It takes so long to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.
Eugene WignerRead
It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.
Interpretation
Consciousness plays a crucial role in understanding quantum mechanics.
Eugene Wigner highlights the intrinsic connection between consciousness and the formulation of quantum mechanics, suggesting that our understanding of the quantum world is influenced by our awareness and interpretation. This perspective proposes that physical laws cannot be completely divorced from the observer's consciousness, pointing to a fundamental relationship between mind and matter in the realm of quantum physics.
In practice
In a lecture on the fundamental principles of quantum physics.
It takes so long to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.
The full meaning of life, the collective meaning of all human desires, is fundamentally a mystery beyond our grasp. As a young man, I chafed at this state of affairs. But by now I have made peace with it. I even feel a certain honor to be associated with such a mystery.
The great mathematician fully, almost ruthlessly, exploits the domain of permissible reasoning and skirts the impermissible. That his recklessness does not lead him into a morass of contradictions is a miracle in itself: certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin's process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.
The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.
The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the language we use for their expression.
The unreasonable efficiency of mathematics in science is a gift we neither understand nor deserve.
The scientist who recognizes God knows only the God of Newton. To him the God imagined by Laplace and Comte is wholly inadequate. He feels that God is in nature, that the orderly ways in which nature works are themselves the manifestations of God's will and purpose. Its laws are his orderly way of working.
We didn't build the interstate system to connect New York to Los Angeles because the West Coast was a priority. No, we webbed the highways so people can go to multiple places and invent ways of doing things not thought of by the persons building the roads.
The increase of disorder or entropy with time is one example of what is called an arrow of time, something that distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.
No doubt science cannot admit of compromises, and can only bring out the complete truth. Hence there must be controversy, and the strife may be, and sometimes must be, sharp. But must it even then be personal? Does it help science to attack the man as well as the statement? On the contrary, has not science the noble privilege of carrying on its controversies without personal quarrels?
Man does not limit himself to seeing; he thinks and insists on learning the meaning of phenomena whose existence has been revealed to him by observation. So he reasons, compares facts, puts questions to them, and by the answers which he extracts, tests one by another. This sort of control, by means of reasoning and facts, is what constitutes experiment, properly speaking; and it is the only process that we have for teaching ourselves about the nature of things outside us.
The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.
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