83 quotes found
"Simplicity is the touchstone in finding new physical laws. … If it's elegant, then it's a rough rule of thumb: you're on the right track."
"Not only God knows, I know, and by the end of the semester, you will know."
"People get a lot of confusion, because they keep trying to think of quantum mechanics as classical mechanics"
"Every successful physical theory swallows its predecessor alive. But it does so by interpreting the concepts of the old theory in terms of the new, not the other way around. Thus our aim is not "the interpretation of quantum mechanics." It is the interpretation of classical mechanics."
"The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction."
"Sidney Coleman was not only a leader in theoretical particle physics, but also a hugely gifted and dedicated teacher. In his courses he found just the right balance between rigor and intuition, enlivened by wit, humor and a deep store of anecdotes about the history of physics. Very often these were first-hand accounts; if he wasn't a participant, he was an eyewitness."
"If you haven't read his Erice Lectures, you don't know the heights that scientific writing can attain."
"Steve Weinberg was giving the gauge seminar one Wednesday and was, as I recall nearly finished or just finishing his talk. Sidney had not arrived. So-Young Pi asked Steve a question and Steve replied (as I recall) “That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer; I haven’t thought about it.” At that exact instant Sidney enters the room, hears Steve’s reply, heads for the coffee pot, and says “I know the answer; what’s the question?” He was told the question, and he answered it. (Correctly, of course.)"
"Obviously, you have to know accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was once the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double-entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention. And it's not that hard to understand. But you have to know enough about it to understand its limitations — because although accounting is the starting place, it's only a crude approximation. And it's not very hard to understand its limitations. For example, everyone can see that you have to more or less just guess at the useful life of a jet airplane or anything like that. Just because you express the depreciation rate in neat numbers doesn't make it anything you really know."
"... much of what is taught in modern corporate finance courses is twaddle."
"The first $100,000 is a bitch, but you gotta do it. I don’t care what you have to do — if it means walking everywhere and not eating anything that wasn’t purchased with a coupon, find a way to get your hands on $100,000. After that, you can ease off the gas a little bit."
"The hard part of the process for most people is the first $100,000. If you have a standing start at zero, getting together $100,000 is a long struggle for most people."
"You have to learn all the big ideas in the key disciplines in a way that they're in a mental latticework in your head and you automatically use them for the rest of your life. If you do that, I solemnly promise you that one day you'll be walking down the street and you'll look to your right and left and you’ll think "my heavenly days, I'm now one of the few competent people in my whole age cohort." If you don't do it, many of the brightest of you will live in the middle ranks or in the shallows."
"Our investment style has been given a name - focus investing - which implies ten holdings, not one hundred or four hundred. The idea that it is hard to find good investments, so concentrate in a few, seems to me to be an obvious idea. But 98% of the investment world does not think this way. It's been good for us."
"You can't give the average Wall Street CEO really lenient standards of accounting and expect the figures to be good. The accountant is like the referee in soccer. The accountant has to be the adult that prevents the mayhem. Accountants don't want to be the adults because it causes liability, it causes responsibility, it causes difficulty ... they failed us terribly."
"How do these super-smart people with all these degrees and higher mathematics end up doing these dumb things? I think it's explainable by the old proverb that to the man with a hammer every problem looks pretty much like a nail. They've learned these techniques and they just twist the problem so it fits the solution — which is not the way to do it."
"Neither Warren nor I have ever used any fancy math in business — and neither did Ben Graham who taught Warren. Everything I have ever done in business could be done with the simplest algebra and geometry and addition and multiplication and so forth. I never used calculus for any practical work in my whole damn life — and I was a perfect whiz at it when they taught it to me."
"I see [Bitcoin as] an artificial speculative medium that people are buying just because they think they can sell it to somebody else at a higher price, even though it inherently has no intrinsic value. So, I regard the whole business as anti-social, stupid, immoral. [...] I regard the thing as a combination of dementia and immorality, and I think the people that are pushing it are a disgrace."
"... I regard it as a cinch that a great nation will in due time be Rome. ... Where is Rome? Where is Britain in its heyday? They all pass and so our turn is bound to come some day."
"You don’t have a lot of envy, you don’t have a lot of resentment. You don’t overspend your income, you stay cheerful in spite of your troubles, you deal with reliable people, and you do what you’re supposed to do. And all these simple rules work so well to make your life better. And they’re so trite."
"I don't think that she knows who Adam Smith was."
"What I would say is the single most important thing, if you want to avoid all the stupid errors, is knowing where you're competent and where you aren't. And that's very hard to do because the human mind naturally tries to make you think you're way smarter than you are."
"You fix what can be fixed, and what can't be fixed you endure."
"We don't want to make our money selling things that are bad for people."
"Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome."
