Inspirational Quote by John D. Barrow

“When we try to observe things that are very small, the act of observation itself will significantly disturb the state we are seeking to measure.” quote by John D. Barrow — Download Open image

“When we try to observe things that are very small, the act of observation itself will significantly disturb the state we are seeking to measure.”

John D. Barrow

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More by John D. Barrow

“One of Nature's deep secrets is the fact that the outcomes of the laws of Nature do not have to possess the same symmetries as the laws themselves. The outcomes are far more complicated, and far less symmetrical, than the laws. Consequently, they are far more difficult to understand. In this way it is possible to have a Universe governed…

John D. Barrow

“The effect of the 'time becomes space' proposal is that there is no definite moment or point of creation. In more conventional quantum mechanical terms we would say that the universe is the result of a quantum mechanical tunneling process, where it must be interpreted as having tunneled from nothing at all. Quantum tunneling processes, which are familiar to physicists…

John D. Barrow

“Humans are distinguished further by the highly effective way in which they have pooled the individual intelligence of single individuals to produce a collective…

John D. Barrow

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We can predict the present without having to know everything about the past.

John D. Barrow

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All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is"... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change. The problem of human contact with some spiritual realm, of timelessness, of…

John D. Barrow

“If the deep logic of what determines the value of the fine-structure constant also played a significant role in our understanding of all the…

John D. Barrow

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“Each of us is a complicated assymetrical outcome of the laws of electromagnetism and gravity.”

John D. Barrow

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“Impressed by the success of high-level mathematics in the formulation of the general theory of relativity in 1915, we find that Einstein's life-long quest for a unified field theory was dominated by the search for more general mathematical formalisms that could bring together the existing descriptions of gravity and electromagnetism. We find none of Einstein's compelling thought experiments and beautifully…

John D. Barrow

“Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who died in 1965, wrote of how the mere thought of the infinite led him to contemplate suicide: “A necessity I could not imagine swept over me: I had to try again and again to imagine the edge of space, or its edgelessness, time with a beginning and an end or time without a beginning or…

John D. Barrow

“As we look way back into the first instants of the Big Bang, we find the quantum world that we described in Chapter 3. From that state, where like effects do not follow from like causes, there must somehow emerge a world resembling our own, where the results of most observations are definite. This is by no means inevitable and…

John D. Barrow

“The inclusion of just one contradiction (like 0 = 1) in an axiomatic system allows any statement about the objects in the system to be proved true (and also proved false). When Bertrand Russell pointed this out in a lecture he was once challenged by a heckler demanding that he show how the questioner could be proved to be the…

John D. Barrow