We might be the holographic image of a two-dimensional structure.
If the theory turns out to be right, that will be tremendously thick and tasty icing on the cake.
You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.
But, as Einstein once said, “For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”5.
Falsifiability for a theory is great, but a theory can still be respectable even if it is not falsifiable, as long as it is verifiable.
Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.
How can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens above?
I can’t stand clutter. I can’t stand piles of stuff. And whenever I see it, I basically just throw the stuff away.
I believe we owe our young an education that captures the exhilarating drama of science.
We are living through a remarkably privileged era, when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration.
If string theory is right, the microscopic fabric of our universe is a richly intertwined multidimensional labyrinth within which the strings of the universe endlessly twist and vibrate, rhythmically beating out the laws of the cosmos.
I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly – or ever – gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe.
All mathematics is is a language that is well tuned, finely honed, to describe patterns; be it patterns in a star, which has five points that are regularly arranged, be it patterns in numbers like 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 that follow very regular progression.
I believe that through its rational evaluation of truth and indifference to personal belief, science transcends religious and political divisions and so does bind us into a greater, more resilient whole.
When you know the answer you want, it is often all too easy to figure out a way of getting it.
Gravity is matter’s sugar daddy.
Black holes, we all know, are these regions where if an object falls in, it can’t get out, but the puzzle that many struggled with over the decades is, what happens to the information that an object contains when it falls into a black hole. Is it simply lost?
I believe the process of going from confusion to understanding is a precious, even emotional, experience that can be the foundation of self-confidence.
Far from being accidental details, the properties of nature’s basic building blocks are deeply entwined with the fabric of space and time.
There may be many Big Bangs that happened at various and far-flung locations, each creating its own swelling, spatial expanse, each creating a universe – our universe being the result of only one of those Big Bangs.