Physicists from the United States

"A point of great importance would be first to know: what is the capacity of the earth? And what charge does it contain if electrified? Though we have no positive evidence of a charged body existing in space without other oppositely electrified bodies being near, there is a fair probability that the earth is such a body, for by whatever process it was separated from other bodies — and this is the accepted view of its origin — it must have retained a charge, as occurs in all processes of mechanical separation."

"Alternate currents, especially of high frequencies, pass with astonishing freedom through even slightly rarefied gases. The upper strata of the air are rarefied. To reach a number of miles out into space requires the overcoming of difficulties of a merely mechanical nature."

"Russians are lucky - they have socialism and Stalin."

"Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. This idea is not novel. Men have been led to it long ago by instinct or reason; it has been expressed in many ways, and in many places, in the history of old and new. We find it in the delightful myth of Antaeus, who derives power from the earth; we find it among the subtle speculations of one of your splendid mathematicians and in many hints and statements of thinkers of the present time. Throughout space there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic! If static our hopes are in vain; if kinetic — and this we know it is, for certain — then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature."

"Ere long intelligence—transmitted without wires—will throb through the earth like a pulse through a living organism. The wonder is that, with the present state of knowledge and the experiences gained, no attempt is being made to disturb the electrostatic or magnetic condition of the earth, and transmit, if nothing else, intelligence."

"There is something within me that might be illusion as it is often case with young delighted people, but if I would be fortunate to achieve some of my ideals, it would be on the behalf of the whole of humanity. If those hopes would become fulfilled, the most exciting thought would be that it is a deed of a Serb."

"Nature may reach the same result in many ways. Like a wave in the physical world, in the infinite ocean of the medium which pervades all, so in the world of organisms, in life, an impulse started proceeds onward, at times, may be, with the speed of light, at times, again, so slowly that for ages and ages it seems to stay, passing through processes of a complexity inconceivable to men, but in all its forms, in all its stages, its energy ever and ever integrally present. A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature. In no way can we get such an overwhelming idea of the grandeur of Nature than when we consider, that in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, throughout the Infinite, the forces are in a perfect balance, and hence the energy of a single thought may determine the motion of a universe."

"There is an influence which is getting strong and stronger day by day, which shows itself more and more in all departments of human activity, and influence most fruitful and beneficial—the influence of the artist. It was a happy day for the mass of humanity when the artist felt the desire of becoming a physician, an electrician, an engineer or mechanician or—whatnot—a mathematician or a financier; for it was he who wrought all these wonders and grandeur we are witnessing. It was he who abolished that small, pedantic, narrow-grooved school teaching which made of an aspiring student a galley-slave, and he who allowed freedom in the choice of subject of study according to one's pleasure and inclination, and so facilitated development."

"Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more."

"In a crystal we have the clear evidence of the existence of a formative life-principle, and though we cannot understand the life of a crystal, it is none the less a living being."

"When the great truth accidentally revealed and experimentally confirmed is fully recognized, that this planet, with all its appalling immensity, is to electric currents virtually no more than a small metal ball and that by this fact many possibilities, each baffling imagination and of incalculable consequence, are rendered absolutely sure of accomplishment; when the first plant is inaugurated and it is shown that a telegraphic message, almost as secret and non-interferable as a thought, can be transmitted to any terrestrial distance, the sound of the human voice, with all its intonations and inflections, faithfully and instantly reproduced at any other point of the globe, the energy of a waterfall made available for supplying light, heat or motive power, anywhere — on sea, or land, or high in the air — humanity will be like an ant heap stirred up with a stick: See the excitement coming!"

"Of all the frictional resistances, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance, what Buddha called 'the greatest evil in the world.' The friction which results from ignorance ... can be reduced only by the spread of knowledge and the unification of the heterogeneous elements of humanity. No effort could be better spent."

"As soon as it is completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind. More important than all of this, however, will be the transmission of power, without wires, which will be shown on a scale large enough to carry conviction."

"Money does not represent such a value as men have placed upon it. All my money has been invested into experiments with which I have made new discoveries enabling mankind to have a little easier life."

"Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine."

"The idea of atomic energy is illusionary but it has taken so powerful a hold on the minds, that although I have preached against it for twenty-five years, there are still some who believe it to be realizable."

"I have harnessed the cosmic rays and caused them to operate a motive device."

"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor."

"Edison was by far the most successful and, probably, the last exponent of the purely empirical method of investigation. Everything he achieved was the result of persistent trials and experiments often performed at random but always attesting extraordinary vigor and resource. Starting from a few known elements, he would make their combinations and permutations, tabulate them and run through the whole list, completing test after test with incredible rapidity until he obtained a clue. His mind was dominated by one idea, to leave no stone unturned, to exhaust every possibility."

"I came from Paris in the Spring of 1884, and was brought in intimate contact with him [Thomas Edison]. We experimented day and night, holidays not excepted. His existence was made up of alternate periods of work and sleep in the laboratory. He had no hobby, cared for no sport or amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene. There can be no doubt that, if he had not married later a woman of exceptional intelligence, who made it the one object of her life to preserve him, he would have died many years ago from consequences of sheer neglect. So great and uncontrollable was his passion for work."

"I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view."

"The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born."

"The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes."

"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket. We shall be able to witness and hear events—the inauguration of a President, the playing of a World Series game, the havoc of an earthquake or the terror of a battle—just as though we were present."

"But the female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated, for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated to an activity that will be all the more intense and powerful because of centuries of repose. Woman will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress."

"I have satisfied myself that the [cosmic] rays are not generated by the formation of new matter in space, a process which would be like water running up a hill. Nor do they come to any appreciable amount from the stars. According to my investigations the sun emits a radiation of such penetrative power that it is virtually impossible to absorb it in lead or other substances. ... This ray, which I call the primary solar ray, gives rise to a secondary radiation by impact against the cosmic dust scattered through space. It is the secondary radiation which now is commonly called the cosmic ray, and comes, of course, equally from all directions in space. [The article continues: The phenomena of radioactivity are not the result of forces within the radioactive substances but are caused by this ray emitted by the sun. If radium could be screened effectively against this ray it would cease to be radioactive, he said.]"

"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."

"The scientists from Franklin to Morse were clear thinkers and did not produce erroneous theories. The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane."

"Much has been said about Yugoslavia and its people, but many Americans may be under a wrong impression for political enemies and agitators have spread the idea that its inhabitants belong to different nations animated by mutual hate and held together against their will, by a tyrannical power. The fact is that all Yugoslavs — Serbians, Slavonians, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Dalmations, Montenagrins, Croatians and Slovenes — are of the same race, speak the same language and have common national ideals and traditions. At the termination of the World War, Alexander brought about a political union creating a powerful and resourceful State. This was hailed with joy by all the Slavs of the Balkans, but it took time before the people found themselves in the new conditions. The Croatians and Slovenes were never in a position to fight for their independence. It was the Serbians who fought the battles for freedom and the price of liberty was paid in Serbian blood. All true Croatians and Slovenes remember that gratefully. They also know that the Serbians have an unequaled aptitude and experience in warfare and are best qualified to direct the forces of the country in a crisis. Ever since united Yugoslavia came into being through Alexander's efforts, political enemies have done all they could to disrupt it by sowing seeds of discord and disseminating malicious reports. … The death of the King has shaken the country to its very foundations, but the enemies who say that it means the disruption of Yugoslavia will hope in vain, for the noble blood of the great man has only served to cement its parts more firmly and strengthen the national structure. Alexander will live long in the memory of his people, a heroic figure of imposing stature, both the Washington and Lincoln of the Yugoslavs; like Washington an able and intrepid general who freed his country from oppression; like Lincoln a wise and patriotic leader who suffered martyrdom."

"Einstein's relativity work is a magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king...[I]ts exponents are brilliant men but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists."

"When we speak of man, we have a conception of humanity as a whole, and before applying scientific methods to the investigation of his movement we must accept this as a physical fact. But can anyone doubt to-day that all the millions of individuals and all the innumerable types and characters constitute an entity, a unit? Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. I cut myself in the finger, and it pains me: this finger is a part of me. I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one. And now I see stricken down an enemy, a lump of matter which, of all the lumps of matter in the universe, I care least for, and it still grieves me. Does this not prove that each of us is only part of a whole? For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of insuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one. Metaphysical proofs are, however, not the only ones which we are able to bring forth in support of this idea. Science, too, recognizes this connectedness of separate individuals, though not quite in the same sense as it admits that the suns, planets, and moons of a constellation are one body, and there can be no doubt that it will be experimentally confirmed in times to come, when our means and methods for investigating psychical and other states and phenomena shall have been brought to great perfection. Still more: this one human being lives on and on. The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains. Therein lies the profound difference between the individual and the whole."

"For every person who perishes from the effects of a stimulant, at least a thousand die from the consequences of drinking impure water. This precious fluid, which daily infuses new life into us, is likewise the chief vehicle through which disease and death enter our bodies. The germs of destruction it conveys are enemies all the more terrible as they perform their fatal work unperceived. They seal our doom while we live and enjoy. The majority of people are so ignorant or careless in drinking water, and the consequences of this are so disastrous, that a philanthropist can scarcely use his efforts better than by endeavoring to enlighten those who are thus injuring themselves. By systematic purification and sterilization of the drinking water the human mass would be very considerably increased. It should be made a rigid rule which might be enforced by law to boil or to sterilize otherwise the drinking water in every household and public place. The mere filtering does not afford sufficient security against infection. All ice for internal uses should be artificially prepared from water thoroughly sterilized. The importance of eliminating germs of disease from the city water is generally recognized, but little is being done to improve the existing conditions, as no satisfactory method of sterilizing great quantities of water has yet been brought forward. By improved electrical appliances we are now enabled to produce ozone cheaply and in large amounts, and this ideal disinfectant seems to offer a happy solution of the important question."

"The production of artificial food as a means for causing an increase of the human mass naturally suggests itself, but a direct attempt of this kind to provide nourishment does not appear to me rational, at least not for the present. Whether we could thrive on such food is very doubtful. We are the result of ages of continuous adaptation, and we cannot radically change without unforeseen and, in all probability, disastrous consequences. So uncertain an experiment should not be tried. By far the best way, it seems to me, to meet the ravages of the evil, would be to find ways of increasing the productivity of the soil. With this object the preservation of forests is of an importance which cannot be overestimated, and in this connection, also, the utilization of water-power for purposes of electrical transmission, dispensing in many ways with the necessity of burning wood, and tending thereby to forest preservation, is to be strongly advocated. But there are limits in the improvement to be effected in this and similar ways. To increase materially the productivity of the soil, it must be more effectively fertilized by artificial means. The question of food-production resolves itself, then, into the question how best to fertilize the soil. What it is that made the soil is still a mystery. To explain its origin is probably equivalent to explaining the origin of life itself. The rocks, disintegrated by moisture and heat and wind and weather, were in themselves not capable of maintaining life. Some unexplained condition arose, and some new principle came into effect, and the first layer capable of sustaining low organisms, like mosses was formed. These, by their life and death, added more of the life sustaining quality to the soil, and higher organisms could then subsist, and so on and on, until at last highly developed plant and animal life could flourish. But though the theories are, even now, not in agreement as to how fertilization is effected, it is a fact, only too well ascertained, that the soil cannot indefinitely sustain life, and some way must be found to supply it with the substances which have been abstracted from it by the plants. The chief and most valuable among these substances are compounds of nitrogen, and the cheap production of these is, therefore, the key for the solution of the all-important food problem. Our atmosphere contains an inexhaustible amount of nitrogen, and could we but oxidize it and produce these compounds, an incalculable benefit for mankind would follow. Long ago this idea took a powerful hold on the imagination of scientific men, but an efficient means for accomplishing this result could not be devised. The problem was rendered extremely difficult by the extraordinary inertness of the nitrogen, which refuses to combine even with oxygen. But here electricity comes to our aid: the dormant affinities of the element are awakened by an electric current of the proper quality. As a lump of coal which has been in contact with oxygen for centuries without burning will combine with it when once ignited, so nitrogen, excited by electricity, will burn. I did not succeed, however, in producing electrical discharges exciting very effectively the atmospheric nitrogen until a comparatively recent date, although I showed, in May, 1891, in a scientific lecture, a novel form of discharge or electrical flame named "St. Elmo's hotfire," which, besides being capable of generating ozone in abundance, also possessed, as I pointed out on that occasion, distinctly the quality of exciting chemical affinities. This discharge or flame was then only three or four inches long, its chemical action was likewise very feeble, and consequently the process of oxidation of nitrogen was wasteful. How to intensify this action was the question. Evidently electric currents of a peculiar kind had to be produced in order to render the process of nitrogen combustion more efficient."

"There can be no doubt that, of all the frictional resistances, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance. Not without reason said that man of wisdom, Buddha: "Ignorance is the greatest evil in the world." The friction which results from ignorance, and which is greatly increased owing to the numerous languages and nationalities, can be reduced only by the spread of knowledge and the unification of the heterogeneous elements of humanity. No effort could be better spent. But however ignorance may have retarded the onward movement of man in times past, it is certain that, nowadays, negative forces have become of greater importance. Among these there is one of far greater moment than any other. It is called organized warfare. When we consider the millions of individuals, often the ablest in mind and body, the flower of humanity, who are compelled to a life of inactivity and unproductiveness, the immense sums of money daily required for the maintenance of armies and war apparatus, representing ever so much of human energy, all the effort uselessly spent in the production of arms and implements of destruction, the loss of life and the fostering of a barbarous spirit, we are appalled at the inestimable loss to mankind which the existence of these deplorable conditions must involve. What can we do to combat best this great evil?"

"It has been argued that the perfection of guns of great destructive power will stop warfare. So I myself thought for a long time, but now I believe this to be a profound mistake. Such developments will greatly modify, but not arrest it. On the contrary, I think that every new arm that is invented, every new departure that is made in this direction, merely invites new talent and skill, engages new effort, offers new incentive, and so only gives a fresh impetus to further development. Think of the discovery of gun-powder. Can we conceive of any more radical departure than was effected by this innovation? Let us imagine ourselves living in that period: would we not have thought then that warfare was at an end, when the armor of the knight became an object of ridicule, when bodily strength and skill, meaning so much before, became of comparatively little value? Yet gunpowder did not stop warfare: quite the opposite it acted as a most powerful incentive."

"As regards the security of a country against foreign invasion, it is interesting to note that it depends only on the relative, and not the absolute, number of the individuals or magnitude of the forces, and that, if every country should reduce the war-force in the same ratio, the security would remain unaltered. An international agreement with the object of reducing to a minimum the war-force which, in view of the present still imperfect education of the masses, is absolutely indispensable, would, therefore, seem to be the first rational step to take toward diminishing the force retarding human movement."

"So we find that the three possible solutions of the great problem of increasing human energy are answered by the three words: food, peace, work. Many a year I have thought and pondered, lost myself in speculations and theories, considering man as a mass moved by a force, viewing his inexplicable movement in the light of a mechanical one, and applying the simple principles of mechanics to the analysis of the same until I arrived at these solutions, only to realize that they were taught to me in my early childhood. These three words sound the key-notes of the Christian religion. Their scientific meaning and purpose now clear to me: food to increase the mass, peace to diminish the retarding force, and work to increase the force accelerating human movement. These are the only three solutions which are possible of that great problem, and all of them have one object, one end, namely, to increase human energy. When we recognize this, we cannot help wondering how profoundly wise and scientific and how immensely practical the Christian religion is, and in what a marked contrast it stands in this respect to other religions. It is unmistakably the result of practical experiment and scientific observation which have extended through the ages, while other religions seem to be the outcome of merely abstract reasoning. Work, untiring effort, useful and accumulative, with periods of rest and recuperation aiming at higher efficiency, is its chief and ever-recurring command. Thus we are inspired both by Christianity and Science to do our utmost toward increasing the performance of mankind. This most important of human problems I shall now specifically consider."

"The ultimate results of development in these three directions are: first, the burning of coal by a cold process in a battery; second, the efficient utilization of the energy of the ambient medium; and, third the transmission without wires of electrical energy to any distance. In whatever way these results may be arrived at, their practical application will necessarily involve an extensive use of iron, and this invaluable metal will undoubtedly be an essential element in the further development along these three lines. If we succeed in burning coal by a cold process and thus obtain electrical energy in an efficient and inexpensive manner, we shall require in many practical uses of this energy electric motors that is, iron. If we are successful in deriving energy from the ambient medium, we shall need, both in the obtainment and utilization of the energy, machinery again, iron. If we realize the transmission of electrical energy without wires on an industrial scale, we shall be compelled to use extensively electric generators once more, iron. Whatever we may do, iron will probably be the chief means of accomplishment in the near future, possibly more so than in the past. How long its reign will last is difficult to tell, for even now aluminium is looming up as a threatening competitor. But for the time being, next to providing new resources of energy, it is of the greatest importance to making improvements in the manufacture and utilization of iron. Great advances are possible in these latter directions, which, if brought about, would enormously increase the useful performance of mankind. Iron is by far the most important factor in modern progress. It contributes more than any other industrial product to the force accelerating human movement. So general is the use of this metal, and so intimately is it connected with all that concerns our life, that it has become as indispensable to us as the very air we breathe. Its name is synonymous with usefulness. But, however great the influence of iron may be on the present human development, it does not add to the force urging man onward nearly as much as it might. First of all, its manufacture as now carried on is connected with an appalling waste of fuel that is, waste of energy. Then, again, only a part of all the iron produced is applied for useful purposes. A good part of it goes to create frictional resistances, while still another large part is the means of developing negative forces greatly retarding human movement. Thus the negative force of war is almost wholly represented in iron."

"Aluminium, however, will not stop at downing copper. Before many years have passed it will be engaged in a fierce struggle with iron, and in the latter it will find an adversary not easy to conquer. The issue of the contest will largely depend on whether iron shall be indispensable in electric machinery. This the future alone can decide. The magnetism as exhibited in iron is an isolated phenomenon in nature. What it is that makes this metal behave so radically different from all other materials in this respect has not yet been ascertained, though many theories have been suggested. As regards magnetism, the molecules of the various bodies behave like hollow beams partly filled with a heavy fluid and balanced in the middle in the manner of a see-saw. Evidently some disturbing influence exists in nature which causes each molecule, like such a beam, to tilt either one or the other way. If the molecules are tilted one way, the body is magnetic; if they are tilted the other way, the body is non-magnetic; but both positions are stable, as they would be in the case of the hollow beam, owing to the rush of the fluid to the lower end. Now, the wonderful thing is that the molecules of all known bodies went one way, while those of iron went the other way. This metal, it would seem, has an origin entirely different from that of the rest of the globe. It is highly improbable that we shall discover some other and cheaper material which will equal or surpass iron in magnetic qualities."

"A far better way, however, to obtain power would be to avail ourselves of the sun's rays, which beat the earth incessantly and supply energy at a maximum rate of over four million horsepower per square mile. Although the average energy received per square mile in any locality during the year is only a small fraction of that amount, yet an inexhaustible source of power would be opened up by the discovery of some efficient method of utilizing the energy of the rays. The only rational way known to me at the time when I began the study of this subject was to employ some kind of heat- or thermodynamic-engine, driven by a volatile fluid evaporate in a boiler by the heat of the rays. But closer investigation of this method, and calculation, showed that, notwithstanding the apparently vast amount of energy received from the sun's rays, only a small fraction of that energy could be actually utilized in this manner. Furthermore, the energy supplied through the sun's radiations is periodical, and the same limitations as in the use of the windmill I found to exist here also. After a long study of this mode of obtaining motive power from the sun, taking into account the necessarily large bulk of the boiler, the low efficiency of the heat-engine, the additional cost of storing the energy and other drawbacks, I came to the conclusion that the "solar engine," a few instances excepted, could not be industrially exploited with success. Another way of getting motive power from the medium without consuming any material would be to utilize the heat contained in the earth, the water, or the air for driving an engine. It is a well-known fact that the interior portions of the globe are very hot, the temperature rising, as observations show, with the approach to the center at the rate of approximately 1 degree C. for every hundred feet of depth. The difficulties of sinking shafts and placing boilers at depths of, say, twelve thousand feet, corresponding to an increase in temperature of about 120 degrees C., are not insuperable, and we could certainly avail ourselves in this way of the internal heat of the globe. In fact, it would not be necessary to go to any depth at all in order to derive energy from the stored terrestrial heat. The superficial layers of the earth and the air strata close to the same are at a temperature sufficiently high to evaporate some extremely volatile substances, which we might use in our boilers instead of water. There is no doubt that a vessel might be propelled on the ocean by an engine driven by such a volatile fluid, no other energy being used but the heat abstracted from the water. But the amount of power which could be obtained in this manner would be, without further provision, very small. Electricity produced by natural causes is another source of energy which might be rendered available. Lightning discharges involve great amounts of electrical energy, which we could utilize by transforming and storing it. Some years ago I made known a method of electrical transformation which renders the first part of this task easy, but the storing of the energy of lightning discharges will be difficult to accomplish. It is well known, furthermore, that electric currents circulate constantly through the earth, and that there exists between the earth and any air stratum a difference of electrical pressure, which varies in proportion to the height."

"When I advanced this system of telegraphy, my mind was dominated by the idea of effecting communication to any distance through the earth or environing medium, the practical consummation of which I considered of transcendent importance, chiefly on account of the moral effect which it could not fail to produce universally. As the first effort to this end I proposed at that time, to employ relay-stations with tuned circuits, in the hope of making thus practicable signaling over vast distances, even with apparatus of very moderate power then at my command. I was confident, however, that with properly designed machinery signals could be transmitted to any point of the globe, no matter what the distance, without the necessity of using such intermediate stations. I gained this conviction through the discovery of a singular electrical phenomenon, which I described early in 1892, in lectures I delivered before some scientific societies abroad, and which I have called a "rotating brush." This is a bundle of light which is formed, under certain conditions, in a vacuum-bulb, and which is of a sensitiveness to magnetic and electric influences bordering, so to speak, on the supernatural. This light-bundle is rapidly rotated by the earth's magnetism as many as twenty thousand times pre second, the rotation in these parts being opposite to what it would be in the southern hemisphere, while in the region of the magnetic equator it should not rotate at all. In its most sensitive state, which is difficult to obtain, it is responsive to electric or magnetic influences to an incredible degree. The mere stiffening of the muscles of the arm and consequent slight electrical change in the body of an observer standing at some distance from it, will perceptibly affect it. When in this highly sensitive state it is capable of indicating the slightest magnetic and electric changes taking place in the earth. The observation of this wonderful phenomenon impressed me strongly that communication at any distance could be easily effected by its means, provided that apparatus could be perfected capable of producing an electric or magnetic change of state, however small, in the terrestrial globe or environing medium."

"The photograph shown in Fig. 3 illustrates, as its title explains, an actual transmission of this kind effected with apparatus used in other experiments here described. To what a degree the appliances have been perfected since my first demonstrations early in 1891 before a scientific society, when my apparatus was barely capable of lighting one lamp (which result was considered wonderful), will appear when I state that I have now no difficulty in lighting in this manner four or five hundred lamps, and could light many more. In fact, there is no limit to the amount of energy which may in this way be supplied to operate any kind of electrical device."

"After demonstrating the practicability of this method of transmission, the thought naturally occurred to me to use the earth as a conductor, thus dispensing with all wires. Whatever electricity may be, it is a fact that it behaves like an incompressible fluid, and the earth may be looked upon as an immense reservoir of electricity, which, I thought, could be disturbed effectively by a properly designed electrical machine. Accordingly, my next efforts were directed toward perfecting a special apparatus which would be highly effective in creating a disturbance of electricity in the earth."

"However extraordinary the results shown may appear, they are but trifling compared with those which are attainable by apparatus designed on these same principles. I have produced electrical discharges the actual path of which, from end to end, was probably more than one hundred feet long; but it would not be difficult to reach lengths one hundred times as great. I have produced electrical movements occurring at the rate of approximately one hundred thousand horse-power, but rates of one, five, or ten million horse-power are easily practicable. In these experiments effects were developed incomparably greater than any ever produced by human agencies, and yet these results are but an embryo of what is to be."

"That communication without wires to any point of the globe is practicable with such apparatus would need no demonstration, but through a discovery which I made I obtained absolute certitude. Popularly explained, it is exactly this: When we raise the voice and hear an echo in reply, we know that the sound of the voice must have reached a distant wall, or boundary, and must have been reflected from the same. Exactly as the sound, so an electrical wave is reflected, and the same evidence which is afforded by an echo is offered by an electrical phenomenon known as a "stationary" wave that is, a wave with fixed nodal and ventral regions. Instead of sending sound-vibrations toward a distant wall, I have sent electrical vibrations toward the remote boundaries of the earth, and instead of the wall the earth has replied. In place of an echo I have obtained a stationary electrical wave, a wave reflected from afar. Stationary waves in the earth mean something more than mere telegraphy without wires to any distance. They will enable us to attain many important specific results impossible otherwise. For instance, by their use we may produce at will, from a sending-station, an electrical effect in any particular region of the globe; we may determine the relative position or course of a moving object, such as a vessel at sea, the distance traversed by the same, or its speed; or we may send over the earth a wave of electricity traveling at any rate we desire, from the pace of a turtle up to lightning speed. With these developments we have every reason to anticipate that in a time not very distant most telegraphic messages across the oceans will be transmitted without cables. For short distances we need a "wireless" telephone, which requires no expert operators. The greater the spaces to be bridged, the more rational becomes communication without wires. The cable is not only an easily damaged and costly instrument, but it limits us in the speed of transmission by reason of a certain electrical property inseparable from its construction. A properly designed plant for effecting communication without wires ought to have many times the working capacity of a cable, while it will involve incomparably less expense. Not a long time will pass, I believe, before communication by cable will become obsolete, for not only will signaling by this new method be quicker and cheaper, but also much safer. By using some new means for isolating the messages which I have contrived, an almost perfect privacy can be secured. I have observed the above effects so far only up to a limited distance of about six hundred miles, but inasmuch as there is virtually no limit to the power of the vibrations producible with such an oscillator, I feel quite confident of the success of such a plant for effecting transoceanic communication. Nor is this all. My measurements and calculations have shown that it is perfectly practicable to produce on our globe, by the use of these principles, an electrical movement of such magnitude that, without the slightest doubt, its effect will be perceptible on some of our nearer planets, as Venus and Mars. Thus from mere possibility interplanetary communication has entered the stage of probability. In fact, that we can produce a distinct effect on one of these planets in this novel manner, namely, by disturbing the electrical condition of the earth, is beyond any doubt. This way of effecting such communication is, however, essentially different from all others which have so far been proposed by scientific men. In all the previous instances only a minute fraction of the total energy reaching the planet—as much as it would be possible to concentrate in a reflector could be utilized by the supposed observer in his instrument. But by the means I have developed he would be enabled to concentrate the larger portion of the entire energy transmitted to the planet in his instrument, and the chances of affecting the latter are thereby increased many millionfold. Besides machinery for producing vibrations of the required power, we must have delicate means capable of revealing the effects of feeble influences exerted upon the earth. For such purposes, too, I have perfected new methods. By their use we shall likewise be able, among other things, to detect at considerable distance the presence of an iceberg or other object at sea. By their use, also, I have discovered some terrestrial phenomena still unexplained. That we can send a message to a planet is certain, that we can get an answer is probable: man is not the only being in the Infinite gifted with a mind."

"While I have not, as yet, actually effected a transmission of a considerable amount of energy, such as would be of industrial importance, to a great distance by this new method, I have operated several model plants under exactly the same conditions which will exist in a large plant of this kind, and the practicability of the system is thoroughly demonstrated. The experiments have shown conclusively that, with two terminals maintained at an elevation of not more than thirty thousand to thirty-five thousand feet above sea-level, and with an electrical pressure of fifteen to twenty million volts, the energy of thousands of horse-power can be transmitted over distances which may be hundreds and, if necessary, thousands of miles. I am hopeful, however, that I may be able to reduce very considerably the elevation of the terminals now required, and with this object I am following up an idea which promises such a realization. There is, of course, a popular prejudice against using an electrical pressure of millions of volts, which may cause sparks to fly at distances of hundreds of feet, but, paradoxical as it may seem, the system, as I have described it in a technical publication, offers greater personal safety than most of the ordinary distribution circuits now used in the cities. This is, in a measure, borne out by the fact that, although I have carried on such experiments for a number of years, no injury has been sustained either by me or any of my assistants."

"It is probable that we shall soon have a self-acting heat-engine capable of deriving moderate amounts of energy from the ambient medium. There is also a possibility—though a small oneï—that we may obtain electrical energy direct from the sun. This might be the case if the Maxwellian theory is true, according to which electrical vibrations of all rates should emanate from the sun. I am still investigating this subject. Sir William Crookes has shown in his beautiful invention known as the "radiometer" that rays may produce by impact a mechanical effect, and this may lead to some important revelation as to the utilization of the sun's rays in novel ways. Other sources of energy may be opened up, and new methods of deriving energy from the sun discovered, but none of these or similar achievements would equal in importance the transmission of power to any distance through the medium. I can conceive of no technical advance which would tend to unite the various elements of humanity more effectively than this one, or of one which would more add to and more economize human energy. It would be the best means of increasing the force accelerating the human mass. The mere moral influence of such a radical departure would be incalculable. On the other hand if at any point of the globe energy can be obtained in limited quantities from the ambient medium by means of a self-acting heat-engine or otherwise, the conditions will remain the same as before. Human performance will be increased, but men will remain strangers as they were."

"Universal Peace, assuming it to be in the fullest sense realizable, might not require eons for its accomplishment, however probable this may appear, judging from the imperceptibly slow growth of all great reformatory ideas of the past. ... Our accepted estimates of the duration of natural metamorphoses, or changes in general, have been thrown in doubt of late. The very foundations of science have been shaken."

"A state of human life vaguely defined by the term "Universal Peace," while a result of cumulative effort through centuries past, might come into existence quickly, not unlike a crystal suddenly forms in a solution which has been slowly prepared. But just as no effect can precede its cause, so this state can never be brought on by any pact between nations, however solemn. Experience is made before the law is formulated, both are related like cause and effect. So long as we are clearly conscious of the expectation, that peace is to result from such a parliamentary decision, so long have we a conclusive evidence that we are not fit for peace. Only then when we shall feel that such international meetings are mere formal procedures, unnecessary except in so far as they might serve to give definite expression to a common desire, will peace be assured.To judge from current events we must be, as yet, very distant from that blissful goal. It is true that we are proceeding towards it rapidly. There are abundant signs of this progress everywhere. The race enmities and prejudices are decidedly waning."

"We begin to think cosmically. Our sympathetic feelers reach out into the dim distance. The bacteria of the "Weltschmerz," are upon us. So far, however, universal harmony has been attained only in a single sphere of international relationship. That is the postal service. Its mechanism is working satisfactorily, but — how remote are we still from that scrupulous respect of the sanctity of the mail bag! And how much farther again is the next milestone on the road to peace — an international judicial service equally reliable as the postal!"

"General disarmament being for the present entirely out of question, a proportionate reduction might be recommended. The safety of any country and of the world's commerce depending not on the absolute, but relative amount of war material, this would be evidently the first reasonable step to take towards universal economy and peace. But it would be a hopeless task to establish an equitable basis of adjustment. Population, naval strength, force of army, commercial importance, water-power, or any other natural resource, actual or prospective, are equally unsatisfactory standards to consider."

"To conquer by sheer force is becoming harder and harder every day. Defensive is getting continuously the advantage of offensive, as we progress in the satanic science of destruction. The new art of controlling electrically the movements and operations of individualized automata at a distance without wires, will soon enable any country to render its coasts impregnable against all naval attacks."

"The distance at which it can strike, and the destructive power of such a quasi-intelligent machine being for all practical purposes unlimited, the gun, the armor of the battleship and the wall of the fortress, lose their import and significance. One can prophesy with a Daniel's confidence that skilled electricians will settle the battles of the near future. But this is the least. In its effect upon war and peace, electricity offers still much greater and more wonderful possibilities. To stop war by the perfection of engines of destruction alone, might consume centuries and centuries. Other means must be employed to hasten the end."

"Fights between individuals, as well as governments and nations, invariably result from misunderstandings in the broadest interpretation of this term. Misunderstandings are always caused by the inability of appreciating one another's point of view. This again is due to the ignorance of those concerned, not so much in their own, as in their mutual fields. The peril of a clash is aggravated by a more or less predominant sense of combativeness, posed by every human being. To resist this inherent fighting tendency the best way is to dispel ignorance of the doings of others by a systematic spread of general knowledge. With this object in view, it is most important to aid exchange of thought and intercourse."

"Mutual understanding would be immensely facilitated by the use of one universal tongue. But which shall it be, is the great question. At present it looks as if the English might be adopted as such, though it must be admitted that it is not the most suitable. Each language, of course, excels in some feature.... A practical answer to that momentous question must perforce be found in times to come, for it is manifest that by adopting one common language the onward march of man would be prodigiously quickened. I do not believe that an artificial concoction, like Volapuk, will ever find universal acceptance, however time-saving it might be. That would be contrary to human nature. Languages have grown into our hearts."

"Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world. Our hearing extends to a small distance. Our sight is impeded by intervening bodies and shadows. To know each other we must reach beyond the sphere of our sense perceptions. We must transmit our intelligence, travel, transport the materials and transfer the energies necessary for our existence. Following this thought we now realize, forcibly enough to dispense with argument, that of all other conquests of man, without exception, that which is most desirable, which would be most helpful in the establishment of universal peaceful relations is — the complete '. To achieve this wonder, electricity is the one and only means. Inestimable good has already been done by the use of this all powerful agent, the nature of which is still a mystery. Our astonishment at what has been accomplished would be uncontrollable were it not held in check by the expectation of greater miracles to come. That one, the greatest of all, can be viewed in three aspects: Dissemination of intelligence, transportation, and transmission of power."

"Within a few years a simple and inexpensive device, readily carried about, will enable one to receive on land or sea the principal news, to hear a speech, a lecture, a song or play of a musical instrument, conveyed from any other region of the globe. The invention will also meet the crying need for cheap transmission to great distances, more especially over the oceans. The small working capacity of the cables and the excessive cost of messages are now fatal impediments in the dissemination of intelligence which can only be removed by transmission without wires."

"The ideal solution of the problem of transportation will be arrived at only when the complete annihilation of distance in the transmission of power in large amounts shall have become a commercial reality. That day we shall invade the domain of the bird. When the vexing problem of aerial navigation, which has defied his attempts for ages, is solved, man will advance with giant strides."

"That electrical energy can be economically transmitted without wires to any terrestrial distance, I have unmistakably established in numerous observations, experiments and measurements, qualitative and quantitative. These have demonstrated that is practicable to distribute power from a central plant in unlimited amounts, with a loss not exceeding a small fraction of one per cent, in the transmission, even to the greatest distance, twelve thousand miles — to the opposite end of the globe."

"I have obtained... spark discharges extending through more than one hundred feet and carrying currents of one thousand amperes, electromotive forces approximating twenty million volts, chemically active streamers covering areas of several thousand square feet, and electrical disturbances in the natural media surpassing those caused by lightning, in intensity. Whatever the future may bring, the universal application of these great principles is fully assured, though it may be long in coming. With the opening of the first power plant, incredulity will give way to wonderment, and this to ingratitude, as ever before."

"It should be borne in mind that electrical energy obtained by harnessing a waterfall is probably fifty times more effective than fuel energy. Since this is the most perfect way of rendering the sun's energy available, the direction of the future material development of man is clearly indicated."

"Electric current, after passing into the earth travels to the diametrically opposite region of the same and rebounding from there, returns to its point of departure with virtually undiminished force. The outgoing and returning currents clash and form nodes and loops similar to those observable on a vibrating cord. To traverse the entire distance of about twenty-five thousand miles, equal to the circumference of the globe, the current requires a certain time interval, which I have approximately ascertained. In yielding this knowledge, nature has revealed one of its most precious secrets, of inestimable consequence to man. So astounding are the facts in this connection, that it would seem as though the Creator, himself, had electrically designed this planet just for the purpose of enabling us to achieve wonders which, before my discovery, could not have been conceived by the wildest imagination."

"The economic transmission of power without wires is of all-surpassing importance to man. By its means he will gain complete mastery of the air, the sea and the desert. It will enable him to dispense with the necessity of mining, pumping, transporting and burning fuel, and so do away with innumerable causes of sinful waste. By its means, he will obtain at any place and in any desired amount, the energy of remote waterfalls — to drive his machinery, to construct his canals, tunnels and highways, to manufacture the materials of his want, his clothing and food, to heat and light his home — year in, year out, ever and ever, by day and by night. It will make the living glorious sun his obedient, toiling slave. It will bring peace and harmony on earth."

"It is not a dream, it is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive — blind, faint-hearted, doubting world! ... Humanity is not yet sufficiently advanced to be willingly led by the discover's keen searching sense. But who knows? Perhaps it is better in this present world of ours that a revolutionary idea or invention instead of being helped and patted, be hampered and ill-treated in its adolescence — by want of means, by selfish interest, pedantry, stupidity and ignorance; that it be attacked and stifled; that it pass through bitter trials and tribulations, through the heartless strife of commercial existence. So do we get our light. So all that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle."

"According to an adopted theory, every ponderable atom is differentiated from a tenuous fluid, filling all space merely by spinning motion, as a whirl of water in a calm lake. By being set in movement this fluid, the ether, becomes gross matter. Its movement arrested, the primary substance reverts to its normal state. It appears, then, possible for man through harnessed energy of the medium and suitable agencies for starting and stopping ether whirls to cause matter to form and disappear. At his command, almost without effort on his part, old worlds would vanish and new ones would spring into being. He could alter the size of this planet, control its seasons, adjust its distance from the sun, guide it on its eternal journey along any path he might choose, through the depths of the universe. He could make planets collide and produce his suns and stars, his heat and light; he could originate life in all its infinite forms. To cause at will the birth and death of matter would be man's grandest deed, which would give him the mastery of physical creation, make him fulfill his ultimate destiny."

"When a child is born its sense-organs are brought in contact with the outer world. The waves of sound, heat, and light beat upon its feeble body, its sensitive nerve-fibres quiver, the muscles contract and relax in obedience: a gasp, a breath, and in this act a marvelous little engine, of inconceivable delicacy and complexity of construction, unlike any on earth, is hitched to the wheel-work of the Universe."

"The little engine labors and grows, performs more and more involved operations, becomes sensitive to ever subtler influences and now there manifests itself in the fully developed being — Man — a desire mysterious, inscrutable and irresistible: to imitate nature, to create, to work himself the wonders he perceives. Inspired to this task he searches, discovers and invents, designs and constructs, and covers with monuments of beauty, grandeur and awe, the star of his birth. He descends into the bowels of the globe to bring forth its hidden treasures and to unlock its immense imprisoned energies for his use. He invades the dark depths of the ocean and the azure regions of the sky. He peers in the innermost nooks and recesses of molecular structure and lays bare to his gaze worlds infinitely remote. He subdues and puts to his service the fierce, devastating spark of Prometheus, the titanic forces of the waterfall, the wind and the tide. He tames the thundering bolt of Jove and annihilates time and space. He makes the great Sun itself his obedient toiling slave. Such is his power and might that the heavens reverberate and the whole earth trembles by the mere sound of his voice."

"What has the future in store for this strange being, born of a breath, of perishable tissue, yet Immortal, with his powers fearful and Divine? What magic will be wrought by him in the end? What is to be his greatest deed, his crowning achievement? Long ago he recognized that all perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or a tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasha or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life-giving Prana or Creative Force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles, all things and phenomena. The primary substance, thrown into infinitesimal whirls of prodigious velocity, becomes gross matter; the force subsiding, the motion ceases and matter disappears, reverting to the primary substance. Can man control this grandest, most awe-inspiring of all processes in nature? Can he harness her inexhaustible energies to perform all their functions at his bidding? more still cause them to operate simply by the force of his will? If he could do this, he would have powers almost unlimited and supernatural. At his command, with but a slight effort on his part, old worlds would disappear and new ones of his planning would spring into being. He could fix, solidify and preserve the ethereal shapes of his imagining, the fleeting visions of his dreams. He could express all the creations of his mind on any scale, in forms concrete and imperishable. He could alter the size of this planet, control its seasons, guide it along any path he might choose through the depths of the Universe. He could cause planets to collide and produce his suns and stars, his heat and light. He could originate and develop life in all its infinite forms."

"To create and to annihilate material substance, cause it to aggregate in forms according to his desire, would be the supreme manifestation of the power of Man's mind, his most complete triumph over the physical world, his crowning achievement, which would place him beside his Creator, make him fulfill his Ultimate Destiny."

"This growing tendency of women to overshadow the masculine is a sign of a deteriorating civilization."

"Woman's determined competition with man in the business world is breaking down some of the best traditions"

"Perhaps the male in human society is useless. I am frank to admit that I don't know. If women are beginning to feel this way about it--and there is striking evidence at hand that they do--then we are entering upon the cruelest period of the world's history."

"The tendency of women to push aside man, supplanting the old spirit of cooperation with him in all the affairs of life, is very disappointing to me."

"While I am not a believer in the orthodox sense, I commend religion, first, because every individual should have some ideal — religious, artistic, scientific, or humanitarian — to give significance to his life. Second, because all the great religions contain wise prescriptions relating to the conduct of life, which hold good now as they did when they were promulgated."

"There is no conflict between the ideal of religion and the ideal of science, but science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call "soul " or "spirit," is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the "soul" or the "spirit" ceases likewise."

"The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct, Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal."

"Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents."

"I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success...Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything."

"Never trust a Jew!"

"If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration. My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists."

"He'll be a child of the storm."

"We think of his contribution much oftener than that of Ampere and Ohm … the induction motor and our power system are enduring monuments to Nikola Tesla."

"The world, I think, will wait a long time for Nikola Tesla's equal in achievement and imagination."

"Nikola Tesla is proof that real greatness surpasses national borders and differences."

"Tesla is entitled to the enduring gratitude of mankind."

"As an eminent pioneer in the realm of high frequency currents... I congratulate you on the great successes of your life's work."

"Tesla has done great things that will take the rest of us a long time to fully exploit. Lets just hope we exploit them for the right reasons!"

"Nikola Tesla is the true unsung prophet of the electronic age; without whom our radio, auto ignition, telephone, alternating current power generation and transmission, radio and television would all have been impossible."

"The invention of the wheel was perhaps rather obvious; but the invention of an invisible wheel, made of nothing but a magnetic field, was far from obvious, and that is what we owe to Nikola Tesla."

"Tesla has contributed more to electrical science than any man up to his time."

"I am sending [Dr. Tesla]...my gratitude and my respect in overflowing measure."

"All scientific men will be delighted to extend their warmest congratulations to Tesla and to express their appreciation of his great contributions to science."

"Nikola Tesla's achievements in electrical science are monuments that symbolize America as a land of freedom and opportunity … Tesla's mind was a human dynamo that whirled to benefit mankind."

"The evolution of electric power from the discovery of Faraday to the initial great installation of the Tesla polyphase system in 1896 is undoubtedly the most tremendous event in all engineering history."

"I misunderstood Tesla. I think we all misunderstood Tesla. We thought he was a dreamer and visionary. He did dream and his dreams came true, he did have visions but they were of a real future, not an imaginary one. Tesla was the first man to lift his eyes high enough to see that the rarified stratum of atmosphere above our earth was destined to play an important role in the radio telegraphy of the future, a fact which had to obtrude itself on the attention of most of us before we saw it. But Tesla also perceived what many of us did not in those days, namely, the currents which flowed way from the base of the antenna over the surface of the earth and in the earth itself."

"Tesla, with his almost preternatural insight into alternating current phenomenon that had enabled him some years before to revolutionize the art of electric power transmission through the invention of the rotary field motor, knew how to make resonance serve, not merely the role of a microscope to make visible the electric oscillations, as Hertz had done, but he made it serve the role of a stereopticon to render spectacular to large audiences the phenomena of electric oscillations and high frequency currents....He did more to excite interest and create an intelligent understanding of these phenomena in the years 1891–1893 than anyone else, and the more we learn about high frequency phenomena, resonance, and radiation today, the nearer we find ourselves approaching what we at one time were inclined, through a species of intellectual myopia, to regard as the fascinating but fantastical speculations of a man whom we are now compelled, in the light of modern experience and knowledge, to admit was a prophet. But Tesla was no mere lecturer and prophet. He saw to the fulfillment of his prophesies and it has been difficult to make any but unimportant improvements in the art of radio-telegraphy without traveling part of the way at least, along a trail blazed by this pioneer who, though eminently ingenious, practical, and successful in the apparatus he devised and constructed, was so far ahead of his time that the best of us then mistook him for a dreamer. I never came anywhere near having an appreciation of what Mr. Tesla had done in this art until a very late date..."

"[Dr. Tesla's] lectures opened a new physical world to me... [He was] one of the kindest men I've ever encountered. The hours which I was permitted to spend together with [him] will always be among the fondest memories of my life."

"We scientists are clever — too clever — are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it!"

"Principles You can't say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction."

"I had too much stuff. My machines came from too far away."

"The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things."

"In this age of specialization men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another. The great problems of the relations between one and another aspect of human activity have for this reason been discussed less and less in public. When we look at the past great debates on these subjects we feel jealous of those times, for we should have liked the excitement of such argument. The old problems, such as the relation of science and religion, are still with us, and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as ever, but they are not often publicly discussed because of the limitations of specialization."

"Western civilization, it seems to me, stands by two great heritages. One is the scientific spirit of adventure — the adventure into the unknown, an unknown which must be recognized as being unknown in order to be explored; the demand that the unanswerable mysteries of the universe remain unanswered; the attitude that all is uncertain; to summarize it — the humility of the intellect. The other great heritage is Christian ethics — the basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual — the humility of the spirit. These two heritages are logically, thoroughly consistent. But logic is not all; one needs one's heart to follow an idea. If people are going back to religion, what are they going back to? Is the modern church a place to give comfort to a man who doubts God — more, one who disbelieves in God? Is the modern church a place to give comfort and encouragement to the value of such doubts? So far, have we not drawn strength and comfort to maintain the one or the other of these consistent heritages in a way which attacks the values of the other? Is this unavoidable? How can we draw inspiration to support these two pillars of western civilization so that they may stand together in full vigor, mutually unafraid? Is this not the central problem of our time?"

"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama."

"The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language. The desire is to have the idea clearly communicated to the other person. It is only necessary to be precise when there is some doubt as to the meaning of a phrase, and then the precision should be put in the place where the doubt exists. It is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing.Pure mathematics is just such an abstraction from the real world, and pure mathematics does have a special precise language for dealing with its own special and technical subjects. But this precise language is not precise in any sense if you deal with real objects of the world, and it is only pedantic and quite confusing to use it unless there are some special subtleties which have to be carefully distinguished."

"This is all very confusing, especially when we consider that even though we may consistently consider ourselves to be the outside observer when we look at the rest of the world, the rest of the world is at the same time observing us, and that often we agree on what we see in each other. Does this then mean that my observations become real only when I observe an observer observing something as it happens? This is a horrible viewpoint. Do you seriously entertain the idea that without the observer there is no reality? Which observer? Any observer? Is a fly an observer? Is a star an observer? Was there no reality in the universe before 109 B.C. when life began? Or are you the observer? Then there is no reality to the world after you are dead? I know a number of otherwise respectable physicists who have bought life insurance."

"Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize."

"We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work."

"A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven."

"The chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off-chance that it is in another direction — a direction obvious from an unfashionable view of field theory — who will find it? Only someone who has sacrificed himself by teaching himself quantum electrodynamics from a peculiar and unfashionable point of view; one that he may have to invent for himself."

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

"I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it."

"Energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right."

"Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation."

"There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. … It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it; other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can — if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong — to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition. In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another."

"We've learned from experience that the truth will out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science."

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool."

"All experiments in psychology are not of this [cargo cult] type, however. For example there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on — with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train rats to go to the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe they were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go to the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using — not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or of being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science."

"And then there's a kind of saying that you don't understand it, meaning "I don't believe it. It's too crazy. It's the kind of thing, I'm just... I'm not going to accept it."... This kind, I hope you'll come along with me, and you'll have to accept it, because it's the way nature works. If you want to know the way nature works... We looked at it, carefully... That's the way it looks! You don't like it? Go somewhere else... to another universe where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I can't help it! OK? If I'm going to tell you honestly what the world looks like to... human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand it, I can only tell you what it looks like, and I cannot make it innocent. ...I'm not going to simplify it, eh? I'm not going to fake it. I'm not going to... tell you it's something like a ball bearing on a spring. It isn't."

"All right. I already see you turning off. I can see you say you don't understand me. You can't understand that it could be chance. "I don't like it!" Tough! I don't like it either, but that's the way it is! OK? I don't understand it either. ..."It must be that Nature knows that it's going to go up or down." No, it must not be that nature knows! We are not to tell Nature what she's gotta be! That's what we found out. Every time we take a guess as how she's got to be, and go and measure... She's clever. She's always got better imagination than we have, and she finds a cleverer way to do it than we have thought of. And in this particular case, the clever way to do it is by probability, by odds. ...[L]ight works by probability."

"The question of whether or not, when you see something, you see only the light or you see the thing you're looking at, is one of those dopey philosophical things that an ordinary person has no difficulty with. Even the most profound philosopher, when sitting, eating his dinner, hasn't any difficulty in making out that what he looks at perhaps might be only the light from the steak, but it still implies the existence of the steak, which he is able to lift by the fork to his mouth. The philosophers that were unable to make that analysis and that idea, have fallen by the wayside through hunger!"

"Tell your son to stop trying to fill your head with science — for to fill your heart with love is enough!"

"We always have had ... a great deal of difficulty in understanding the world view that quantum mechanics represents. At least I do, because I'm an old enough man that I haven't got to the point that this stuff is obvious to me. Okay, I still get nervous with it. And therefore, some of the younger students ... you know how it always is, every new idea, it takes a generation or two until it becomes obvious that there's no real problem. It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem."

"Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it's a wonderful problem, because it doesn't look so easy."

"One of the miseries of life is that everybody names things a little bit wrong, and so it makes a little bit harder to understand things than it would have been if they had been named differently."

"I took this stuff I got out of your [O-ring] seal and I put it in ice water, and I discovered that when you put some pressure on it for a while and then undo it it doesn't stretch back. It stays the same dimension. In other words, for a few seconds at least, and more seconds than that, there is no resilience in this particular material when it is at a temperature of 32 degrees. I believe that has some significance for our problem."

"The Quantum Universe has a quotation from me in every chapter — but it's a damn good book anyway."

"There are 1011 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."

"I do feel strongly that this is nonsense! ... So perhaps I could entertain future historians by saying I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. ... I don't like it that they're not calculating anything. ... why are the masses of the various particles such as quarks what they are? All these numbers ... have no explanations in these string theories – absolutely none! ... I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, “Well, it might be true.” For example, the theory requires ten dimensions. Well, maybe there's a way of wrapping up six of the dimensions. Yes, that's all possible mathematically, but why not seven? When they write their equation, the equation should decide how many of these things get wrapped up, not the desire to agree with experiment. In other words, there's no reason whatsoever in superstring theory that it isn't eight out of the ten dimensions that get wrapped up and that the result is only two dimensions, which would be completely in disagreement with experience. So the fact that it might disagree with experience is very tenuous, it doesn't produce anything."

"God was always invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out."

"I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."

"This dying is boring."

"What I cannot create, I do not understand. ...Know how to solve every problem that has been solved."

"You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!"

"[I call myself] an atheist. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this."

"Einstein was a giant. His head was in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground. But those of us who are not that tall have to choose!"

"One of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before. But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium. This committee had men like Compton and Tolman and Smyth and Urey and Rabi and Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they'd ask me questions and talk about it. In these discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there's this other possibility we have to consider against it. So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn't repeat and emphasize his point. Finally at the end, Tolman, who's the chairman, would say, "Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it's true that Compton's argument is the best of all, and now we have to go ahead." It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best -- summing it all up -- without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed."

"Physics is to mathematics what sex is to masturbation."

"When you're thinking about something that you don't understand, you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion. It's a very difficult and unhappy business. And so most of the time you're rather unhappy, actually, with this confusion. You can't penetrate this thing. Now, is the confusion's because we're all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid working against this, trying to figure out [how] to put the two sticks together to reach the banana and we can't quite make it, the idea? And I get this feeling all the time that I'm an ape trying to put two sticks together, so I always feel stupid. Once in a while, though, the sticks go together on me and I reach the banana."

"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy — and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter."

"Of course if we make good things, it is not only to the credit of science; it is also to the credit of the moral choice which led us to good work. Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it. Such power has evident value — even though the power may be negated by what one does with it.I learned a way of expressing this common human problem on a trip to Honolulu. In a Buddhist temple there, the man in charge explained a little bit about the Buddhist religion for tourists, and then ended his talk by telling them he had something to say to them that they would never forget — and I have never forgotten it. It was a proverb of the Buddhist religion:To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.What then, is the value of the key to heaven? It is true that if we lack clear instructions that enable us to determine which is the gate to heaven and which the gate to hell, the key may be a dangerous object to use.But the key obviously has value: how can we enter heaven without it?"

"The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man."

"I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves mountains of molecules each stupidly minding its own business trillions apart yet forming white surf in unison.Ages on ages before any eyes could see year after year thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what? On a dead planet with no life to entertain.Never at rest tortured by energy wasted prodigiously by the sun poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar. Deep in the sea all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves and a new dance starts.Growing in size and complexity living things masses of atoms DNA, protein dancing a pattern ever more intricate.Out of the cradle onto dry land here it is standing: atoms with consciousness; matter with curiosity.Stands at the sea, wonders at wondering: I a universe of atoms an atom in the universe."

"Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers, you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age."

"The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure — that it is possible to live and not know. But I don't know whether everyone realizes this is true. Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle. Permit us to question — to doubt, that's all — not to be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget the importance of this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained. Here lies a responsibility to society."

"If we take everything into account — not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn't know — then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know."

"We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. ...It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming "This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!" we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before. ...It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations."

"Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected. ... The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth”."

"If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied."

"If an apple is magnified to the size of the earth, then the atoms in the apple are approximately the size of the original apple."

"What do we mean by “understanding” something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. Even if we knew every rule, however, we might not be able to understand why a particular move is made in the game, merely because it is too complicated and our minds are limited. If you play chess you must know that it is easy to learn all the rules, and yet it is often very hard to select the best move or to understand why a player moves as he does. So it is in nature, only much more so."

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

"Incidentally, psychoanalysis is not a science: it is at best a medical process, and perhaps even more like witch-doctoring. It has a theory as to what causes disease—lots of different “spirits,” etc. The witch doctor has a theory that a disease like malaria is caused by a spirit which comes into the air; it is not cured by shaking a snake over it, but quinine does help malaria. So, if you are sick, I would advise that you go to the witch doctor because he is the man in the tribe who knows the most about the disease; on the other hand, his knowledge is not science. Psychoanalysis has not been checked carefully by experiment."

"A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the Earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange arrays of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!"

"It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. It is not that way."

"We cannot define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each other, one saying to the other, "You don't know what you are talking about!". The second one says, "What do you mean by know? What do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you?""

"So, ultimately, in order to understand nature it may be necessary to have a deeper understanding of mathematical relationships. But the real reason is that the subject is enjoyable, and although we humans cut nature up in different ways, and we have different courses in different departments, such compartmentalization is really artificial, and we should take our intellectual pleasures where we find them."

"Finally, we make some remarks on why linear systems are so important. The answer is simple: because we can solve them! So most of the time we solve linear problems. Second (and most important), it turns out that the fundamental laws of physics are often linear. The Maxwell equations for the laws of electricity are linear, for example. The great laws of quantum mechanics turn out, so far as we know, to be linear equations. That is why we spend so much time on linear equations: because if we understand linear equations, we are ready, in principle, to understand a lot of things."

"There are many interesting phenomena ... which involve a mixture of physical phenomena and physiological processes, and the full appreciation of natural phenomena, as we see them, must go beyond physics in the usual sense. We make no apologies for making these excursions into other fields, because the separation of fields, as we have emphasized, is merely a human convenience, and an unnatural thing. Nature is not interested in our separations, and many of the interesting phenomena bridge the gaps between fields."

"In fact, the science of thermodynamics began with an analysis, by the great engineer Sadi Carnot, of the problem of how to build the best and most efficient engine, and this constitutes one of the few famous cases in which engineering has contributed to fundamental physical theory. Another example that comes to mind is the more recent analysis of information theory by Claude Shannon. These two analyses, incidentally, turn out to be closely related."

"So far as we know, all the fundamental laws of physics, like Newton's equations, are reversible."

"From a long view of the history of mankind — seen from, say, ten thousand years from now — there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade."

"The physicist needs a facility in looking at problems from several points of view. The exact analysis of real physical problems is usually quite complicated, and any particular physical situation may be too complicated to analyze directly by solving the differential equation. But one can still get a very good idea of the behavior of a system if one has some feel for the character of the solution in different circumstances. Ideas such as the field lines, capacitance, resistance, and inductance are, for such purposes, very useful. ... On the other hand, none of the heuristic models, such as field lines, is really adequate and accurate for all situations. There is only one precise way of presenting the laws, and that is by means of differential equations. They have the advantage of being fundamental and, so far as we know, precise. If you have learned the differential equations you can always go back to them. There is nothing to unlearn."

"The same equations have the same solutions"

"It requires a much higher degree of imagination to understand the electromagnetic field than to understand invisible angels. ... I speak of the E and B fields and wave my arms and you may imagine that I can see them ... [but] I cannot really make a picture that is even nearly like the true waves."

"Whenever you see a sweeping statement that a tremendous amount can come from a very small number of assumptions, you always find that it is false. There are usually a large number of implied assumptions that are far from obvious if you think about them sufficiently carefully."

"There are those who are going to be disappointed when no life is found on other planets. Not I — I want to be reminded and delighted and surprised once again, through interplanetary exploration, with the infinite variety and novelty of phenomena that can be generated from such simple principles. The test of science is its ability to predict. Had you never visited the earth, could you predict the thunderstorms, the volcanoes, the ocean waves, the auroras, and the colorful sunset? A salutary lesson it will be when we learn of all that goes on on each of those dead planets — those eight or ten balls, each agglomerated from the same dust cloud and each obeying exactly the same laws of physics."

"The "paradox" is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality "ought to be.""

"I hope ... that you will find someday that, after all, it isn't as horrible as it looks."

"Perhaps you will not only have some appreciation of this culture; it is even possible that you may want to join in the greatest adventure that the human mind has ever begun."

"On the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics."

"A person talks in such generalities that everyone can understand him and it's considered to be some deep philosophy. However, I would like to be very rather more special and I would like to be understood in an honest way, rather than in a vague way."

"This is the key of modern science and is the beginning of the true understanding of nature. This idea. That to look at the things, to record the details, and to hope that in the information thus obtained, may lie a clue to one or another of a possible theoretical interpretation."

"The next question was — what makes planets go around the sun? At the time of Kepler some people answered this problem by saying that there were angels behind them beating their wings and pushing the planets around an orbit. As you will see, the answer is not very far from the truth. The only difference is that the angels sit in a different direction and their wings push inward."

"If we have confidence in a law, then if something appears to be wrong it can suggest to us another phenomenon."

"It is impossible, by the way, when picking one example of anything, to avoid picking one which is atypical in some sense."

"Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry."

"[T]he total amount that a physicist knows is very little. He has only to remember the rules to get him from one place to another..."

"...Dirac discovered the correct laws for relativity quantum mechanics simply by guessing the equation. The method of guessing the equation seems to be a pretty effective way of guessing new laws. This shows again that mathematics is a deep way of expressing nature, and any attempt to express nature in philosophical principles, or in seat-of-the-pants mechanical feelings, is not an efficient way. ...It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do? So I have often made the hypotheses that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities."

"chapter 2, “The Relation of Mathematics to Physics,” p. 58; video"

"To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature. ... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in."

"Mathematics is not just a language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning. It's like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning. It's, in fact, a big collection of the results of some person's careful thought and reasoning. By mathematics, it is possible to connect one statement to another."

"Now we have a problem. We can deduce, often, from one part of physics like the law of gravitation, a principle which turns out to be much more valid than the derivation. This doesn't happen in mathematics, that the theorems come out in places where they're not supposed to be!"

"So we have these wide principles which sweep across all the different laws, and if one takes too seriously its derivations, and feels that this is only valid because this [assumed more fundamental principle] is valid, you cannot understand the interconnections of the different branches of physics. Some day, when physics is complete, then maybe with this kind of argument we'll know all the laws, then we can start with some axioms (and no doubt somebody will figure out a particular way of doing it) and then all the deductions will be made. But while we don't know all the laws, we can use some to make guesses at theorems which extend beyond the proof."

