Nick Herbert

Physicists cannot explain atoms to their children, not because we are ignorant but because we know too much.

Though today's quantum theory shows no sign of weakness, someday it may collapse.

Physicists, for all their odd notions, are basically a conservative lot.

The quantum world is objective but objectless.

Most everywhere, most of the time, the world dwells in an unmeasured state.

The pragmatist regards any theory as a mere mathematical machine for generating numbers which he then compares with experiment. A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality. The pragmatist refuses on principle to speculate about deep reality, such a concept being meaningless from his point of view. Pragmatism is an intelectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy.

The quantum world is not made up of objects.

One of the curious features of modern physics is that in spite of its overwhelming success in explaining a vast range of physical phenomena from quark to quasar, it fails to give us a single metaphor for how the universe really works.

The entire visible universe, what Bishop Berkley called "the mighty frame of the world," rests ultimately on a strange quantum kind of being no more substantial than a promise.

The gist of Bell's theorem is this: no local model of reality can explain the results of a particular experiment.

One of the best-kept secrets of science is that physicists have lost their grip on reality.