"Charlie's mind has a greater span than I do. He has read more biographies, hundreds per year. He soaks them up and remembers [them]."
"Blue Chip's business model eventually became obsolete, and its sales slowly declined over the years, from $126 million in sales in 1970 to $1.5 million in 1990. But, in its heyday, under Charlie's direction, Blue Chip used its surplus capital to purchase 100% of See's Candies and 80% of a finance company called Wesco, which owned a savings and loan. Just as Warren had taken capital out of Berkshire's failing textile operation to buy a thriving insurance company, National Indemnity, Charlie took the excess capital out of Blue Chip Stamp and invested it in profitable businesses. Eventually Blue Chip Stamp was merged into Berkshire Hathaway."
"Ever since before quantum phenomena became definitely recognized many attempts were made to picture their mechanism."
"Your waistline may be spreading but you can't blame it on the expansion of the universe."
"The way I solved the theoretical problem was to go into the shop and build something concrete."
"Scientists and engineers changed the world."
"Science is art. It is the process of creating something that never exists before. ... It makes us ask new questions about ourselves, others; about ethics, the future."
"We want to make things. We want to make things with our hands. We crave it. It sparks something in us, feeds our urge to create. That's why were here. The future will be what we choose to build. We choose to build what we believe in. It's always been that way. A small group of people choose to believe in something, and then they make it so. In that order. They choose to believe in something, and then they make it so. That's the power of makers — the power to choose a new future, by believing, and making."
"1. Get uncomfortable."
"5. Create tension."
"The path to truly new, never-been-done-before things always has failure along the way … It’s supposed to be hard. … Solving the problem must matter. It must instill a sense of urgency … And that urgency cannot be created in the abstract; it has to be real to inspire greater genius."
"Our lives are so full of activity and "chatter" it’s difficult to find quiet time… Those are the moments that are the most creative for me. The location is less important than the choice to turn other things off. Because I find that the quietest times of my life speak the loudest."
"You can't lose your nerve for the big failure because you need exactly the same nerve for the big success."
"I do think that speed is part of the innovation process. If ideas aren't built on with a sense of urgency, time can pass you by. This isn't just a problem for the government. It's a problem for everyone: The difficulty of making new ideas broadly available. And yet some ideas move quickly. Look at the progression of radio, television, the Internet, the iPod, Facebook. The acceleration in getting to millions of users has gone from 38 years to less than 4. That's something that we've paid a lot of attention to: How do we increase the speed at DARPA?"
"To increase the speed of innovation here, we want to increase the number of people who can contribute ideas to the creative process. … We structure programs so that we can have diversity of involvement from universities to small businesses to large businesses to garage inventors. You're looking for the maximum number of folks who can contribute ideas to the process. So we're trying to catalyze and grab the best ideas no matter where they come from, leveraging the most modern concepts of crowdsourcing and harnessing creative power. Look at the semiconductor industry. Those companies could only keep up with Moore's law by going from hundreds of chip designers focused on eking out every last electron, to hundreds of thousands of designers throughout the industry who could excel at various pieces of the design. When you open up the process like that, the number of people and the diversity of people who can participate goes way up."
"I tell young people who ask me about their careers, "Wake up on Saturday and ask yourself, Which job would I go to right now? Then choose that one." Because what it tells you is that you're going to your passion; your passion is your work. And I feel that way about my work."
"Over the past 50 years, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has produced an unparalleled number of breakthroughs. Arguably, it has the longest-standing, most consistent track record of radical invention in history. Its innovations include the internet; RISC computing; global positioning satellites; stealth technology; unmanned aerial vehicles, or “drones”; and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), which are now used in everything from air bags to ink-jet printers to video games like the Wii. Though the U.S. military was the original customer for DARPA’s applications, the agency’s advances have played a central role in creating a host of multibillion-dollar industries. What makes DARPA’s long list of accomplishments even more impressive is the agency’s swiftness, relatively tiny organization, and comparatively modest budget. Its programs last, on average, only three to five years."
"The DARPA model has three elements: Ambitious goals. The agency’s projects are designed to harness science and engineering advances to solve real-world problems or create new opportunities. At Defense, GPS was an example of the former and stealth technology of the latter. The problems must be sufficiently challenging that they cannot be solved without pushing or catalyzing the science. The presence of an urgent need for an application creates focus and inspires greater genius. Temporary project teams. DARPA brings together world-class experts from industry and academia to work on projects of relatively short duration. Team members are organized and led by fixed-term technical managers, who themselves are accomplished in their fields and possess exceptional leadership skills. These projects are not open-ended research programs. Their intensity, sharp focus, and finite time frame make them attractive to the highest-caliber talent, and the nature of the challenge inspires unusual levels of collaboration. In other words, the projects get great people to tackle great problems with other great people. Independence. By charter, DARPA has autonomy in selecting and running projects. Such independence allows the organization to move fast and take bold risks and helps it persuade the best and brightest to join."