"So in order to understand the physics one must always have a neat balance and contain in his head all of the various propositions and their interelationships because the laws often extend beyond the range of their deductions. This will only have no importance when all the laws are known."

"For those who want some proof that physicists are human, the proof is in the idiocy of all the different units which they use for measuring energy."

"Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there."

"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

"Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get "down the drain", into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that."

"In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it."

"In general, we look for a new law by the following process: First we guess it. Then we – now don't laugh, that's really true. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what, if this is right, if this law that we guessed is right, to see what it would imply. And then we compare the computation results to nature, or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn't make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. That's all there is to it."

"Nature's imagination far surpasses our own."

"It is not unscientific to make a guess, although many people who are not in science think it is. Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers — because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said “I don’t think there are flying saucers”. So my antagonist said, “Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it’s impossible?” “No”, I said, “I can’t prove it’s impossible. It’s just very unlikely”. At that he said, “You are very unscientific. If you can’t prove it impossible then how can you say that it’s unlikely?” But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. To define what I mean, I might have said to him, "Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence." It is just more likely. That is all."

"Therefore psychologically we must keep all the theories in our heads, and every theoretical physicist who is any good knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics."

"One of the most important things in this 'guess — compute consequences — compare with experiment' business is to know when you are right. It is possible to know when you are right way ahead of checking all the consequences. You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. It is always easy when you have made a guess, and done two or three little calculations to make sure that it is not obviously wrong, to know that it is right. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right — at least if you have any experience — because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in. Your guess is, in fact, that something is very simple. If you cannot see immediately that it is wrong, and it is simpler than it was before, then it is right. The inexperienced, the crackpots, and people like that, make guesses that are simple, but you can immediately see that they are wrong, so that does not count. Others, the inexperienced students, make guesses that are very complicated, and it sort of looks as if it is all right, but I know it is not true because the truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought."

"That was the beginning and the idea seemed so obvious to me that I fell deeply in love with it. And, like falling in love with a woman, it is only possible if you don't know too much about her, so you cannot see her faults. The faults will become apparent later, but after the love is strong enough to hold you to her. So, I was held to this theory, in spite of all the difficulties, by my youthful enthusiasm."

"[T]he Mayan[s]... had a scheme for predicting... when Venus was a morning... or . ...[T]hey had a rule for... making corrections and... had a very good way of predicting when Venus was coming up. ...Suppose that the professors (the priests in those days) ...were giving a lecture ...to explain ... these wonderful predictions ...He would say, "What we're doing is counting the days, just like you're putting nuts in a pod." ...[The students] did not know a quick and tricky way to add 365 x 8. ...These students were learning ...the laws of arithmetic. Something... to us now, because we have public, free, general education, almost everybody has to... learn... by a tricky scheme... The waitress, just an ordinary person, in two minutes does that. How..? ...She's ...counting ...415 pennies ...then ...287 more ...and telling you how many pennies you would have got if you counted ...beginning to the end. But it's highly educated and very trained to... do that... quickly. ...In the 14th century [it was] mathematicians... who could do that."

"What the students are taught ...now ...about physics ...The numbers are much bigger... so enormous you can't count them directly, and so we've invented a fantastic array of tricks and gimmicks for putting together the numbers... without actually doing it. ...We don't actually ...draw 7,000 arrows and find... the end point... just like we don't actually count 415 pennies... We do it by... the tricks of mathematics, and that's all. So... we're not going to worry about that. ...[Y]ou don't have to know about mathematics. All you have to know is what it is... tricky ways of doing something which would be laborious otherwise."

"[I]n the years we have developed enormous abilities in mathematics and it takes a long time to train the students, and so they're very highly educated in that, but if you ask them why. Now we go back to the Mayans... [W]hy the rule? ...They don't know. They don't understand... The more accurately they can do it... adds nothing to their understanding... The student who is able to make these calculations of Venus... Mars, the Sun, the eclipses and everything else is a super priest, doesn't know why, any better. And if you were to explain that it was nothing but counting days, you would be reduced to the truth... and to an honest statement that he doesn't understand it."

"I don't know about philosophy of Mayans. We have very little information due to the efficiency of the Spanish es and... mostly their priests, who burned all the books... hundreds of thousands of books, and there's three left... [O]ne of them has this Venus calculation... Just imagine our civilization reduced to three books... left by accident."

"That's called monochromatic light, light of one color. ...I'm going to discuss all my phenomena for a while with light of one color, because it's simpler"

"If we make an instrument that can detect light, that's as sensitive as it can possibly be made. ...This ...is called a photomultiplier."

"Amplify. ...[W]hen we have a device like this and we put it in the dark... it goes click, click... Every once in a while a light particle comes in: a photon. This is a particle in every sense. ...[I]f you have a very weak light... and... you put two cells out, and there's just a few... [photons] coming, then it goes on one or the other... the particle is either here or there. ...It is particles, in every way, whenever you can detect it. ...If we were ten times more sensitive to light, then in the dark, we would see... little flashes, little tiny... dots of light, the nerves would go off just like the photomultiplier, in spots. But the human eye is not quite that sensitive, and it takes 5 or 6 ...photons ...to make one nerve fiber go off. ...So we cannot detect, with the eye, light quite low enough to notice the fact that it comes in the form of rain drops."

"For each reflection you make an arrow. This arrow... for the reflection from front surface, and this arrow... from the back surface... and... you tie the arrows together this way... [Y]ou put the tail of the other one on the head of that one... and you put these two arrows together by this rule, and you look at the vector sum,] how far off you've come from the end... You count the number of beans you put in the barrel, I mean you make these pictures. ...[T]hen you ask, "How big is this circle [whose radius is the vector sum of the front and back arrows] in area?" And that area represents the probability... If the circle area is big, then you get a high probability, if... small, you get a small probability."

"[T]he size of the arrow depends upon the... materials... [Y]ou make an arrow, and depending upon the time it takes for the light to get from the source to... where you... count it, you turn that arrow like a clock... round, round, depending on how much time it takes... every second it goes around... 1 followed by 15 zeros [10^{15}] times... It doesn't take light very long to get from the source... but it still turns a lot of times... It's like the roulette wheel and just the moment it hits the counter, it happens to be setting at some angle... It can look like a small angle when you're done, but you had to turn... like a clock hand after 25 years... it can start at 2:00 and end up at 2:15. ...That's ...the arrow for the first surface. Now the arrow for the second surface. Rule: same as the arrow for the first surface... [rotated] in the... opposite direction... When you go from air to glass it's one way... glass to air you change it around. ...You start this way for the second surface, and you turn this [arrow]... for the time, and when you get finished with this roulette wheel in the second one it comes out so. And now you add them together... and that's the laws of... light, and that will tell you whether it reflects or doesn't reflect."

"The probability of an event is always... the square of an amplitude... the size [area] of a circle corresponding to an arrow. An arrow is called an amplitude. For every event you calculate an amplitude (which is an arrow on a plane). The probability is the area corresponding to that arrow."

"[T]his rule explains several of the ordinary phenomena... such as angle of incidence equals angle of reflection, and , that light bends... from air to water, and travels in straight lines... It's all hidden in that one rule."

"The idea of quantum mechanics that I want to describe now is a positive thing. It's a way that we actually use to make calculations and understand nature. Excuse me, to make calculations! We really don't understand it very well... Understanding real nature, we are unable to do."

"What I would like to do now... is to... try to tell you what actually what physicists do when they make calculations, so they can predict... correctly the probabilities of events for all the experiments, at least in a certain range where they know some things about electrons and photons... and light and matter and chemistry and ordinary phenomena not involving gravitation in detail or nuclear phenomena in d... Well, actually today... nuclear phenomena are now probably under control too."

"I start with the simplest phenomena... the first... is the phenomena of light. Early on, when light was being investigated by Newton, he thought that the light that came into the eye was like a rain of particles, like rain drops... [M]ore light meant more particles... and one kind of color light would one kind of rain drop and another... would be a different kind of rain drop... over the whole spectrum... and if we would some day have sufficiently delicate instruments, we would presumably discover that it was like a pattering... [I]t would go click, click, click when the particles came raining down. ...He also discovered ...the light from the soap bubbles or light from thin films... The brightness of reflection... depends on how thick the film is. As the film gets thicker and thinner, it gets brighter and darker. That was hard for him to understand from the point of view of particles. Finally a theory of waves was invented which explained that very easily... until we measured light very precisely... and lo and behold, to our horror, it behaved like particles."

"The different colored light... correspond to particles of different energy, that is energy comes in lumps and these lumps have different sizes for the different colored light. [I]t was hard... virtually impossible to understand... that the reflection of light... from layers of different thicknesses varies by using particles... [T]hat makes a problem which I want to describe..."

"If we try to say how big a photon is, or how it's spread out, or what it looks like, we're going to get into some difficulty with some experiment. It isn't going to behave that way you'd expect. ...[I]t's going to be impossible for me to tell you how big a photon is, where it is... Nevertheless... I'll tell you a series of crazy rules by which you can tell exactly what will happen in any experiment with photons... without ever being able to say what a photon looks like... in the sense of some sort of model of waves in space. ...And so to make a complete theory, we cannot do it with a model. We can only make an incomplete theory and what my purpose is today is to tell you the complete theory, not the incomplete approximations..."

"[T]o make it easy... we'll suppose that all the light... is exactly one color... At night... they have these yellow street lights... that's a sodium light... and that emits light all of one color... Then take the soap bubble and blow it at night.. and then you'll see the bands... [You] can take... very thin glass... you can see very thin bands, even in a reasonable size thickness... [S]uppose then that we do have light like from sodium-vapor so that all the light... is always photons of exactly the same energy. We call it monochromatic, one color light."

"There has never been a satisfactory model of the very simple process of reflection of light from thin surfaces or... for any other phenomenon. Satisfactory in the old fashioned classical view. A logical hocus-pocus has to be done quantum mechanically in order in order to describe these things... This is another example of the type of difficulty when you try to reason in a straight forward... in a classical way about a simple phenomenon."

"Finally, I must tell you what the arrow is for the net result. When a thing can happen in alternative ways you do what we call "add the arrows"... I know how to add numbers. How do you add arrows? The rule is... you simply put one arrow head on the tail of the other... I just draw the second arrow off from the first one... exactly parallel... it's drawn the same, but it's centered, it's moved... it's tied one onto the other, head to tail, and the result, it's supposed to be the sum. The adding is this net arrow that you would get, from where you started [from the beginning of the first arrow] to where you ended [at the end of the second arrow]. The way of thinking of it, that is rather nice, is to think of each arrow as indicating the direction of a step to be taken. If we take a step, on this plane, this way [the distance and direction of arrow #1] and then take a step that way [the distance and direction of arrow #2] and we say, where did we actually move? We could have done it all in one step, this one [from the beginning of arrow #1 to the end of arrow #2]. So this is the one step which is the equivalent of the succession of the other steps. Adding means putting together steps... The square of the [summation] arrow determines the probability of the reflection."

"So there are two aspects of an amplitude. An amplitude is a sort of two dimensional thing and therefor you can represent it... on a plane as an arrow. So an amplitude is a physical thing, which also is identical, we... make it very equal by using three lines [ ≡ ] instead of two [ = ], the same as these arrows that I've been talking about on a plane, and that's, by the way, for those that know mathematics, that can be equivalent to representing everything by s. You can do it algebraically, in other words, not just by drawing the arrows.AMPLITUDE ≡ ARROW ( ≡ COMPLEX NUMBERS)"

"I want you to think of an arrow in another way... Here is an arrow... Now if we multiply, you have to think in a different way than for adding. There's an arrow... and imagine there's a [different] standard arrow... always horizontal and has unit length, that's the standard unit arrow. Now suppose I have a second arrow and I want to multiply them... [W]hat do I mean by multiplying? ...Let me first describe this [first] arrow [number 1] ...compare it to the standard arrow and ask for the relation... You can turn... and shrink it. So an arrow describes... how much I have to shrink the standard, and how much I have to rotate it to get the arrow I want. Now multiplication of arrows means that you do these rotations and shrinkings in succession. ...Now if I take this arrow [#2] ...this red [arrow #3] is the product [of arrow #1 and arrow #2].... It bears the same geometric relationship to the purple arrow [#2] as the blue one [arrow number 1] bears to the black one [standard arrow]. In other words it's supposed to be turned the same degree and shrunk the same degree as the blue one [arrow #2] is to the black [standard] one. In other words this [arrow #1] is to that [standard arrow], as this [arrow #3] arrow is to that [arrow #2]."

"That's the way multiplication works you know, with numbers it's the same. ...That's why we call it multiplication. ...Suppose you wanted to say that 6 = 3 x 2, which is true. But let me look at it a different way... This is the analog [to arrow multiplication]... The 2 bears a relation, 2 is not a number from this point of view. It's a relationship. It bears a relation to 1. It's an expansion of 1. How much do you have to expand 1? ...Yeah, double. ...That's what you do to 3 to get 6. That's why... it's called multiplication, because we do to this arrow [#2], what we had to do to the original one [standard arrow] to get the blue one [arrow #1]."

"People are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don't give us a chance to tell them anything about what we know pretty well. They always want to know the things we don't know."

"Will you understand what I'm going to tell you? ... No, you're not going to be able to understand it. ... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does."

"While I am describing to you how Nature works, you won't understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that."

"The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you accept Nature as She is — absurd."

"The scale of light can be described by numbers — called the frequency — and as the numbers get higher, the light goes from red to blue to ultraviolet. We can't see ultraviolet light, but it can affect photographic plates. It's still light — only the number is different."

"Light is something like raindrops — each little lump of light is called a photon — and if the light is all one color, all the "raindrops" are the same."

"Every instrument that has been designed to be sensitive enough to detect weak light has always ended up discovering that the same thing: light is made of particles."

"When a photon comes down, it interacts with electrons throughout the glass, not just on the surface. The photon and electrons do some kind of dance, the net result of which is the same as if the photon hit only on the surface."

"You will have to brace yourselves for this — not because it is difficult to understand, but because it is absolutely ridiculous: All we do is draw little arrows on a piece of paper — that's all!"

"It is to be emphasized that no matter how many [amplitude] arrows we draw, add, or multiply, our objective is to calculate a single final arrow for the event. Mistakes are often made by physics students at first because they do not keep this important point in mind. They work for so long analyzing events involving a single photon that they begin to think that the arrow is somehow associated with the photon [rather than with the event]."

"Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi, or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed His pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out — without putting it in secretly!"

"Why are the theories of physics so similar in their structure? There are a number of possibilities. The first is the limited imagination of physicists: when we see a new phenomenon, we try to fit it into the framework we already have—until we have made enough experiments, we don't know that it doesn't work. So when some fool physicist gives a lecture at UCLA in 1983 and says, “This is the way it works, and look how wonderfully similar the theories are,” it's not because Nature is really similar; it's because the physicists have only been able to think of the same damn thing, over and over again. Another possibility is that it is the same damn thing over and over again—that Nature has only one way of doing things, and She repeats her story from time to time. A third possibility is that things look similar because they are aspects of the same thing—some larger picture underneath, from which things can be broken into parts that look different, like fingers on the same hand. Many physicists are working very hard trying to put together a grand picture that unifies everything into one super-duper model. It's a delightful game, but at present time none of the speculators agree with any of the other speculators as to what the grand picture is."

