Hans Christian von Baeyer Quotes

As with all quantum devices, a qubit is a delicate flower. If you so much as look at it, you destroy it.

The problem of defining exactly what is meant by the signal velocity, which cropped up as long ago as 1907, has not been solved.

Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science. Nothing concentrates the mind as effectively, regardless of whether it pits two competing theories against each other, or theory against observation, or a compelling mathematical deduction against ordinary common sense.

Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric rain.

An electron is real; a probability is not.

In fact, an information theory that leaves out the issue of noise turns out to have no content.

As every bookie knows instinctively, a number such as reliability - a qualitative rather than a quantitative measure - is needed to make the valuation of information practically useful.

Entropy is not about speeds or positions of particles, the way temperature and pressure and volume are, but about our lack of information.

Time has been called God's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once. In the same spirit, noise is Nature's way of making sure that we don't find out everything that happens. Noise, in short, is the protector of information.

Both induction and deduction, reasoning from the particular and the general, and back again from the universal to the specific, form the essence to scientific thinking.

To put it one way, a collection of Shakespeare's plays is richer than a phone book that uses the same number of letters; to put it another, the essence of information lies in the relationships among bits, not their sheer number.

If you don't understand something, break it apart; reduce it to its components. Since they are simpler than the whole,you have a much better chance of understanding them; and when you have succeeded in doing that, put the whole thing back together again.

This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms of clearly understood mathematical laws; but perhaps comparisons are the best we can hope for.

Underneath the shifting appearances of the world as perceived by our unreliable senses, is there, or is there not, a bedrock of objective reality?

The solution of the Monty Hall problem hinges on the concept of information, and more specifically, on the relationship between added information and probability.