"DARPA was created in 1958, shortly after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to reach space, sparking a national crisis in the United States. Concern that the Russians had achieved technological superiority led to the formation of the agency. Its founding mission was simple: "to prevent and create strategic surprise.”"
"Dr. Dugan’s contributions to the United States military are numerous. She led a counterterrorism task force for the Deputy Secretary of Defense in 1999 and, from 2001 to 2003, she served as a special advisor to the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, completing a Quick Reaction Study on Countermine for Enduring Freedom. The results of this study were subsequently briefed to joint senior military leadership and successfully implemented in the field."
"The way corporations approach innovation is decades out of date, says Regina Dugan. The head of special projects at Google-owned Motorola Mobility is trying to change the way big companies come up with ideas by emphasizing urgency and not being afraid to fail."
"Dugan believes that the nerds at DARPA are heroes. They challenge assumptions and push far past imagined boundaries. And: “We all have nerd power, we just forget.” We’re born with the feeling that we can create and explore. It’s hard to hold on to this feeling. We doubt and fear. We think that someone else will be better than us, more capable. “But there isn’t anyone else, just you. If we’re lucky, someone steps in, takes a hand and says let me help you believe” For Dugan, that came in the form of an e-mail from Jason Harley, who, on a dark day for her, wrote an e-mail:"
"Regina Dugan, the head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, asked us this: What would you do if you knew that failure was impossible?"
"Disruptive innovation is the kind that unhinges old ways of operating, juices competition and creates new growth. One of the world’s leading experts on the subject is Regina Dugan."
"Regina does bring in outside perspective specifically related to projects that are leaps, versus incremental steps."
"The brain has this wonderful property — you can go through and shoot out every tenth neuron and never miss them."
"Listen to the technology; find out what it's telling you."
"The quantum world is a world of waves, not particles. So we have to think of electron waves and proton waves and so on. Matter is 'incoherent' when all its waves have a different wavelength, implying a different momentum. On the other hand, if you take a pure quantum system – the electrons in a superconducting magnet, or the atoms in a laser – they are all in phase with one another, and they demonstrate the wave nature of matter on a large scale. Then you can see quite visibly what matter is down at its heart."
"... the inflationary paradigm is so flexible that it is immune to experimental and observational tests. First, inflation is driven by a hypothetical , the inflaton, which has properties that can be adjusted to produce effectively any outcome. Second, inflation does not end with a universe with uniform properties, but almost inevitably leads to a multiverse with an infinite number of bubbles, in which the cosmic and physical properties vary from bubble to bubble. The part of the multiverse that we observe corresponds to a piece of just one such bubble. Scanning over over all possible bubbles in the multiverse, everything that can physically happen does happen an infinite number of times. No experiment can rule out a theory that allows for all possible outcomes. Hence, the paradigm of inflation is unfalsifiable."
"String theory suggested that we should have a whole new set of particles called "supersymmetric partners" that were supposed to be observed at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN — we don't see those."
"(quote at 33:07 of 49:06)"
"I know of no other scientist, no other theoretical physicist alive who has a clearer focus on whether our theories and ideas are relevant to the real world. And that's always what he's after."
"D-branes provide a simple description of various nonperturbative objects required by string duality, and give new insights into the quantum mechanics of black holes and the nature of spacetime at the shortest distances. ... D-branes are extended objects, topological defects in a sense, defined by the property that strings can end on them."
"In the open string the gauge charges are carried by the Chan-Paton degrees of freedom at the endpoints. In the closed string the charges are carried by fields that move along the string."
"In all there are four arguments here for the multiverse: the failure of conventional methods for understanding why the cosmological constant is not large, the success of the environmental theories for doing so, the successful prediction of the nonzero cosmological constant, and the string landscape."
"On notable classmate was Dan Friedan. Friedan stunned me, and I think everyone else, at his Ph.D. seminar, when he showed that Einstein's equation, the basic equation of general relativity, could be interpreted in terms of one of the basic objects in QFT, the β function that governs the energy scale. I did not see what this could possibly mean, but a few years later it showed up as one of the key ideas in string theory."
"And then, on October 5, 1995, a paper appeared that changed the whole discussion, forever. It was Joe, explaining D-branes to those of us who’d barely heard of his earlier work, and showing that many of these black holes, black strings and black surfaces were actually D-branes in disguise. His paper made everything clearer, simpler, and easier to calculate; it was an immediate hit. By the beginning of 1996 it had 50 citations; twelve months later, the citation count was approaching 300."
"My greatest failure as head of the Theory Group here in Austin was to lose Joe to Santa Barbara."
"Cellular automata are now being used to model varied physical phenomena normally modelled by wave equations, fluid dynamics, Ising models, etc. We hypothesize that there will be found a single cellular automaton rule that models all of microscopic physics; and models it exactly. We call this field DM, for digital mechanics."
