The number of e-mails and letters that I get from choreographers, from sculptors, from composers who are being inspired by science is huge.
The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand.
Before the discovery of quantum mechanics, the framework of physics was this: If you tell me how things are now, I can then use the laws of physics to calculate, and hence predict, how things will be later.
I’d say many features of string theory don’t mesh with what we observe in everyday life.
I may be a Jewish scientist, but I would be tickled silly if one day I were reincarnated as a Baptist preacher.
I like ‘The Simpsons’ quite a lot. I love the irreverent character of the whole show. It’s great.
Writing for the stage is different from writing for a book. You want to write in a way that an actor has material to work with, writing in the first person not the third person, and pulling out the dramatic elements in a bigger way for a stage presentation.
When general relativity was first put forward in 1915, the math was very unfamiliar to most physicists. Now we teach general relativity to advanced high school students.
We can certainly go further than cats, but why should it be that our brains are somehow so suited to the universe that our brains will be able to understand the deepest workings?
To tell you the truth, I’ve never met anybody who can envision more than three dimensions. There are some who claim they can, and maybe they can; it’s hard to say.
There’s a picture of my dorm room in the college yearbook as the most messy, most disgusting room on the Harvard campus, where I was an undergraduate.
The universe is incredibly wondrous, incredibly beautiful, and it fills me with a sense that there is some underlying explanation that we have yet to fully understand. If someone wants to place the word ‘God’ on those collections of words, it’s OK with me.
The melded nature of space and time is intimately woven with properties of light speed. The inviolable nature of the speed of light is actually, in Einstein’s hands, talking about the inviolable nature of cause and effect.
The central idea of string theory is quite straightforward. If you examine any piece of matter ever more finely, at first you’ll find molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles. Probe the smaller particles, you’ll find something else, a tiny vibrating filament of energy, a little tiny vibrating string.
The absolute worst thing that you ever can do, in my opinion, in bringing science to the general public, is be condescending or judgmental. It is so opposite to the way science needs to be brought forth.
Supersymmetry is a theory which stipulates that for every known particle there should be a partner particle. For instance, the electron should be paired with a supersymmetric ‘selectron,’ quarks ought to have ‘squark’ partners, and so on.
For most people, the major hurdle in grasping modern insights into the nature of the universe is that these developments are usually phrased using mathematics.
When you realize that quantum mechanics underlies all physical processes, from the fusing of atoms in the sun to the neural firings that constitutes the stuff of thought, the far-reaching implications of the proposal become apparent. It says that there’s no such thing as a road untraveled. Yet each such road – each reality – is hidden from all others.
A tree is to the entire universe as a string is to an atom.
Quantum mechanics challenges this view by revealing, at least in certain circumstances, a capacity to transcend space; long-range quantum connections can bypass spatial separation. Two objects can be far apart in space, but as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, it’s as if they’re a single entity.