The theory community, myself included

 

The theory community, myself included - became rather troubled about the particle.
--
about the pentaquark, soon after its thought-to-be discovery in 2003, particle physicists found that the particle took about 100 times longer to decay into a neutron and meson than other paticles did of the same mass, as quoted by by Maggie McKee, New Scientist, (April 20, 2005)

 

Robert Jaffe

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What appears to us solid is ultimately both a particle and a wavelength, and on that realm everything behaves as both a particle and a wave.

 

Vanna Bonta

 

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.

 

Max Born

 

My job here is to try to move forward, keeping this very delicate jar of the Afghan peace process and reconstruction and institution building in my hands through troubled waters. Through minefields, through stormy conditions, through areas that don't have proper light and keep this jar intact and safe, and take it to the distant place. Along the way I may have to do things that some in the international community may not like. But I have my Afghan judgment and that is what I use. And that Afghan judgment does not need to be understood by the international community.

 

Hamid Karzai

 

So far Unitarian realism claiming to possess positive knowledge about Ultimate Reality has succeeded only by excluding large areas of phenomena or by declaring, without proof, that they could be reduced to basic theory, which, in this connection, means elementary particle physics.

 

Paul Karl Feyerabend

 

The quantum theory, as it is now constituted, presents us with a very great challenge, if we are at all interested in such a venture, for in quantum physics there is no consistent notion at all of what the reality may be that underlies the universal constitution and structure of matter. Thus, if we try to use the prevailing world view based on the notions of particles, we discover that the 'particles' (such as electrons) can also manifest as waves, that they move discontinuously, that there are no laws at all that apply in detail to the actual movements of individual particles and that only statistical predictions can be made about large aggregates of such particles. If on the other hand we apply the world view in which the world is regarded as a continuous field, we find that this field must also be discontinuous, as well as particle-like, and that it is as undermined in its actual behaviour as is required in the particle view of relation as a whole.

 

David Bohm