"There were certain things I didn't like, such as tipping. I thought we should be paid more, and not have to have any tips. But when I proposed that to the boss, I got nothing but laughter. She told everybody, "Richard doesn't want his tips, hee, hee, hee; he doesn't want his tips, ha, ha, ha." The world is full of this kind of dumb smart-alec who doesn't understand anything."

"I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!"

"The electron is a theory we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real."

"[John] von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of von Neumann's advice. It's made me a very happy man ever since. But it was von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!"

"I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all smashed — and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless. But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead."

"And this is medicine?"

"And then I thought to myself, "You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it's impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!"It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing."

"One time I was in the men's room of the bar and there was a guy at the urinal. He was kind of drunk, and said to me in a mean-sounding voice, "I don't like your face. I think I'll push it in."I was scared green. I replied in an equally mean voice, "Get out of my way, or I'll pee right through ya!""

"Finally, I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything."

"I have to understand the world, you see."

"While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. I worked much harder at it, and got to a point where I could go around in taxis and do things. I took lessons from a Japanese man every day for an hour. One day he was teaching me the word for "see." "All right," he said. "You want to say, 'May I see your garden?' What do you say?" I made up a sentence with the word that I had just learned. "No, no!" he said. "When you say to someone, 'Would you like to see my garden?' you use the first 'see.' But when you want to see someone else's garden, you must use another 'see,' which is more polite." "Would you like to glance at my lousy garden?" is essentially what you're saying in the first case, but when you want to look at the other fella's garden, you have to say something like, "May I observe your gorgeous garden?" So there's two different words you have to use. Then he gave me another one: "You go to a temple, and you want to look at the gardens..." I made up a sentence, this time with the polite "see." "No, no!" he said. "In the temple, the gardens are much more elegant. So you have to say something that would be equivalent to 'May I hang my eyes on your most exquisite gardens?" Three or four different words for one idea, because when I'm doing it, it's miserable; when you're doing it, it's elegant. I was learning Japanese mainly for technical things, so I decided to check if this same problem existed among the scientists. At the institute the next day, I said to the guys in the office, "How would I say in Japanese, 'I solve the Dirac Equation'?" They said such-and-so. "OK. Now I want to say, 'Would you solve the Dirac Equation?' — how do I say that?" "Well, you have to use a different word for 'solve,' " they say. "Why?" I protested. "When I solve it, I do the same damn thing as when you solve it!" "Well, yes, but it's a different word — it's more polite." I gave up. I decided that wasn't the language for me, and stopped learning Japanese."

"Since then I never pay attention to anything by "experts". I calculate everything myself."

"I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that's the end of you."

"I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It's difficult to describe because it's an emotion. It's analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there's a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run "behind the scenes" by the same organization, the same physical laws. It's an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It's a feeling of awe — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe."

"This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There's a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!"

"Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools—guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus—THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!"

"On the contrary, it's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance — gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood — so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!"

"So I have just one wish for you—the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom."

"It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?" We have also found that certification criteria used in Flight Readiness Reviews often develop a gradually decreasing strictness. The argument that the same risk was flown before without failure is often accepted as an argument for the safety of accepting it again. Because of this, obvious weaknesses are accepted again and again, sometimes without a sufficiently serious attempt to remedy them, or to delay a flight because of their continued presence."

"If we are to replace standard numerical probability usage with engineering judgment, why do we find such an enormous disparity between the management estimate and the judgment of the engineers? It would appear that, for whatever purpose, be it for internal or external consumption, the management of NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product, to the point of fantasy."

"The acceptance and success of these flights is taken as evidence of safety. But erosion and blow-by are not what the design expected. They are warnings that something is wrong. The equipment is not operating as expected, and therefore there is a danger that it can operate with even wider deviations in this unexpected and not thoroughly understood way. The fact that this danger did not lead to a catastrophe before is no guarantee that it will not the next time, unless it is completely understood. When playing Russian roulette the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next. The origin and consequences of the erosion and blow-by were not understood. They did not occur equally on all flights and all joints; sometimes more, and sometimes less. Why not sometime, when whatever conditions determined it were right, still more leading to catastrophe? In spite of these variations from case to case, officials behaved as if they understood it, giving apparently logical arguments to each other often depending on the "success" of previous flights."

"There was no way, without full understanding, that one could have confidence that conditions the next time might not produce erosion three times more severe than the time before. Nevertheless, officials fooled themselves into thinking they had such understanding and confidence, in spite of the peculiar variations from case to case. A mathematical model was made to calculate erosion. This was a model based not on physical understanding but on empirical curve fitting."

"Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty of the projects. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources. For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

"I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. ... There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts."

"You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. ... I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."

"My mother ... had a wonderful sense of humor, and I learned from her that the highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion."

"Doubting the great Descartes ... was a reaction I learned from my father: Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, "Is it reasonable?""

"The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity — and until they do (and find the cure), all ideal plans will fall into quicksand."

"The only way to have real success in science, the field I'm familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what's good and what's bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty."

"The most important thing I found out from [my father] is that if you asked any question and pursued it deeply enough, then at the end there was a glorious discovery of a general and beautiful kind."

"I don't like honors. ... I've already got the prize: the prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it. Those are the real things."

"Well, we're getting a little philosophical and serious, ok? Let's go back to what we're doing. One day we look at a map and this capital is K-Y-Z-Y-L and we decided it would be fun to go there because it's so obscure and peculiar. It's a game. It's not serious. It doesn't involve some deep philosophical point of view about authority or anything. It's just the fun of having an adventure to try to go to a land that we'd never heard of, that we knew was an independent country once, no longer an independent country, find out what it's like. And discover as we went along that nobody went there for a long time and it's isolated made it more interesting. But, you know, many explorers liked to go to places that are unusual. And, it's only for the fun of it. I don't go for this philosophical interpretation of "our deeper understanding of what we’re doing." We haven't any deep understanding of what we're doing. If we tried to understand what we're doing, we'd go nutty."

"I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything. There are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask "Why are we here?" I might think about it a little bit, and if I can't figure it out then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me."

"People say to me, "Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?" No, I'm not. I'm just looking to find out more about the world and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it; that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is!... And therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn't pre-decide what it is we are trying to do except to find out more about it... My interest in science is to simply find out more about the world."

"Jiry, don't worry about anything. Go out and have a good time."

"The third aspect of my subject is that of science as a method of finding things out. This method is based on the principle that observation is the judge of whether something is so or not. All other aspects and characteristics of science can be understood directly when we understand that observation is the ultimate and final judge of the truth of an idea. But "prove" used in this way really means "test," in the same way that a hundred-proof alcohol is a test of the alcohol, and for people today the idea really should be translated as, "The exception tests the rule." Or, put another way, "The exception proves that the rule is wrong." That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong."

"Some people say, "How can you live without knowing?" I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know."

"Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true."

"It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man."

"It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing — atoms with curiosity — that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders. Well, these scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate."

"The fact that you are not sure means that it is possible that there is another way someday."

"I believe in limited government. I believe that government should be limited in many ways, and what I am going to emphasize is only an intellectual thing. I don't want to talk about everything at the same time. Let's take a small piece, an intellectual thing.No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literary or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race."

"The first one has to do with whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. And my trick that I use is very easy. If you ask him intelligent questions — that is, penetrating, interested, honest, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questions — then he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naive questions. If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn't know the answer, if he is an honest man."

"Anyway, I have to argue about flying saucers on the beach with people, you know. And I was interested in this: they keep arguing that it is possible. And that's true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it's possible or not but whether it's going on or not."

"It's a great game to try to look at the past, at an unscientific era, look at something there, and say have we got the same thing now, and where is it? So I would like to amuse myself with this game. First, we take witch doctors. The witch doctor says he knows how to cure. There are spirits inside which are trying to get out. ... Put a snakeskin on and take quinine from the bark of a tree. The quinine works. He doesn't know he's got the wrong theory of what happens. If I'm in the tribe and I'm sick, I go to the witch doctor. He knows more about it than anyone else. But I keep trying to tell him he doesn't know what he's doing and that someday when people investigate the thing freely and get free of all his complicated ideas they'll learn much better ways of doing it. Who are the witch doctors? Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, of course."

"If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell "friend," I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend."

"Suppose two politicians are running for president, and one goes through the farm section and is asked, "What are you going to do about the farm question?" And he knows right away - bang, bang, bang. Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through. "What are you going to do on the farm problem?" "Well, I don't know. I used to be a general, and I don't know anything about farming. But it seems to me it must be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say that they know how to solve the farm problem. And it must be a hard problem. So the way I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it, and then to come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it. Now, I can't tell you ahead of time what solution, but I can give you some of the principles I'll try to use - not to make things difficult for individual farmers, if there are any special problems we will have to have some way to take care of them," etc., etc., etc. Now such a man would never get anywhere in this country, I think. It's never been tried, anyway. This is in the attitude of mind of the populace, that they have to have an answer and that a man who gives an answer is better than a man who gives no answer, when the real fact of the matter is, in most cases, it is the other way around. And the result of this of course is that the politician must give an answer. And the result of this is that political promises can never be kept. It is a mechanical fact; it is impossible. The result of that is that nobody believes campaign promises. And the result of that is a general disparaging of politics, a general lack of respect for the people who are trying to solve problems, and so forth. It's all generated from the very beginning (maybe - this is a simple analysis). It's all generated, maybe, by the fact that the attitude of the populace is to try to find the answer instead of trying to find a man who has a way of getting at the answer."

"I've always been rather very one-sided about the science, and when I was younger, I concentrated almost all my effort on it. I didn't have time to learn, and I didn't have much patience for what's called the humanities; even though in the university there were humanities that you had to take, I tried my best to avoid somehow to learn anything and to work on it. It's only afterwards, when I've gotten older and more relaxed that I've spread out a little bit — I've learned to draw, and I read a little bit, but I'm really still a very one-sided person and don't know a great deal. I have a limited intelligence and I've used it in a particular direction."

"The remark which I read somewhere, that science is all right as long as it doesn't attack religion, was the clue I needed to understand the problem. As long as it doesn't attack religion it need not be paid attention to and nobody has to learn anything. So it can be cut off from society except for its applications, and thus be isolated. And then we have this terrible struggle to try to explain things to people who have no reason to want to know. But if they want to defend their own point of view, they will have to learn what yours is a little bit. So I suggest, maybe correctly and perhaps wrongly, that we are too polite."

"We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don't know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know."

"...I don't believe in the idea that there are a few peculiar people capable of understanding math and the rest of the world is normal. Math is a human discovery, and it's no more complicated than humans can understand. I had a calculus book once that said, "What one fool can do, another fool can." What we've been able to work out about nature may look abstract and threatening to someone who hasn't studied it, but it was fools who did it, and in the next generation, all the fools will understand it. There's a tendency to pomposity in all this, to make it all deep and profound..."

"...In that same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions and take the contrary propositions and look at the world--and you can't tell which is right. Sure, people were awed because he had the courage to take on these great questions, but it doesn't do any good to have the courage if you can't get anywhere with the question..."

"I don't know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

"D’Arline,I adore you, sweetheart. I know how much you like to hear that—but I don’t only write it because you like it—I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you. It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you—almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing. But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and what I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you—I always will love you. I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead—but I still want to comfort and take care of you—and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you—I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that together. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together—or learn Chinese—or getting a movie projector. Can’t I do something now. No. I am alone without you and you were the "idea-woman" and general instigator of all our wild adventures. When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn't have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true—you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else—but I want to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive. I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don’t want to be in my way. I’ll bet that you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I—I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone—but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.My darling wife, I do adore you.I love my wife. My wife is dead.RichP.S. Please excuse my not mailing this—but I don’t know your new address."

"[S]tudy hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible."

"The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. … No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it. You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself — it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are."

"Do not read so much, look about you and think of what you see there."

"Shut up and calculate!"

"Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."

"The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds."

"In the hands of a Feynman the [variational] technique works like a Latin charm; with ordinary mortals the result is a mixed bag."

"People often ask me why I became an economist. In college and before that, I tended toward mathematics and science. As a physics major at Caltech in the early 1960s, I was lucky to take the two-year sequence taught to freshmen and sophomores the one and only time by the great Richard Feynman. (To prove this, I have a signed and leather-bound copy of the notes from his course.) Feynman's approach was to skip the standard topics in physics and use with frontier material. That was partly why many of the faculty and graduate students attended the course. It also meant that I learned early on what it would mean to be an actual physicist, and I decided pretty quickly that I would not be a great one. In retrospect, it was fortunate that I learned this so soon, rather than having to wait until my senior year or, perhaps, even to graduate school."

"Richard Feynman became so exasperated [at the National Academy of Sciences] that he resigned his membership, saying that he saw no point in belonging to an organization that spent most of its time deciding who to let in."

"This verse is for Richard Feynman. He was not a simple simon."

"Richard Feynman has related that at a meeting of the American Physical Society, likely sometime in 1956, he was chatting with Onsager when a wild-eyed young man came up to them and said that he had solved the problem of superconductivity. ... As Feyman relates, he could not understand what the young man was saying and concluded that the fellow was probably crazy. ... Feynman believed that the young man was me. I am not sure whether or not this meeting actually occurred, but it might have."

"Feynman uses Dirac's notation to describe the quantum mechanics of stimulated emission. ... He applies that physics to several physical systems, including dye molecules. ... In this regard, Feynman could have predicted the existence of the tunable laser. Furthermore, Feynman made accessible Dirac's quantum notation via his thought experiments on two-slit interference with electrons."

"Feynman is the young American professor, half genius and half buffoon, who keeps all physicists and their children amused with his effervescent vitality. He has, however, as I have recently learned, a great deal more to him than that, and you may be interested in his story. The part of it with which I am concerned began when he arrived at Los Alamos; there he found and fell in love with a brilliant and beautiful girl, who was tubercular and had been exiled to New Mexico in the hope of stopping the disease. When Feynman arrived, things had got so bad that the doctors gave her only a year to live, but he determined to marry her and marry her he did; and for a year and a half, while working at full pressure on the Project, he nursed her and made her days cheerful. She died just before the end of the war."

"A truer description would have said that Feynman was all genius and all buffoon. The deep thinking and the joyful clowning were not separate parts of a split personality. He did not do his thinking on Monday and his clowning on Tuesday. He was thinking and clowning simultaneously."

"As soon as I arrived at Cornell, I became aware of Dick as the liveliest personality in our department. In many ways he reminded me of Frank Thompson. Dick was no poet and certainly no Communist. But he was like Frank in his loud voice, his quick mind, his intense interest in all kinds of things and people, his crazy jokes, and his disrespect for authority. I had a room in a student dormitory and sometimes around two o'clock in the morning I would wake up to the sound of a strange rhythm pulsating over the silent campus. That was Dick playing his bongo drums. Dick was also a profoundly original scientist. He refused to take anybody's word for anything. This meant that he was forced to rediscover or reinvent for himself almost the whole of physics. It took him five years of concentrated work to reinvent quantum mechanics. He said that he couldn't understand the official version of quantum mechanics that was taught in textbooks, and so he had to begin afresh from the beginning."

"Thirty-one years ago [1948], Dick Feynman told me about his "sum over histories" version of quantum mechanics. "The electron does anything it likes," he said. "It just goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time, however it likes, and then you add up the amplitudes and it gives you the wave-function." I said to him, "You're crazy." But he wasn't."

