“Which came first — the observer or the particle?”

— Vanna Bonta, book Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel

Preface
Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel (1995)

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Vanna Bonta205

Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice art… 1958–2014

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“I said, "…it is quantum fiction." The first line of the story is "Which came first, the observer or the particle?"”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

and it goes from there.
Vanna Bonta Talks About Quantum fiction: Author Interview (2007)

“The secret of how galaxies came into being may well be fathomed by the study of the most elementary particles of matter in particle detectors buried deep underground; the identity of those elementary particles may be revealed by observations of distant starlight. …by the coming together of the largest and the smallest aspects of the physical world our appreciation of the unity of the universe becomes more impressive and complete.”

John D. Barrow (1952–2020) British scientist

Preface
The Origin of the Universe (1997)

“The conventional Big Bang theory says nothing about where all the matter came from. The theory really assumes that for every particle that we see in the universe today, there was, at the very beginning, at least some precursor particle, if not the same particle, with no explanation of where all those particles came from.”

Alan Guth (1947) American theoretical physicist and cosmologist

Lecture 1: Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse? Part I.
The Early Universe (2012)

“What about the orbiting of the so-called electrons around their central nucleus? What has really been observed unequivocally? Nothing of the moving particle; what has rather been observed are phenomena which at first glance have nothing to do at all with the motion of bodies. Everything else that leads to the atomic model, is a long chain of inferences.”

Felix Ehrenhaft (1879–1952) Austrian physicist

Wie steht es bei dem Kreisen der sogenannten Elektronen um ihren zentralen Kern? Was ist hier wirklich unmittelbar wahrgenommen worden? Nichts von den bewegten Teilchen; was vielmehr beobachtet wurde, sind Erscheinungen, welche auf den ersten Blick mit der Bewegung von Körpern gar nichts zu tun haben. Alles übrige, was zum Atommodell geführt, ist eine lange Kette von Schlüssen. <br class="br">In an address to the Viennese Chemisch-Physikalische Gesellschaft http://www.cpg.univie.ac.at/, April 26, 1932, as quoted by [Joseph Braunbeck, Der andere Physiker: das Leben von Felix Ehrenhaft, Leykam Buchverlagsgesellschaft, 2003, 3701174709, 51]

“Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.”

Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Danish physicist

"Atomic Physics and the Description of Nature" (1934)

“Now it is one great object of this work, to shew the importance and advantage of ascertaining the relative weights of the ultimate particles, both of simple and compound bodies, the number of simple elementary particles which constitute one compound particle, and the number of less compound particles which enter into the formation of one more compound particle.”

John Dalton book A New System of Chemical Philosophy

Source: A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808), Ch. III. On Chemical Synthesis

“The existence of exotic dark matter particles outside the standard model of particle physics constitutes a central hypothesis of the current standard model of cosmology (SMoC). Using a wide range of observational data I outline why this hypothesis cannot be correct for the real Universe.”

Pavel Kroupa (1963) Australian astrophysicist

[Pavel Kroupa, 2014, Lessons from the Local Group (and beyond) on dark matter, arXiv.org, http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.6302]

“Observe the light and consider its beauty. Blink your eye and look at it. That which you see was not there at first, and that which was there is there no more.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), I Philosophy

“One rule observed in their council is, never to debate a thing on the same day in which it is first proposed”

Thomas More book Utopia

Source: Utopia (1516), Ch. 3 : Of Their Magistrates
Context: One rule observed in their council is, never to debate a thing on the same day in which it is first proposed; for that is always referred to the next meeting, that so men may not rashly and in the heat of discourse engage themselves too soon, which might bias them so much that, instead of consulting the good of the public, they might rather study to support their first opinions, and by a perverse and preposterous sort of shame hazard their country rather than endanger their own reputation, or venture the being suspected to have wanted foresight in the expedients that they at first proposed; and therefore, to prevent this, they take care that they may rather be deliberate than sudden in their motions.

“Is the purpose of theoretical physics to be no more than a cataloging of all the things that can happen when particles interact with each other and separate? Or is it to be an understanding at a deeper level in which there are things that are not directly observable (as the underlying quantized fields are) but in terms of which we shall have a more fundamental understanding?”

Julian Schwinger (1918–1994) American theoretical physicist

Quantum Mechanics - Symbolism of Atomic Measurements (2001) p. 24 f.

“Which came first — the observer or the particle?”

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