Manjit Kumar > Quotes

“After Elsa’s death, Einstein established a routine that as the years passed varied less and less. Breakfast between 9 and 10 was followed by a walk to the institute. After working until 1pm he would return home for lunch and a nap. Afterwards he would work in his study until dinner between 6.30 and 7pm. If not entertaining guests, he would return to work until he went to bed between 11 and 12. He rarely went to the theatre or to a concert, and unlike Bohr, hardly ever watched a movie. He was, Einstein said in 1936, ‘living in the kind of solitude that is painful in one’s youth but in one’s more mature years is delicious’.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Marriage is,’ Einstein said later, ‘the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an incident.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Planck understood that Clausius was not simply stating the obvious, but something of deep significance. Heat, the transfer of energy from A to B due to a temperature difference, explained such everyday occurrences as a hot cup of coffee getting cold and an ice cube in a glass of water melting. But left undisturbed, the reverse never happened. Why not? The law of conservation of energy did not forbid a cup of coffee from getting hotter and the surrounding air colder, or the glass of water becoming warmer and the ice cooler. It did not outlaw heat flowing from a cold to a hot body spontaneously. Yet something was preventing this from happening. Clausius discovered that something and called it entropy. It lay at the heart of why some processes occur in nature and others do not.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Although it might be heuristically useful to bear in mind what one has actually observed, in principle, he argued, 'it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone'. 'In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“How can one look happy when he is contemplating the anomolous Zeeman effect? (Wolfgang Pauli)”
― Manjit Kumar

“A storm broke loose in my mind’, was how he described the surge of creativity that consumed him as he produced his breathtaking succession of papers during that glorious Bern spring and summer of 1905.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is', Bohr would argue later. 'Physics concerns what we can say about nature'. Nothing More.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“The more successes the quantum theory enjoys, the more stupid it looks’,”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“For him it was no laughing matter, for at stake was the very nature of reality and the soul of physics.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Einstein, to the surprise of his secular parents, had developed what he described as ‘a deep religiosity’. He stopped eating pork, sang religious songs on the way to school, and accepted the biblical story of creation as an established fact. Then, as he devoured one book after another on science, came the realisation that much of the Bible could not be true. It unleashed what he called ‘a fanatic freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the State through lies; it was a crushing impression’.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“My maxim is always this,' he once told a student, 'consider every step carefully in advance, but then, if you believe you can take responsibility for it, let nothing stop you.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“They cheer me because they all understand me,' Chaplin told Einstein, 'and they cheer you because no one understands you.'7”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“hundred and fifty delegates from 22 countries gathered in Paris, in 1881, for the first International Conference for the Determination of Electrical Units.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Michael Faraday decided to see if he could generate electricity using magnetism.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“What is meant by 'position' in the quantum realm? Nothing more or less, Heisenberg answered, than the result of a specific experiment designed to measure, say, the 'position of the electron' in space at a given moment, 'otherwise this word has no meaning'.46 For him there simply is no electron with a well-defined position or a well-defined momentum in the absence of an experiment to measure its position or momentum. A measurement of an electron's position creates an electron-with-a-position, while a measurement of its momentum creates an electron-with-a-momentum. The very idea of an electron with a definite 'position' or 'momentum' is meaningless prior to an experiment that measures it. Heisenberg had adopted an approach to defining concepts through their measurement that harked back to Ernst Mach and what philosophers called operationalism. But it was more than just a redefinition of old concepts.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“The fact that all heated objects emit light of the same colour at the same temperature was well known to potters long before 1859, the year that Gustav Kirchhoff, a 34-year-old German physicist at Heidelberg University, started his theoretical investigations into the nature of this correlation.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Eight men and one woman; six have Nobel Prizes in either physics or chemistry. The woman has two, one for physics awarded in 1903 and another for chemistry in 1911. Her name: Marie Curie. In the centre, the place of honour, sits another Nobel laureate, the most celebrated scientist since the age of Newton: Albert Einstein.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“It was already known that the rise in temperature would result in an increase in the total amount of energy radiated, but Wien’s ‘displacement law’ revealed something very precise: the wavelength at which the maximum amount of radiation is emitted multiplied by the temperature of a blackbody is always a constant. If the temperature is doubled, then the ‘peak’ wavelength will be half the previous length.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Starting at low temperatures, the poker emits predominantly long-wavelength radiation from the infrared part of the spectrum. As the temperature increases, more energy is radiated in each region and the peak wavelength decreases. It is ‘displaced’ towards the shorter wavelengths.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“They, however, never occur in practice, only in the mind of the physicist.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“For Bohr the theory came first, then the philosophical position, the interpretation constructed to make sense of what the theory says about reality. Einstein knew that it was dangerous to build a philosophical worldview on the foundation of any scientific theory. If the theory is found wanting in the light of new experimental evidence, then the philosophical position it supports collapses with it. 'it is basic for physics that one assumes a real world existing independently from any act of perception', said Einstein. 'But this we do not know'.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“A talented pianist, he toyed with the idea of pursuing a career as a professional musician. Unsure, he sought advice and was bluntly told: ‘If you have to ask, you’d better study something else!”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Einstein said years later that ‘this theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoic, concocted of incoherent elements of thoughts’.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born in Kiel, then a part of Danish Holstein, on 23 April 1858”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“flawed. Einstein said years later that ‘this theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoic, concocted of incoherent elements of thoughts’.5”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“In a note to Einstein as they sat around the conference table, Ehrenfest scribbled: ‘Don’t laugh! There is a special section in purgatory for professors of quantum theory, where they will be obliged to listen to lectures on classical physics ten hours every day.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“Bohr had built his atom using a heady cocktail of classical and quantum physics. In the process he had violated tenets of accepted physics by proposing that: electrons inside atoms can occupy only certain orbits, the stationary states; electrons cannot radiate energy while in those orbits; an atom can be in only one of a series of discrete energy states, the lowest being the ‘ground state’; electrons can ‘somehow’ jump from a stationary state of high energy to a stationary state of low energy and the difference in energy between the two is emitted in a quantum of energy. Yet his model correctly predicted various properties of the hydrogen atom such as its radius, and it provided a physical explanation for the production of spectral lines. The quantum atom, Rutherford said later, was ‘a triumph of mind over matter’ and until Bohr unveiled it, he believed that ‘it would require centuries’ to solve the mystery of the spectral lines.36”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“It was in the 1880s, when German companies tried to develop more efficient light bulbs”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“fifth Solvay conference on ‘Electrons and Photons’, held in Brussels from 24 to 29 October 1927,”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

“André Marie Ampère demonstrated that two parallel wires were attracted towards one another if each had a current flowing through it in the same direction.”
― Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality