When We Cease to Understand the World

shots. Then everything was quiet again. In

condensed all his hatred of quantum mechanics in a phrase he would repeat time and again in the succeeding years, one he practically spat in the Dane’s face before his departure: “God does not play dice with the universe!”

They live in worlds of potentialities, Heisenberg explained; they are not things, but possibilities.

Copenhagen Interpretation. Reality, they said to those present, does not exist as something separate from the act of observation. A quantum object has no intrinsic properties. An electron is not in any fixed place until it is measured; it is only in that instant that it appears. Before being measured, it has no attributes; prior to observation, it

it expresses the contradictory properties of what is discrete and what is continuous, what is local and what is spread out.

Light exists in two different ways.

if Heisenberg triumphed, a fundamental aspect of the laws that governed the physical world would remain forever obscure, as if chance had somehow nested in the heart of matter and become inextricably bound to its most fundamental constituents.

The physicist—like the poet—should not describe the facts of the world, but rather generate metaphors and mental connections.

when discussing atoms, language could serve as nothing more than a kind of poetry.