"Why should we care about Feynman? What was so special about him? Why did he become a public icon, standing with Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking as the Holy Trinity of twentieth-century physics? The public has demonstrated remarkably good taste in choosing its icons. All three of them are genuinely great scientists, with flashes of true genius as well as solid accomplishments to their credit. But to become an icon, it is not enough to be a great scientist. There are many other scientists, not so great as Einstein but greater than Hawking and Feynman, who did not become icons. ... Scientists who become icons must not only be geniuses but also performers, playing to the crowd and enjoying public acclaim. Einstein and Feynman both grumbled about the newspaper and radio reporters who invaded their privacy, but both gave the reporters what the public wanted, sharp and witty remarks that would make good headlines. Hawking in his unique way also enjoys the public adulation that his triumph over physical obstacles has earned for him. I will never forget the joyful morning in Tokyo when Hawking went on a tour of the streets in his wheelchair and the Japanese crowds streamed after him, stretching out their hands to touch his chair. Einstein, Hawking, and Feynman shared an ability to break through the barriers that separated them from ordinary people. The public responded to them because they were regular guys, jokers as well as geniuses. The third quality that is needed for a scientist to become a public icon is wisdom. Besides being a famous joker and a famous genius, Feynman was also a wise human being whose answers to serious questions made sense. To me and to hundreds of other students who came to him for advice, he spoke truth. Like Einstein and Hawking, he had come through times of great suffering, nursing Arline through her illness and watching her die, and emerged stronger. Behind his enormous zest and enjoyment of life was an awareness of tragedy, a knowledge that our time on earth is short and precarious. The public made him into an icon because he was not only a great scientist and a great clown but also a great human being and a guide in time of trouble. Other Feynman books have portrayed him as a scientific wizard and as a storyteller. This collection of letters shows us for the first time the son caring for his father and mother, the father caring for his wife and children, the teacher caring for his students, the writer replying to people throughout the world who wrote to him about their problems and received his full and undivided attention."

"Feynman has no interest in scholastic arguments. He is concerned only with human problems. He has a deep respect for religion, because he sees it as helping people to behave well toward one another and to be brave in facing tragedy. He respects religion as an important part of human nature. He does not himself believe in God, but he has no wish to destroy other people's belief."

"He does not write about professional scientists or professional scientists or professional religious thinkers. He writes about students who come to college from homes where religious belief is strong, and then find that exposure to modern science is calling their beliefs into question. ...He does not claim to have a cure for their anguish. He sees a genuine conflict between the old-fashioned family religion that commands the students to believe without question, and the ethic of science that commands them to question everything."

"Just as science can live without certainty, religion can live without dogma, and the two can live together without conflict. This is the solution that Feynman recommends to his students."

"Weinberg had a remarkable feel for the workings of nature. Always beginning with experimentally well-established principles, he had an uncanny ability to set out regularities in the natural world and to use them to account for a wide range of measurements and observations. He loved mathematics, he told me, but it was only ever a tool for him: more than anything else, he wanted ‘to explain the world’, a phrase he used as the title of one of his popular books. In many ways, his approach was similar to that of Richard Feynman, and for many years I was puzzled by the many rumours I heard that they did not get on. Weinberg confirmed to me only relatively recently that the stories were true. ‘I didn’t like [Feynman] very much’, he admitted. The main reason was that whenever Weinberg gave a talk at Caltech, Feynman harried him mercilessly, to the point of cruelty. Several witnesses to these encounters told me that Feynman appeared to be jealous of Weinberg’s ascent to pre-eminence and could never resist trying to take him down a peg or two. Feynman’s brilliant colleague Murray Gell-Mann, also famous for his aggression, was a much more reasonable critic, Weinberg said: ‘If you set out a good argument, in a bullet-proof way, Murray would leave you alone’."

"If that's the world's smartest man, God help us."

"He surrounded himself with a cloud of myth, and he spent a great deal of time and energy generating anecdotes about himself. ... Many of the anecdotes arose, of course, through the stories Richard told, of which he generally was the hero, and in which he had to come out, if possible, looking smarter than anyone else."

"A [physics student] ... discovers unpublished lecture notes by Richard Feynman, circulating samizdat style. He asks Gell-Mann about them. Gell-Mann says no, Dick's methods are not the same as the methods used here. The student asks, well, what are Feynman's methods? Gell-Mann leans coyly against the blackboard and says, Dick's method is this. You write down the problem. You think very hard. (He shuts his eyes and presses his knuckles parodically to his forehead.) Then you write down the answer."

"Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times. He took the half-made conceptions of waves and particles in the 1940s and shaped them into tools that ordinary physicists could use and understand. He had a lightning ability to see into the heart of the problems nature posed."

"Shortly before midnight on February 15, 1988, his body gasped for air that the oxygen tube could not provide, and his space in the world closed. An imprint remained: what he knew, how he knew."

"Once I asked him to explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin-1/2 particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Gauging his audience perfectly, he said, "I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it." But a few days later he came to me and said: "You know, I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it.""

"Feynman was fond of saying that all of quantum mechanics can be gleaned from carefully thinking through the implications of this single experiment, so it's well worth discussing."

"Feynman's grasp of the big picture, coupled with his love for knowing first-hand of practical details — from low-level programming to lock-picking — gave him an almost unique perspective on any subject he chose to study. It was this mastery, both of the minutiae of a subject and of its overall intellectual framework, that gave him the seemingly effortless ability to move back and forth between the two levels at will, without getting lost in the detail or losing the overall plot."

"Even when Richard didn't understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us. And whatever he understood, he could make others understand as well. Richard made people feel like children do when a grown-up first treats them as adults. He was never afraid to tell the truth, and however foolish your question was, he never made you feel like a fool."

"In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician's mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber. Hans Bethe, whom Dyson considers to be his teacher, is an “ordinary genius”; so much so that one may gain the erroneous impression that he is not a genius at all. But it was Feynman, only slightly older than Dyson, who captured the young man's imagination."

"He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this. He is a man of thoroughly engaging character and personality, extremely clear, extremely normal in all respects, and an excellent teacher with a warm feeling for physics in all its aspects. He has the best possible relations both with the theoretical people of whom he is one, and with the experimental people with whom he works in very close harmony.The reason for telling you about him now is that his excellence is so well known, both at Princeton where he worked before he came here, and to a not inconsiderable number of "big shots" on this project, that he has already been offered a position for the post war period, and will most certainly be offered others. I feel that he would be a great strength for our department, tending to tie together its teaching, its research and its experimental and theoretical aspects. I may give you two quotations from men with whom he has worked. Bethe has said that he would rather lose any two other men than Feynman from this present job, and E.P. Wigner said, "He is a second Dirac. Only this time human.""

"Feynman's IQ was measured at 124 when he was young — well above average, but far from genius level. So how'd he become fluent in differential equations by the age of 15? Feynman's fascination with the inner workings of the mechanical objects around him couldn't have hurt his left-brain power. As a kid living in Queens, he took apart everything from radios to wagon wheels. This wide-eyed fascination stuck with him; for his entire life, Feynman's colleagues cited his "childlike" approach to physics problems, which bore great results. In fact, a fellow physicist once said that the “Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm” contained three steps: 1. Write down the problem. 2. Think very hard. 3. Write down the answer."

"My strongest memory of [Feynman’s junior quantum mechanics course] is the very beginning, when he started, not with some deep principle of nature, or some experiment, but with a review of Gaussian integrals. Clearly, there was some calculating to be done. I did get over my shyness one time, to ask him about the infinities that appear in quantum field theory (QFT): do they have a physical interpretation? Feynman said ‘no.’ In retrospect, he must have known more, from the work of Wilson, Weinberg, and others. But perhaps it did not satisfy him, since he had not derived it himself. But this question tugged on me for the next eight years, and was my first deep result."

"Feynman is becoming a real pain in the ass."

"An honest men, the outstanding intuitionist of our age, and a prime example of what may lie in store for anyone who dares to follow the beat of a different drum."

"In the hall, there were 183 new freshmen and a bowling ball hanging from the three-story ceiling to just above the floor. Feynman walked in and, without a word, grabbed the ball and backed against the wall with the ball touching his nose. He let go, and the ball swung slowly 60 feet across the room and back — stopping naturally just short of crushing his face. Then he took the ball again, stepped forward, and said: "I wanted to show you that I believe in what I'm going to teach you over the next two years.""

"Several conversations that Feynman and I had involved the remarkable abilities of other physicists. In one of these conversations, I remarked to Feynman that I was impressed by Stephen Hawking's ability to do path integration in his head. "Ahh, that's not so great", Feynman replied. "It's much more interesting to come up with the technique like I did, rather than to be able to do the mechanics in your head." Feynman wasn't being immodest, he was quite right. The true secret to genius is in creativity, not in technical mechanics."

"When I say he didn't like philosophy I meant he didn't like a certain style of thinking that was full of jargon, full of - I'll use his word - "baloney", where people who didn't know what they were talking about pontificated and used fancy words - like "ontological", which I never knew what that meant - as a substitute for simple thinking. That is what he didn't like. And yet, I think in some ways, in some deep way, he was an extraordinarily philosophical person."

"He hated the fact that he participated in the invention of nuclear weapons, and he doubly hated the fact that he had so much fun doing it."

"The story that Dick Feynman could open safes whose combinations had been forgotten by their owners is true."

"Years ago, when I was an assistant professor of physics at Berkeley, I used to be invited down to Cal Tech about once a year to give a talk. It was usually the low point of my year. In the audience at Cal Tech were two leaders of modern physics, Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman, who interrupted with frequent questions, ruthlessly probing to see if I really knew what I was talking about and had anything new to say. Of the two, Feynman was the more frightening. Gell-Mann was mostly interested in finding out whether there was anything in my talk that he should know about, so he was no problem if I did have anything worth while to say. Feynman was having fun. It is Feynman as a fun-lover - chum of Las Vegas showgirls, cracker of safes at Los Alamos, player of bongo drums - who has won the hearts of the public. I found this side of Feynman hard to take. But, of course, Feynman had a more serious side. He did not do his great work on the quantum theory of fields in a moment between bongo gigs, but over several years of hard intellectual labour. On a more personal level, while helping to design the atomic bomb at Los Alamos during the war, Feynman devotedly nursed his first wife through her tragic and ultimately fatal illness. And Feynman thought deeply about the goals and methods of science, as shown in his 1964 Messenger lectures at Cornell."

"Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them? But, again, don't misunderstand me. The only conclusion we can draw is that governments acting in a crisis are guided by questions of expediency, and moral considerations are given very little weight, and that America is no different from any other nation in this respect."

"A great power imposes the obligation of exercising restraint, and we did not live up to this obligation. I think this affected many of the scientists in a subtle sense, and it diminished their desire to continue to work on the bomb."

"If we focus our attention on the next twenty-five years we may say that development is likely to reach some point intermediate between the first bomb detonated over Hiroshima and processes which once initiated might put an end to all life on earth. Just what intermediate point will be reached within twenty-five years no one can tell."

"I'm looking for a market for wisdom."

"A scientist's aim in a discussion with his colleagues is not to persuade, but to clarify."

"The most important step in getting a job done is the recognition of the problem. Once I recognize a problem I usually can think of someone who can work it out better than I could."

"In order to succeed it is not necessary to be much cleverer than other people. All you have to do is be one day ahead of them."

"It is not necessary to succeed in order to persevere. As long as there is a margin of hope, however narrow, we have no choice but to base all our actions on that margin. America and Russia have one interest in common which may override all their other interests: to be able to live with the bomb without getting into an all-out war that neither of them wants."

"In life you must often choose between getting a job done or getting credit for it. In science, the most important thing is not the ideas you have but the decision which ones you choose to pursue. If you have an idea and are not doing anything with it, why spoil someone else's fun by publishing it?"

"Science is progressing at such a rapid rate that when you make a prediction and think you are ahead of your time by 100 years you may be ahead of your time by 10 at most."

"All we had to do was lean back, turn a switch and watch a screen of a television tube. If flashes of light appeared on the screen it would mean that liberation of atomic energy would take place in our lifetime. We turned the switch, saw the flashes — we watched for about five minutes — then switched everything off and went home. That night I knew the world was headed for trouble."

"A man's clarity of judgment is never very good when you're involved, and as you grow older, and as you grow more involved, your clarity of judgment suffers."

"Even if we accept, as the basic tenet of true democracy, that one moron is equal to one genius, is it necessary to go a further step and hold that two morons are better than one genius?"

"I sometimes have the feeling that I have lived through all this before and, in a sense, I have. I was sixteen years old when the first World War broke out, and I lived at that time in Hungary. From reading the newspapers in Hungary, it would have appeared that, whatever Austria and Germany did was right and whatever England, France, Russia, or America did was wrong. A good case could be made out for this general thesis, in almost every single instance. It would have been difficult for me to prove, in any single instance, that the newspapers were wrong, but somehow, it seemed to me unlikely that the two nations located in the center of Europe should be invariably right, and that all the other nations should be invariably wrong. History, I reasoned, would hardly operate in such a peculiar fashion, and it didn't take long until I began to hold views which were diametrically opposed to those held by the majority of my schoolmates."

"Even in times of war, you can see current events in their historical perspective, provided that your passion for the truth prevails over your bias in favor of your own nation."

"The people who have sufficient passion for the truth to give the truth a chance to prevail, if it runs counter to their bias, are in a minority. How important is this "minority?" It is difficult to say at this point, for, at the present time their influence on governmental decisions is not perceptible."

"I had not been long back from Hiroshima when I heard someone say, in Szilárd's presence; that it was the tragedy of scientists that their discoveries were used for destruction. Szilárd replied, as he more than anyone else had the right to reply; that it was not the tragedy of scientists, it is the tragedy of mankind."

"By the time his ideas became accepted he had already forged ahead to take up a new attitude. Szilard himself illustrated this characteristic in a story which he liked to tell about himself. He served once on a jury in a murder case. When the first vote was taken, eleven jurors were in favour of convicting, but one — Szilard — was for acquittal. Since unanimity was required, the discussion was resumed and Szilard expounded his arguments. After some time another vote was taken; the result was again eleven to one, but this time eleven were for acquittal, and one for conviction: the odd vote was Szilard’s who had in the meantime changed his mind!"

"After the war ended, partly disgusted by the cruel use to which his beloved physics had been put, Szilard left professional physics to explore new pastures – in his case, biology... there was a more pragmatic reason. As Szilard put it, this was an age when you took a year to discover something new in physics but only took a day to discover something new in biology."

"Another explanation for the failure of logic and observation alone to advance medicine is that unlike, say, politics, which uses a form of logic – mathematics – as its natural language, biology does not lend itself to logic. Leo Szilard, a prominent physicist, made this point when he complained that after switching from physics to biology he never had a peaceful bath again. As a physicist he would soak in the warmth of the bathtub and contemplate a problem, turn it in his mind, reason his way through it. But once he became a biologist, he constantly had to climb out of the bathtub to look up a fact."

"The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting--because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That's how it makes progress. (2014 interview)"

"The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. (New York Review of Books, 2011)"

"It has been generally believed that only the complex numbers could legitimately be used as the ground field in discussing quantum-mechanical operators. Over the complex field, Frobenius' theorem is of course not valid; the only division algebra over the complex field is formed by the complex numbers themselves. However, Frobenius' theorem is relevant precisely because the appropriate ground field for much of quantum mechanics is real rather than complex."

"I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce."