"Under the roof of one controversial assumption about physics, we discuss five big questions that can be addressed using concepts from a modern understanding of digital informational processes. The assumption is called finite nature. The digital mechanics model is obtained by applying the assumption to physics. The questions are as follows: 1. What is the origin of spin? 2. Why are there symmetries and CPT (charge conjugation, parity, and time reversal)? 3. What is the origin of length? 4. What does a process model of motion tell us? 5. Can the finite nature assumption account for the efficacy of quantum mechanics?"
"Feynman considered Fredkin a brilliant and consistently original, though sometimes incautious, thinker. If anyone is going to come up with a new and fruitful way of looking at physics, Feynman said, Fredkin will."
"Bennett from IBM, Fredkin, and later Toffoli investigated whether, with gates that are reversible, you can do everything. And it turns out, wonderfully true, that the irreversibiilty is not essential for computation. It just happens to be the way we designed the circuits."
"The Pale Blue Dot image of Earth is not a stunning image. But that didn’t matter in the end, because it was the way that Carl romanced it, turning it into an allegory on the human condition, that has ever since made the phrase “Pale Blue Dot” and the image itself synonymous with an inspirational call to planetary brotherhood and protection of Earth."
"If we stay on this line, we will map every large galaxy in the observable universe by 2060. Think about that. Think about it: we've gone from arranging clamshells to general relativity to SDSS in a few thousand years -- and if we hang on 40 more, we can map all the galaxies. But we have to stay on the line. Will that be our choice? There are dark forces in this world that will rob our entire species of our right to understand our universe. Don't be afraid of the dark. Fight back. Join us."
"Wouldn't it be really cool to talk to another species that had a relationship with God but must look different because it's not influenced by our story? I realize we're very limited in what we can do but getting a second data point I think would be helpful."
"Computational biology is the art of developing and applying computational methods to answer questions in biology, such as studying how proteins fold, identifying genes that are associated with diseases, or inferring human population histories from genetic data."
"I have interests in both the development of computational methods and in answering specific biology questions, primarily related to the function of RNA, a molecule central to the function of cells."
"While genome sequencing has obviously been useful in revealing the sequences that are involved in coding various aspects of the molecular biology of the cell, it has had a secondary impact that is less obvious at first glance."
"The low cost and high throughput (the ability to process large volumes of material) of genome sequencing allowed for a more "big-data" approach to biology, so that experiments that previously could only be applied to individual genes could suddenly be applied in parallel to all of the genes in the genome."
"A result of the scale of these new experiments is the emergence of very large data sets in biology whose interpretation demands the application of state-of-the-art computer science methods."
"The problems require interdisciplinary dexterity and involve not only management of large data sets but also the development of novel abstract frameworks for understanding their structure."
"If you want to build a service agent that does returns, you cannot afford for the returns to be wrong one out of ten times. It has to be 99.9% correct. If you have an agent that comes up with a loan, you cannot have an agent make the wrong recommendation about the loan. These are scenarios where we need to have high consistency."
"These are very similar to what DeepMind did when they were training AlphaGo. They have instructions on how to play Go, along with some trajectories on how the game should be played. However, to achieve a breakthrough in performance, they had it interact with another AI. Then they began discovering new strategies, architectures, and approaches for winning the games, and eventually ended up with something that actually beat the gold masters at some point. The same concept can be applied here in the realm of enterprise."
"Generating thousands or millions of trajectories will help us find the right mechanisms for incorporating feedback and re-training those LLMs [Large Language Models]. There are numerous opportunities for developing new training engines, learning engines, and ultimately creating new benchmarks. We cannot improve what we cannot measure. The benchmarks are critical for assessing our current position."
"This doesn't cover all of the objects, fields, and complexity of the orgs that use Salesforce. But even within this simplified scenario, we can go towards something that improves performance for those use cases being tested. The next step is to increase the scope. We need to do more work, add more objects, and more complexity. That's what we want to do in the next phase."
"Prompt engineering is a bit of an art. So, there's a lot of work that goes into that, but finding an automatic way to engineer the prompt could be very useful, because it eliminates the need for humans to do the engineering. You have a system that automatically comes up with the right way of engineering the prompt."
"Our goal is to scale it up and make it as close as possible to real-world use cases. I think it's actually the next stage of the arms race for agentic AI. I have seen these other cases of discussion about simulation bubbling up in this area of the enterprise."
"This kind of scenario can be implemented by plugging it into the right structure, such as CRM-Arena, where we have started simulating all these different business objects and their dependencies. You start training agents that replicate what a customer will do and what a human agent will do to create a lot of interesting use cases. You can actually cover a lot of ground, which is somewhat difficult to predict beforehand."