"In many respects, this is not in any way an unorthodox opinion. ...Physicists have lived with these paradoxes ...for 80 years now. They have been accustomed to the fact that quantum mechanics is not a totally predictive theory, and they've proved long ago that no extension of quantum mechanics can be. This is not a defect... It's not a temporary defect, anyway. No extension of quantum mechanics can recover... total predictivity. From our point of view that's... obvious. ...[N]o correct theory can predict what the particle is going to do before it's made its decision... while it's still free to do something else. ...[I]t's not to be seen as a defect in quantum mechanics that it doesn't predict. It's a merit. ...You shouldn't expect to be able to predict things."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Atheists from EnglandUniversity of Cambridge alumniUniversity of Cambridge facultyMathematicians from EnglandPeople from Liverpool
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Horton_Conway
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
John Horton Conway
John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) was an English mathematician, and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University in New Jersey. He was active in the theory of s, , number theory, and . He also made contributions to many branches of , most notably the invention of the with .
61 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by John Horton Conway →
Related Quotes
"... I have said for twenty-five or thirty years that the one thing I would really like to know before I die is why th…"
"[I]n two dimensions the... [19 point] hexagonal lattice solves the packing, kissing, covering and quantizing problems…"
"We are planning a sequel... The Geometry of Low-Dimensional Groups and Lattices which will contain two earlier papers..."
"In this chapter we discuss the problem of packing spheres in and of packing points on the surface of a sphere. The pr…"
"The classical... problem is... how densely a large number of identical spheres ([e.g.,] ball bearings...) can be pack…"
"The classical... problem... asks: is this the greatest density..? an unsolved problem, one of the most famous..."
"The general... problem... packing... in n-dimensional space. ...[T]here is nothing mysterious about n-dimensional spa…"
"There has been a great deal of nonsense written... about the mysterious fourth dimension. ...4-dimensional space just…"
"[[w:Sphere packing|[L]attice packing]]... has the properties that 0 is a center and... if there are spheres with cent…"
"When I was on the train from Liverpool to Cambridge to become a student, it occurred to me that no one at Cambridge k…"