Eugene Wigner Quotes

18 quotes in 280 categories

• [T]he laws of quantum mechanics itself cannot be formulated ... without recourse to the concept of consciousness.
• When the province of physical theory was extended to encompass microscopic phenomena through the creation of quantum mechanics, the concept of consciousness came to the…
• The unreasonable efficiency of mathematics in science is a gift we neither understand nor deserve.
• The world is very complicated and it is clearly impossible for the human mind to understand it completely. Man has therefore devised an artifice which…
• The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the language we use for their expression.
• The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither…
• The full meaning of life, the collective meaning of all human desires, is fundamentally a mystery beyond our grasp. As a young man, I chafed…
• It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.
• Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to…
• The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither…
• The great mathematician fully, almost ruthlessly, exploits the domain of permissible reasoning and skirts the impermissible. That his recklessness does not lead him into a…
• There are two kinds of people in the world: Johnny Von Neumann and the rest of us.
• OK, so the computer has understood, but what about me ?
• The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation of it.
• There is no natural phenomenon that is comparable with the sudden and apparently accidentally timed development of science, except perhaps the condensation of a super-saturated…
• Solipsism may be logically consistent with present Quantum Mechanics, Monism in the sense of Materialism is not.
• It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too.
• It takes so long to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old…

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