understood that to teach, you have to learn.
We all hate on ourselves way too much, and there are so many people who think they have to look like those women on TV. That’s so unreasonable. Everybody is supposed to be a different size. And if I can just be confident in myself, then I’ll look better. It’s quantum physics!
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.
There certainly is a tension between the relativity of simultaneity and non-locality in quantum theory, but it’s not strong enough to add up to a falsification of either side by itself.
Quantum entanglement is a very intriguing issue, but it is not impossible.
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.
Typically in science, individual scientists make up their minds about scientific fact or theory one at a time. We don’t take votes. We just don’t vote on quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, why the sky is blue, or anything else.
The Planck satellite may detect the imprint of the gravitational waves predicted by inflation. This would be quantum gravity written across the sky.
You have to say now that space is something. Space can vibrate, space can fluctuate, space can be quantum mechanical, but what the devil is it?
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.
To me quantum computation is a new and deeper and better way to understand the laws of physics, and hence understanding physical reality as a whole.
I’m very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don’t really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It’s about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.
Most of what Einstein said and did has no direct impact on what anybody reads in the Bible. Special relativity, his work in quantum mechanics, nobody even knows or cares. Where Einstein really affects the Bible is the fact that general relativity is the organizing principle for the Big Bang.
In many ways, string theory attempts to go beyond Einstein’s dream… an all-encompassing description of nature that works at large distances where gravity becomes important as well as small distances where quantum mechanics is important.
The publicity of the Nobel Prize has made clear that the research work connected with the Quantum Hall Effect was so successful because a tremendous large number of institutions and individuals supported this activity.
During my years at the synchrotron laboratory, I had become interested in the theory of quantum electrodynamics and had decided that what I would most like to do after completing my dissertation work was to probe the short-distance behavior of the electromagnetic interaction.
Einstein was searching for String Theory. It not only reconciles General Relativity to Quantum Mechanics, but it reconciles Science and the Bible as well.
I once pitched this show that was just like ‘Quantum Leap,’ in terms of the set-up, and I got a pass because they said ‘Quantum Leap’ didn’t work, even though it was on for six or seven seasons. You can’t say ‘Quantum Leap’ didn’t work!
Statistical physics or Newtonian physics gives way to quantum physics. Very unusual properties of matter emerge at that scale, and you can think about building products in a very different way. You can think about interfacing to biology in a very different way.
There was a long history of speculation that in quantum gravity, unlike Einstein’s classical theory, it might be possible for the topology of spacetime to change.
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.’
Most people don’t realize that when we were producing ‘Black Panther,’ ‘Quantum & Woody,’ and ‘Steel,’ fairly few people were reading those titles. We were constantly threatened with cancellation.
The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world.
It is astonishing that human brains, which evolved to cope with the everyday world, have been able to grasp the counterintuitive mysteries of the cosmos and the quantum.
‘Quantum Conundrum’ has a little bit of something for everybody – it’s got something for kids and it’s got enough of a challenge for a hardcore gamer.
We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe.
My work during the 1970s has been mainly concerned with the implications of the unified theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions, with the development of the related theory of strong interactions known as quantum chromodynamics, and with steps toward the unification of all interactions.
Quantum mechanics brought an unexpected fuzziness into physics because of quantum uncertainty, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
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.
