We were on the steamer from America to Japan and, so, for instance, I took part in the dances in the evening. Paul [Dirac], somehow, didn't like that too much but he would sit on a chair and look at the dances. Once I came back from a dance and took the chair beside him and he asked "Heisenberg, why do you dance?" I said, "Well, when there are nice girls, it is a pleasure to dance." He thought for a long time about it, and after about five minutes he said, "Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?"
Thursday, August 28, 2008
QOTD
Physicist Werner Heisenberg, quoted in Gino Segrè's Faust in Copenhagen (2007) at 93:
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4 comments:
My favorite physicist quote:
(On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague):
"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."
- Wolfgang Pauli
Lesser, but still good, is a "response" to Einstein's famous statement about uncertainty and quantum mechanics, which he was never comfortable with:
"Actually, God DOES play dice with the Universe, but they're LOADED dice!"
- Joseph Ford -
Some others about the universe, not necessarily attributed:
The universe is simple - it's the explanation that's complex.
"Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it."
- Max Frisch -
There IS intelligent life in the universe. It's ignoring us.
(I'm in the mood for quotes)
:oP
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I have never seen the Uncertainty Principle applied to girls before.
AVI:
I believe you take my point--and I've no doubt about it.
> I have never seen the Uncertainty Principle applied to girls before.
AVI, what possible mechanism do you ascribe to how they set their minds on things?
It's completely quantum mechanical -- a fuzzy cloud of decision where the only way to identify its location is to indicate a specific time of observation. Any other time it could be anywhere in all of known space.
With males, decisions tend to be inertial -- it falls into a slot and takes notable new information to change it. Women (as a group, not necessarily applicable to any individual) are not thus encumbered. Any position is within a probability cloud, which can radically change from one instant to the next without any clear causation.
:oP
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