"Unlike the theological hell, the hell of physics, quantum mechanics, is willing to offer us some precious gifts for those things we abandon."
Avshalom Elitzur is deemed by many to be an intellectual powerhouse in physics and philosophy. Having left school at sixteen to go work as a lab technician, he presented an unpublished paper on quantum mechanics at Temple University, after which he was invited to Tel Aviv University to complete a doctoral thesis on the subject.
He was a senior lecturer at the Israeli Institute for Advanced Research working on physics and philosophy, where his work on the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-testing problem in quantum mechanics inspired Roger Penrose in his book Shadows of Mind.