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Explain quantum mechanics in 5 words or less.

"Don’t look : waves.
Look : particles."

(an answer to a challenge asked by Sean Carroll on Twitter, originally posed by physicist John Wheeler) 

There is a lot to say about quantum mechanics, perhaps the most mysterious idea ever to be contemplated by human beings, but all we need is one simple (but hard to accept) fact: 

How the world appears when we look at it is very different from how it really is.


—Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist
The Particle at the End of the Universe - The Hunt for the Higgs and the Discovery of a New World

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The view of things that all plurality is only apparent, that in the endless series of individuals, passing simultaneously and successively into and out of life, generation after generation, age after age, there is but one and the same entity really existing, which is present and identical in all alike; this theory … may be carried back to the remotest antiquity. 

It is the alpha and omega of the oldest book in the world, the sacred Vedas, whose dogmatic part, or rather esoteric teaching, is found in the Upanishads. There, in almost every page this profound doctrine lies enshrined; with tireless repetition, in countless adaptations, by many varied parables and similes it is expounded and inculcated.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher (1788–1860)

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The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an 

atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.

—Werner Heisenberg, 1901-1976
Pioneer of Quantum Mechanics,
Pantheist

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