
Steven Weinberg, in " Science’s Path From Myth to Multiverse https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150317-sciences-path-from-myth-to-multiverse/" by Dan Falk (March 17, 2015)
The Problems of Quantum Mechanics: Steven Weinberg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBninatwq6k (July 17, 2018) YouTube video at 3:58 of 45:42
Steven Weinberg, in " Science’s Path From Myth to Multiverse https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150317-sciences-path-from-myth-to-multiverse/" by Dan Falk (March 17, 2015)
Does quantum mechanics carry the seeds of its own destruction? (1991)
italics in the original
DISCUSSION OF PROBABILITY RELATIONS BETWEEN SEPARATED SYSTEMS (1935)
“Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.”
Ne pouvant supprimer l'amour, l'Église a voulu au moins le désinfecter, et elle a fait le mariage.
Journaux intimes (1864–1867; published 1887), Mon cœur mis à nu (1864)
“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
Variant: I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
Source: The Character of Physical Law (1965), chapter 6, “Probability and Uncertainty — the Quantum Mechanical View of Nature,” p. 129
Source: Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (2012, 2nd ed. 2015), Ch. 3: General Principles of Quantum Mechanics
The close of his Nobel lecture: "The Statistical Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics" (11 December 1954) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1954/born-lecture.html
Context: Can we call something with which the concepts of position and motion cannot be associated in the usual way, a thing, or a particle? And if not, what is the reality which our theory has been invented to describe?
The answer to this is no longer physics, but philosophy. … Here I will only say that I am emphatically in favour of the retention of the particle idea. Naturally, it is necessary to redefine what is meant. For this, well-developed concepts are available which appear in mathematics under the name of invariants in transformations. Every object that we perceive appears in innumerable aspects. The concept of the object is the invariant of all these aspects. From this point of view, the present universally used system of concepts in which particles and waves appear simultaneously, can be completely justified. The latest research on nuclei and elementary particles has led us, however, to limits beyond which this system of concepts itself does not appear to suffice. The lesson to be learned from what I have told of the origin of quantum mechanics is that probable refinements of mathematical methods will not suffice to produce a satisfactory theory, but that somewhere in our doctrine is hidden a concept, unjustified by experience, which we must eliminate to open up the road.
http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/everett/.
“ORDINARY QUANTUM MECHANICS (as far as I know) IS JUST FINE FOR ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES.”
Against 'measurement' (1990)
Context: I agree with them about that: ORDINARY QUANTUM MECHANICS (as far as I know) IS JUST FINE FOR ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES. Even when I begin by insisting on this myself, and in capital letters, it is likely to be insisted on repeatedly in the course of the discussion. So it is convenient to have an abbreviation for the last phrase: FOR ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES = FAPP.