Eugene Wigner quotes
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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.”
-- Eugene WignerSource : Eugene Paul Wigner (2012). “Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses”, p.549, Springer Science & Business Media
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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.”
-- Eugene Wigner -
“[T]he laws of quantum mechanics itself cannot be formulated ... without recourse to the concept of consciousness.”
-- Eugene Wigner -
“There is no natural phenomenon that is comparable with the sudden and apparently accidentally timed development of science, except perhaps the condensation of a super-saturated gas or the explosion of some unpredictable explosives.”
-- Eugene Wigner -
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“The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation of it.”
-- Eugene WignerSource : Eugene Paul Wigner, Jagdish Mehra, Arthur S. Wightman (1997). “Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses”, p.535, Springer Science & Business Media
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“OK, so the computer has understood, but what about me ?”
-- Eugene Wigner -
“There are two kinds of people in the world: Johnny Von Neumann and the rest of us.”
-- Eugene Wigner -
“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.”
-- Eugene Wigner -
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“Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.”
-- Eugene Wigner -
“It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”
-- Eugene WignerSource : Eugene Paul Wigner (2012). “Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses”, p.248, Springer Science & Business Media
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“The full meaning of life, the collective meaning of all human desires, is fundamentally a mystery beyond our grasp. As a young man, I chafed at this state of affairs. But by now I have made peace with it. I even feel a certain honor to be associated with such a mystery.”
-- Eugene WignerSource : Eugene Paul Wigner, Andrew Szanton (2013). “The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner”, p.318, Springer
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“The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the language we use for their expression.”
-- Eugene Wigner -
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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.”
-- Eugene WignerSource : Eugene Paul Wigner (2012). “Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses”, p.283, Springer Science & Business Media
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“The unreasonable efficiency of mathematics in science is a gift we neither understand nor deserve.”
-- Eugene Wigner -
“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.”
-- Eugene WignerSource : Eugene Paul Wigner (2013). “The Collected Works of Eugene Paul Wigner: Historical, Philosophical, and Socio-Political Papers. Historical and Biographical Reflections and Syntheses”, p.28, Springer Science & Business Media
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“Solipsism may be logically consistent with present Quantum Mechanics, Monism in the sense of Materialism is not.”
-- Eugene WignerSource : Eugene Paul Wigner (2012). “Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses”, p.252, Springer Science & Business Media
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