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Nick Herbert Quotes
born 1936 United States
Nick Herbert (born September 7, 1936, Pittsburgh) is an American physicist and author, best known for his book Quantum Reality. Herbert studied Engineering Physics at the Ohio State University, graduating in 1959.
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19 quotes
Strictly speaking, there are no "measurements" in the world, only correlations.
No local reality can explain the type of world we live in.
The gist of Bell's theorem is this: no local model of reality can explain the results of a particular experiment.
Most everywhere, most of the time, the world dwells in an unmeasured state.
The simplicity of Bell's proof opens it to everyone, not just physicists and mathematicians.
The quantum world is objective but objectless.
The quantum world is not made up of objects.
One of the best-kept secrets of science is that physicists have lost their grip on reality.
Though today's quantum theory shows no sign of weakness, someday it may collapse.
A universe that displays local phenomena but upon a non-local reality is the only sort of world consistent with known facts and Bell's proof.
Physicists cannot explain atoms to their children, not because we are ignorant but because we know too much.
Physicists continue to debate whether Bell's theorem is airtight or not. However, the real question is not whether Bell can prove beyond doubt that reality is non-local, but whether the world is in fact no-local.
Physicists, for all their odd notions, are basically a conservative lot.
Although mathematics originates in the human mind, its remarkable effectiveness in explaining the world does not extend to the mind itself. Psychology has proved unusually resistant to the mathematization that works so well in physics.
Quantum physics emerged from the Stone Age with an embarrassment of riches - three quantum theories, each claiming to explain the world. As it turned out, all three were right.
The entire visible universe, what Bishop Berkley called "the mighty frame of the world," rests ultimately on a strange quantum kind of being no more substantial than a promise.
So minuscule is the scale of quantum events compared to the actions of everyday life that it's a wonder humans ever found out about the quantum world at all.
Legendary King Midas never knew the feel of silk or a human hand after everything he touched turned to gold. Humans are stuck in a similar Midas-like predicament: we can't directly experience the true texture of reality because everything we touch turns to matter.
One of the curious features of modern physics is that in spite of its overwhelming success in explaining a vast range of physical phenomena from quark to quasar, it fails to give us a single metaphor for how the universe really works.
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