The job of a theoretical physicist is to make mistakes as fast as possible .
Of all heroes, Spinoza was Einstein ’s greatest. No one expressed more strongly then he a belief in the harmony, the beauty, and most of all the ultimate comprehensibility of nature .
We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.
Now is the time for everyone who believes in the rule of reason to speak up against pathological science and its purveyors.
The observer cannot be left out of the description of the observation.
No space, no time, no gravity, no electromagnetism, no particles. Nothing. We are back where Plato, Aristotle and Parmenides struggled with the great questions: How Come the Universe, How Come Us, How Come Anything? But happily also we have around the answer to these questions. That’s us.
It is my opinion that everything must be based on a simple idea. And it is my opinion that this idea, once we have finally discovered it, will be so compelling, so beautiful, that we will say to one another, yes, how could it have been any different.
If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day.
We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense this is aparticipatory universe.
Surely where there’s smoke there’s fire? No, where there’s so much smoke there’s smoke.
It was the defining event and remains a thousand degrees hot.
No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.
I like to think that someone will trace how the deepest thinking of India made its way to Greece and from there to the philosophy of our times.
I like to say, when asked why I pursue science, that it is to satisfy my curiosity, that I am by nature a searcher trying to understand. If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day.
One can only learn by teaching.
Yes, there is happiness to be found in the mere contemplation of the deepest mysteries.
Nobody can be anybody without somebodies around.
Anyone who expects to create, be it as a scientist or artist, scholar or writer, needs self-confidence, even bravado. How else can one dare to imagine understanding what no one else has understood, discovering what no one else has discovered? Where does this confidence come from? Fortunately, every young person is blessed with some of it. It is part of human character.
But some numbers, called dimensionless numbers, have the same numerical value no matter what units of measurement are chosen. Probably the most famous of these is the “fine-structure constant,”... Physicists love this number not just because it is dimensionless, but also because it is a combination of three fundamental constants of nature.
Recent decades have taught us that physics is a magic window. It shows us the illusion that lies behind reality – and the reality that lies behind illusion. Its scope is immensely greater than we one realized. We are no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, or fields of force, or geometry, or even space and time. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself.
What we call the past is built on bits.