In a world threatened by pain and death, stories of miracle workers are a psychological necessity, because the alternative is unmitigated horror and despair.

Cabe decir que los genios tienen más posibilidades de incurrir en el error que la media.

Hippocrates can be justifiably regarded as the father of Western medicine, and he stands in relation to this science as Aristotle does to physics. Which is to say, he was almost entirely wrong, but he was at least systematic.

[T]he wavefunction of the electron in [a] box can penetrate into the walls. If the walls aren’t too thick, the wavefunction can actually extend right through them, so that it still has a non-zero value on the outside. What this tells you is that there is a small chance – equal to the amplitude of the wavefunction squared in that part of space – that if you make a measurement of where the electron is, you might find it within the wall, or even outside the wall.

The world is sensitive to our touch. It has a kind of 'Zing!' that makes it fly off in ways that are not imaginable classically. The whole structure of quantum mechanics may be nothing more than the optimal method of reasoning and processing information in the light of such a fundamental (wonderful) sensitivity. — Chris Fuchs

Creer que el genio conlleva estar libre de error es malinterpretar la naturaleza de la creatividad y el entendimiento.

We watch Paracelsus in Basle as though seeing a man run headlong toward a precipice. Like an indestructible lunatic, he will do so again and again throughout his life.

A so-called antimony war had been waged between French [Galenist] physicians and [alchemical, Paracelsian] iatrochemists since the beginning of the seventeenth century. What it lacked in bloodletting, this war made up for in bile.

[There is a] growing conviction that quantum mechanics is at root a theory not of tiny particles and waves but of information and its causative influence. It’s a theory of how much we can deduce about the world by looking at it, and how that depends on intimate, invisible connections between here and there.

[C]lassical physics is just a special case of quantum physics.