Scientists From Pittsburgh

"No local reality can explain the type of world we live in."

"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."

"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."

"One of the best-kept secrets of science is that physicists have lost their grip on reality."

"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."

"Though today's quantum theory shows no sign of weakness, someday it may collapse."

"Physicists, for all their odd notions, are basically a conservative lot."

"Most everywhere, most of the time, the world dwells in an unmeasured state."

"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."

"The pragmatist regards any theory as a mere mathematical machine for generating numbers which he then compares with experiment. A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality. The pragmatist refuses on principle to speculate about deep reality, such a concept being meaningless from his point of view. Pragmatism is an intelectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy."

"The quantum world is not made up of objects."

"The quantum world is objective but objectless."

"If a friend in Texas seals a silver coin in one envelope and a gold coin in another and mails the envelopes to Tokyo and London, the instant you open you envelope in Japan you know the contents of my envelope in England. But opening your letter causes no physical change in England (faster-than-light or otherwise) but merely involves a change in your knowledge concerning something happening far away and outside your control."

"Strictly speaking, there are no "measurements" in the world, only correlations."

"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."

"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."

"Physicists cannot explain atoms to their children, not because we are ignorant but because we know too much."

"The gist of Bell's theorem is this: no local model of reality can explain the results of a particular experiment."

"Bell himself managed to devise such a proof which rejects all models of reality possessing the property of "locality". This proof has since become known as Bells theorem. It asserts that no local model of reality can underlie the quantum facts. Bell's theorem says that reality must be non-local."

"Non-local influences do not diminish with distance. They are as potent at a million miles as at a millimeter. Non-local influences act instantaneously. The speed of their transmission is not limited by the velocity of light. A non-local interaction links up one location with another without crossing space, without decay, and without delay. A non-local interaction is, in short, unmediated, unmitigated, and immediate."

"The simplicity of Bell's proof opens it to everyone, not just physicists and mathematicians."

"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 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."

"It is the great glory of the quest for human knowledge that, while making some small contribution to that quest, we can also continue to learn and to take pleasure in learning."

"79: A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God."

"80: Prolonged contact with the computer turns mathematicians into clerks and vice versa."

"95: Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them."

"I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more."

"116: You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program."

"117: It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and, learning to be self-critical?"

"101 Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve."

"We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses."

"Both knowledge and wisdom extend man's reach. Knowledge led to computers, wisdom to chopsticks."

"There is an appreciated substance to the phrase "ALGOL-like" which is often used in arguments about programming, languages and computation. ALGOL appears to be a durable model, and even flourishes under surgery — be it explorative, plastic, or amputative."

"The vision we have of conversational programming takes in much more than rapid turn around time and convenient debugging aids: our most interesting programs are never wrong and never final. [...] What is new is the requirement to make variable in our languages what we had previously taken as fixed. I do not refer to new data classes now, but to variables whose values are programs or parts of programs, syntax or parts of syntax, and regimes of control."

"This language [LISP] induces humorous arguments among programmers, often being damned and praised for the same feature."

"Programmers should never be satisfied with languages which permit them to program everything, but to program nothing of interest easily."

"Computer science is a restless infant and its progress depends as much on shifts in point of view as on the orderly development of our current concepts."

"1: One man's constant is another man's variable."

"3: Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons."

"8: A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant."

"11: If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some."

"16: Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't."

"19: A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing."

"31: Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it."

"39: A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures."

"41: Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress."

"42: You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN."

"55: LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing."

"57: It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa."