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Eugene Wigner

Eugene Wigner Quotes

Physicist

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Famous Eugene Wigner Quotes

“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 fore again. It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”

WayLawConsciousnessCreationTheoryConceptsPhysicsConsistentQuantumMechanicQuantum PhysicsProvincesQuantum MechanicsLaws Of PhysicsQuantum Theory
Book:The Collected Works of Eugene Paul Wigner: Historical, Philosophical, and Socio-Political Papers. Historical and Biographical Reflections and Syntheses
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“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 permits the complicated nature of the world to be blamed on something which is called accidental and thus permits him to abstract a domain in which simple laws can be found.”

MenWorldMindHumansLawScienceFoundUnderstandingNatureSimpleImpossibleBlameSimplicityComplicatedAbstractHuman MindPermitDomainArtifice
Book:Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses
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“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 understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.”

ShouldLawLanguagePleasureWonderfulResearchDeserveLogicMiracleMathematicsGratefulWidePhysicsCertaintyUncertaintyReasoningBranchesBe GratefulOntologyLaws Of PhysicsAppropriateness
Book:Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses
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“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 morass of contradictions is a miracle in itself: certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin's process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.”

BelieveDoeHardSeemsProcessNaturalPerfectionMiracleReasoningContradictionMathematicianSelectionDomainExploitsSkirtsNatural SelectionHard To BelieveRecklessness
Author:Eugene Wigner
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