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Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions
Sabine Hossenfelder
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Sometimes the only scientific answer we can give is “We don’t know.”
“All the hypotheses about the early universe . . . are pure speculation. They're modern creation myths written in the language of mathematics.”
“For 97 percent of all Wikipedia articles, if you click on the first link and repeat this in each subsequent article, you will eventually get to an entry about philosophy. Philosophy is where our knowledge ends,”
“Today I think they don't teach the principle of least action in school because then everybody would go and study physics.”
“Sometimes the only scientific answer we can give is 'We don't know.”
“If your belief conflicts with empirically confirmed knowledge, then you are not seeking meaning; you are delusional.”
“I don't know if the universe has a purpose, but I would say that there is something more to it, in the sense that the presence of conscious beings is probably something deeper, not just not random. [quoting Roger Penrose]”
“However, they implicitly assume that mathematics itself is timeless, that mathematical truth is eternal, and that logic doesn’t change. This is an assumption that cannot be proved, because what would you prove it true with? It’s one of the usually unstated articles of faith that our scientific inquiry is based on.”
“While entanglement is indeed nonlocal, it is still created locally.”
“Popular-science news about quantum mechanics is to me as baffling as it is frustrating. Hand me an equation, and I can deal with it. But if you tell me that quantum mechanics allows one to separate a cat from its grin or that an experiment shows "an irreconcilable mismatch between the friends and the Wigners," I'll back out of the room quietly before anyone demands I explain this mess. I have suffered through countless well-intended introductions to quantum mechanics featuring quantum shoes, quantum coins, quantum boxes, and entire zoos of quantum animals that went in and out of those boxes. If you actually understand those explanations, I salute you, because if I hadn't known already how quantum mechanics works, I still wouldn't know.”
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Book Keywords:
popular-science, least-action, education, quantum-mechanics, math, physics, science, analogy