Jim Baggott Quotes (1957-)

“The last century was defined by physics. From the minds of the world’s leading physicists there flowed a river of ideas that would transport man kind to the very pinnacle of wonder and to the very depths of despair. This was a century that began with the certainties of absolute knowledge and ended with the knowledge of absolute uncertainty. It was a century in which physicists developed theories that would deny us the possibility that we can ever properly comprehend the nature of physical reality. It was also a century in which they built weapons with the capacity utterly to destroy this reality.”

“As stated repeatedly in this book, John von Neumann's Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics was an extraordinarily influential work. It is important to recall that the language most commonly used to describe and discuss the measurement process in terms of a collapse or projection of the wave function essentially originates with this classic work. It was von Neumann who so clearly distinguished (in the mathematical sense) between the continuous time-symmetric quantum mechanical equations of motion and the discontinuous, time-asymmetric measurement process. Although much of his contribution to the development of the theory was made broadly within the boundaries of the Copenhagen view, he stepped beyond those boundaries in his interpretation of quantum measurement.”

“One of these articles, written by N. David Mermin, gave me a tremendous shock. Mermin described the results of experiments that had been carried out as recently as 1982 to test something called Bell's theorem using two-photon 'cascade' emission from excited calcium atoms. Put simply, Bell's theorem says that my idea of naive realism is in conflict with the predictions of quantum theory in a way that can be tested in the laboratory in special experiments on pairs of quantum particles. These experiments had been done: quantum theory had been proved right and naive realism wrong! There in a montage was a pictorial history of the debate about reality and the experiments that had been done to test it (reproduced opposite). This work struck me as desperately important to my understanding of physical reality, something that as a scientist I felt I ought to know about. This discovery also made me feel rather embarrassed. Here I was, proud of my scientific qualifications and with almost 10 years' experience in chemical physics research at various prestigious institutions around the world, and I had been going around with a conception of physical reality that was completely wrong! Why hadn't somebody told me about this before?”

“I had never met Bell, nor heard him lecture, but in my reading of his scientific papers I have developed a great admiration for him and his work. I have especially admired his attempts to dismantle the orthodox Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, written with such tremendous style and obvious enjoyment. Although in this book I have tried to present a balanced account - arguing one way and then another - I hope that I have done justice to Bell's superbly constructed criticisms. The debate over the meaning of quantum theory will certainly be poorer without him.”