Development of
Quantum Theory
These quotes define
directions for the development of the quantum theory.
J A Wheeler,
It from Bit, Princeton 1991.
"Physics for
long proved unable to carry through to the end the analysis of any existing
field theory free of renormalization, cutoff or approximation."
"Against
this new way of thinking no obstacle so strongly interposed itself as the
absence of any currently avaliable quantitative global command of the totality
of all 3-geometries."
"These
considerations reveal that the concepts of spacetime are not primary but
secondary ideas in the structure of physical theory." "Fluctuations."
J A Wheeler
in, Unified Theories of Elementary Particles, Springer Verlag 1982.
"All the great
formalism of quantum theory will surely unfold someday with equal ease
out of some utterly elementary idea. The central idea is so simple, so
natural, so beatiful that nobody could even imagine anything else."
"The coupling
of mass and geometry, far from being the weakest force in nature, is the
strongest."
R P Feynman,
OMNI Magazine, May 1979.
"Physicists
know about the world."
Dirac said
"To understand a physical problem means to be able to see the answer
without solving equations."
A R Marlow
in, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Theory, Academic Press 1978.
"This quantum
question is so incredibly important and diffecult that everyone should
busy himself with it."
Albert Einstein
writing to Jacob Laub, 1908.
"Nearily
70 years after Einstein's letter to Laub the most inclusive and ambitious
theory ever invented still retains the qualities of importance and diffeculty
seen by Einstein."
P A M Dirac,
Directionsm in Physics, Wiley 1978.
The Development
of Quantum Mechanics
"It is because
of these diffeculties that I feel that the foundations of quantum mechanics
have not yet been correctly established."
"A true
advance will be made only when some fundamental alteration is made, just
about as fundamental as passing from equation (7) to equation (9)."
Quantum Electrodynamics
"Of course,
the proper inference from this work is that the basic equations are not
right. There must be some drastic change introduced into them so that no
infinities occur in the theory at all and so that we can carry out the
solution of the equations sensibly, according to ordinary rules and without
being bothered by difficulties. This requirement will necessitate some
really drastic changes: simple changes will not do, just because the Heisenberg
equations of motion in the present theory are all so satisfactory. I feel
that the change required will be just about as drastic as the passage from
the Bohr orbit theory to the quantum mechanics."
M Capek Ed,
The Concepts of Space and Time, D Reidel 1976.
A N Whitehead,
The Inapplicability of the Concept of Instant on the Quantum Level.
"In the seventeenth
century, the birth of modern science required a new mathematics, more fully
equipped for the purpose of analysing the characteristics of vibratory
existence. And now in the twentieth century we find physicists largely
engaged in analysing the periodicities of atoms. Truely, Pythagoras in
founding European philosophy and European mathematics, endowed them with
the luckiest of lucky guesses or, was it a flash of divine genius, penetrating
the inmost nature of things?"
N Wiener, Spatio-temporal cntinuity, Quantum Theory and Music.
"It was this
paradox of harmonic analysis which formed an important element of my talk
at Gottingen in 1925. At that time, I had clearly in mind the possibility
that the laws of physics are like musical notation, things that are real
and important provided that we do not take them too seriously and push
the time scale beyond a certain level. In other words, I meant to emphasize
that, just as in quantum theory, there is in music a difference of behavior
between those things belonging to very small intervals of time (or space)
and what we accept on the normal scale of every day, and that the infinite
divisibility of the universe is a concept which modern physics cannot any
longer accept without serious qualification."
C J Isham,
R Penrose, D Sciama Eds, Quantum Gravity, Clarendon Press 1975.
C M Patton and
J A Wheeler, Is Physics Legislated by Cosmogony.
"In contrast
to this mathematics, nature does not `quantize'; it is already quantum.
Quantization is a pencil-and-paper activity of theoretical physicists.
This circumstance gives us always some comfort when a quantum field theory
turns out to be 'unrenormalizable', because we know that for nature
the word `renormalization' does not even exist; nature manages to operate
without divergences!".
Isham, An Introduction to Quantum Gravity.
"The primordial
concept is that of a point set whose mathematical points are to be related
in some way with physical space-time events. This set is then equipped
with a topology and then with a differentiable structure which makes it
into a four-dimensional manifold. Finally a metric tensor is constructed
on this manifold in such away as to satisfy the Einstein equations."
H Minkowski
in, The Principle of Relativity, Dover 1955.
"We should
then have in the world no longer 'space', but an infinite number of spaces,
analogously as there are in three-dimensional space an infinite number
of planes."
Hermann Weyl
Space, Time Matter, Dover 1954.
"Is important. I will put in the quote when I find it. "
Hermann Weyl Discusses in his book that the unusual smallness of the gravitational field constant compared to the other fields is an indication that gravitational field is not the primary field."