"Thirty-one years ago [1948], Dick Feynman told me about his "sum over histories" version of quantum mechanics. "The electron does anything it likes," he said. "It just goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time, however it likes, and then you add up the amplitudes and it gives you the wave-function." I said to him, "You're crazy." But he wasn't."

"I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."

"As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming."

"The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right architecture. It's like building a bridge. Once the main lines of the structure are right, then the details miraculously fit. The problem is the overall design."

"Anyone who compares the bibliography with the reprinted papers will notice that mathematics and physics have not been given equal treatment. There is a strong bias in favor of mathematics. The bias arises from the fact that mathematical papers, provided that are correct and not trivial, have permanent value, whereas most papers in physics journals are ephemeral. For this reason, it is customary to publish complete collected works of mathematicians but only selected works of physicists."

"The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible."

"In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." With that, the conversation was over."

"The biggest breakthrough in the next 50 years will be the discovery of extraterrestrial life. We have been searching for it for 50 years and found nothing. That proves life is rarer than we hoped, but does not prove that the universe is lifeless. We are only now developing the tools to make our searches efficient and far-reaching, as optical and radio detection and data processing move forward."

"My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models."

"I believe global warming is grossly exaggerated as a problem. It's a real problem, but it's nothing like as serious as people are led to believe. The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm. It distracts people's attention from much more serious problems."

"All the books that I have seen about the science and the economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. … Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion."

"There’s very good news from the asteroids. It appears that a large fraction of them, including the big ones, are actually very rich in H2O. Nobody imagined that. They thought they were just big rocks … It’s easier to get to an asteroid than to Mars, because the gravity is lower and landing is easier. Certainly the asteroids are much more practical, right now. If we start space colonies in, say, the next 20 years, I would put my money on the asteroids."

"There is an enormous variety of things that we never dreamed of, like... black holes, s, quasars, all these unbelievably active goings-on in the universe... [I]n Aristotle's time the universe... was supposed to be quiescent, it was supposed to be perfect and peaceful, and nothing ever happened in the ; and that remained true... throughout all of the revolutions... It remained the general view of astronomers... through Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and everybody else... until just the last 30 years, and now we know it's not like that at all. In fact the universe is full of violent events, and fantastic strong gravitational fields, and collapsed objects, and huge outpourings of energy. ...The things we understand least are the quasars... the most violent and... energetic objects in the universe, and they're totally... mysterious... and... they're rather frequent; and nobody ever dreamed that they existed... [E]ven after they were found it took a long time before people took them seriously. Nature's imagination is always richer than ours."

"... the most important questions and insights and goals are unpredictable."

"There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use."

"If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives."

"It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment."

"A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad."

"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering."

"Science and religion are two human enterprises sharing many features. They share these features also with other enterprises such as art, literature and music. The most salient features of all these enterprises are discipline and diversity. Discipline to submerge the individual fantasy in a greater whole. Diversity to give scope to the infinite variety of human souls and temperaments. Without discipline there can be no greatness. Without diversity there can be no freedom. Greatness for the enterprise, freedom for the individual — these are the two themes, contrasting but not incompatible, that make up the history of science and the history of religion."

"An awareness of our smallness may help to redeem us from the arrogance which is the besetting sin of the scientists."

"Science is not a monolithic body of doctrine. Science is a culture, constantly growing and changing. The science of today has broken out of the molds of classical nineteenth-century science, just as the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock broke out of the molds of nineteenth century art. Science has as many competing styles as painting or poetry. The diversity of science also finds a parallel in the diversity of religion."

"There is no easy solution to the conflict between fundamentalist Christian dogma and the facts of biological evolution. I am not saying that the conflict could have been altogether avoided. I am saying only that the conflict was made more bitter and more damaging, both to religion and to science, by the dogmatic and self-righteousness of scientists. What was needed was a little more human charity, a little more willingness to listen rather than to lay down the law, a little more humility. Scientists stand in need of these Christian virtues just as much as preachers do."

"Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious it ceases to be of absorbing interest to scientists. Almost all things scientists think and dream about are mysterious."

"Euclid... gave his famous definition of a point: "A point is that which has no parts, or which has no magnitude." …A point has no existence by itself. It exists only as a part of the pattern of relationships which constitute the geometry of Euclid. This is what one means when one says that a point is a mathematical abstraction. The question, What is a point? has no satisfactory answer. Euclid's definition certainly does not answer it. The right way to ask the question is: How does the concept of a point fit into the logical structure of Euclid's geometry? ...It cannot be answered by a definition."

"Imagine, if you can, four things that have very different sizes. First, the entire universe. Second, the planet Earth. Third, the nucleus of an atom. Fourth, a superstring. The step in size from each of these things to the next is roughly the same... twenty powers of ten...."

"What philosophical conclusions should we draw from the abstract style of the superstring theory? We might conclude, as Sir James Jeans concluded long ago, that the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a Pure Mathematician, and that if we work hard enough at mathematics we shall be able to read his mind. Or we might conclude that our pursuit of abstractions is leading us far away from those parts of the creation which are most interesting from a human point of view. It is too early yet to come to conclusions."

"Fifty years ago Kurt Gödel... proved that the world of pure mathematics is inexhaustible. … I hope that the notion of a final statement of the laws of physics will prove as illusory as the notion of a formal decision process for all mathematics. If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed, I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination."

"We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations."

"... informed me that my theological standpoint is Socinian. ...If I remember correctly what Hartshorne said, the main tenant ...is that God is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. He learns and grows as the universe unfolds. ...I merely find ...[this doctrine] congenial, and consistent with common sense. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond our comprehension. ...either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. We are the chief inlets of God on this planet at... present... We may later grow with him as he grows, or we may be left behind. If... left behind, it is an end. If we keep growing, it is a beginning."

"The expansion of life, moving out from Earth into its inheritance, is an even greater theme than the expansion of England across the Atlantic. As Hakluyt wrote that there is under our noses the great and ample country of Virginia, I am saying that there is under our noses the territory of nine planets, forty moons, ten thousand asteroids and a trillion comets."

"The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York."

"Human beings are so constituted that we take for granted the fact that a direct awareness of our past selves is preserved... We take for granted the durability of the individual self. ...But ...the preservation of memories ...is as great an exercise in magic as the transfer of memories from the dead to the living. ...How the magic works ...is still a dark mystery. ...When once the technology exists to read and write memories from one mind to another, the age of mental exploration will begin in earnest. ...[W]e will look at nature directly through the eyes of the elephant, the eagle and the whale. We will... feel in our own minds the pride of the peacock and the wrath of the lion. That magic is no greater than the magic that enables me to see the rocking horse through the eyes of the child who rode it sixty years ago."

"I am neither a saint nor a theologian. To me, good works are more important than theology. We all know that religion has been historically, and still is today, a cause of great evil as well as great good in human affairs. We have seen terrible wars and terrible persecutions conducted in the name of religion. We have also seen large numbers of people inspired by religion to lives of heroic virtue, bringing education and medical care to the poor, helping to abolish slavery and spread peace among nations. Religion amplifies the good and evil tendencies of individual souls. Religion will always remain a powerful force in the history of our species. To me, the meaning of progress in religion is simply this, that as we move from the past to the future the good works inspired by religion should more and more prevail over the evil."

"One of the great but less famous heroes of World War Two was Andre Trocme, the Protestant pastor of the village of Le Chambon sur Lignon in France, which sheltered and saved the lives of five thousand Jews under the noses of the Gestapo. Forty years later Pierre Sauvage, one of the Jews who was saved, recorded the story of the village in a magnificent documentary film with the title, "Weapons of the Spirit". The villagers proved that civil disobedience and passive resistance could be effective weapons, even against Hitler. Their religion gave them the courage and the discipline to stand firm. Progress in religion means that, as time goes on, religion more and more takes the side of the victims against the oppressors."

"Sharing the food is to me more important than arguing about beliefs. Jesus, according to the gospels, thought so too."

"I am content to be one of the multitude of Christians who do not care much about the doctrine of the Trinity or the historical truth of the gospels. Both as a scientist and as a religious person, I am accustomed to living with uncertainty. Science is exciting because it is full of unsolved mysteries, and religion is exciting for the same reason. The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe."

"My personal theology is described in the Gifford lectures that I gave at Aberdeen in Scotland in 1985, published under the title, Infinite In All Directions. Here is a brief summary of my thinking. The universe shows evidence of the operations of mind on three levels. The first level is elementary physical processes, as we see them when we study atoms in the laboratory. The second level is our direct human experience of our own consciousness. The third level is the universe as a whole. Atoms in the laboratory are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe as a whole is also weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus. Our minds may receive inputs equally from atoms and from God. This view of our place in the cosmos may not be true, but it is compatible with the active nature of atoms as revealed in the experiments of modern physics. I don't say that this personal theology is supported or proved by scientific evidence. I only say that it is consistent with scientific evidence."

"I do not claim any ability to read God's mind. I am sure of only one thing. When we look at the glory of stars and galaxies in the sky and the glory of forests and flowers in the living world around us, it is evident that God loves diversity. Perhaps the universe is constructed according to a principle of maximum diversity."

"The principle of maximum diversity says that the laws of nature, and the initial conditions at the beginning of time, are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth. This is the confession of faith of a scientific heretic. Perhaps I may claim as evidence for progress in religion the fact that we no longer burn heretics."

"All through our history, we have been changing the world with our technology. Our technology has been of two kinds, green and grey. Green technology is seeds and plants, gardens and vineyards and orchards, domesticated horses and cows and pigs, milk and cheese, leather and wool. Grey technology is bronze and steel, spears and guns, coal and oil and electricity, automobiles and airplanes and rockets, telephones and computers. Civilization began with green technology, with agriculture and animal-breeding, ten thousand years ago. Then, beginning about three thousand years ago, grey technology became dominant, with mining and metallurgy and machinery. For the last five hundred years, grey technology has been racing ahead and has given birth to the modern world of cities and factories and supermarkets. The dominance of grey technology is now coming to an end."

"Our grey technology of machines and computers will not disappear, but green technology will be moving ahead even faster. Green technology can be cleaner, more flexible and less wasteful, than our existing chemical industries. A great variety of manufactured objects could be grown instead of made. Green technology could supply human needs with far less damage to the natural environment. And green technology could be a great equalizer, bringing wealth to the tropical areas of the world which have most of the sunshine, most of the human population, and most of the poverty. I am saying that green technology could do all these good things, bringing wealth to the tropics, bringing economic opportunity to the villages, narrowing the gap between rich and poor. I am not saying that green technology will do all these good things. "Could" is not the same as "will". To make these good things happen, we need not only the new technology but the political and economic conditions that will give people all over the world a chance to use it. To make these things happen, we need a powerful push from ethics. We need a consensus of public opinion around the world that the existing gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth are intolerable. In reaching such a consensus, religions must play an essential role. Neither technology alone nor religion alone is powerful enough to bring social justice to human societies, but technology and religion working together might do the job."

"The gospel of St. Matthew told of the angry Jesus driving the merchants and money-changers out of the temple, knocking over the tables of the money-changers and spilling their coins on the floor. Jesus was not opposed to capitalism and the profit motive, so long as economic activities were carried on outside the temple. In the parable of the talents, he praises the servant who used his master's money to make a profitable investment, and condemns the servant who was too timid to invest. But he draws a clear line at the temple door. Inside the temple, the ground belongs to God and profit-making must stop."

"In the time of Jesus and for many centuries afterwards, there was a free market in human bodies. The institution of slavery was based on the legal right of slave-owners to buy and sell their property in a free market. Only in the nineteenth century did the abolitionist movement, with Quakers and other religious believers in the lead, succeed in establishing the principle that the free market does not extend to human bodies. The human body is God's temple and not a commercial commodity. And now in the twenty-first century, for the sake of equity and human brotherhood, we must maintain the principle that the free market does not extend to human genes. Let us hope that we can reach a consensus on this question without fighting another civil war."

"Like all the new technologies that have arisen from scientific knowledge, biotechnology is a tool that can be used either for good or for evil purposes. The role of ethics is to strengthen the good and avoid the evil."

"Unfortunately a large number of people in many countries are strongly opposed to green technology, for reasons having little to do with the real dangers. It is important to treat the opponents with respect, to pay attention to their fears, to go gently into the new world of green technology so that neither human dignity nor religious conviction is violated. If we can go gently, we have a good chance of achieving within a hundred years the goals of ecological sustainability and social justice that green technology brings within our reach."

"I have five minutes left to give you a message to take home. The message is simple. "God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world". This was said by Francis Bacon, one of the founding fathers of modern science, almost four hundred years ago. Bacon was the smartest man of his time, with the possible exception of William Shakespeare."

"I am saying to modern scientists and theologians: don't imagine that our latest ideas about the Big Bang or the human genome have solved the mysteries of the universe or the mysteries of life. Here are Bacon's words again: "The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding". In the last four hundred years, science has fulfilled many of Bacon's dreams, but it still does not come close to capturing the full subtlety of nature."

"To talk about the end of science is just as foolish as to talk about the end of religion. Science and religion are both still close to their beginnings, with no ends in sight. Science and religion are both destined to grow and change in the millennia that lie ahead of us, perhaps solving some old mysteries, certainly discovering new mysteries of which we yet have no inkling."

"After sketching his program for the scientific revolution that he foresaw, Bacon ends his account with a prayer: "Humbly we pray that this mind may be steadfast in us, and that through these our hands, and the hands of others to whom thou shalt give the same spirit, thou wilt vouchsafe to endow the human family with new mercies". That is still a good prayer for all of us as we begin the twenty-first century."

"Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect."

"Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious dogma or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute. The media exaggerate their numbers and importance. The media rarely mention the fact that the great majority of religious people belong to moderate denominations that treat science with respect, or the fact that the great majority of scientists treat religion with respect so long as religion does not claim jurisdiction over scientific questions."

"In the little town of Princeton where I live, we have more than twenty churches and at least one synagogue, providing different forms of worship and belief for different kinds of people. They do more than any other organizations in the town to hold the community together. Within this community of people, held together by religious traditions of human brotherhood and sharing of burdens, a smaller community of professional scientists also flourishes."

"The great question for our time is, how to make sure that the continuing scientific revolution brings benefits to everybody rather than widening the gap between rich and poor. To lift up poor countries, and poor people in rich countries, from poverty, to give them a chance of a decent life, technology is not enough. Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich."

"Scientists and business leaders who care about social justice should join forces with environmental and religious organizations to give political clout to ethics. Science and religion should work together to abolish the gross inequalities that prevail in the modern world. That is my vision, and it is the same vision that inspired Francis Bacon four hundred years ago, when he prayed that through science God would "endow the human family with new mercies"."

"There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science. And two thousand years earlier, the beginnings of science were as much Babylonian and Egyptian as Greek. One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white. It belongs to everybody who is willing to make the effort to learn it. And what is true of science is true of poetry. ... Poetry and science are gifts given to all of humanity."

"The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A reductionist philosophy, arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go only in one direction, makes no scientific sense. Indeed, dogmatic philosophical beliefs of any kind have no place in science."

"I have to clear away a few popular misconceptions about space as a habitat … It is generally considered that planets are important. Except for Earth, they are not. Mars is waterless, and the others are, for various reasons, basically inhospitable to man. It is generally considered that beyond the sun’s family of planets there is absolute emptiness extending for light-years until you come to another star. In fact, it is likely that the space around the solar system is populated by huge numbers of comets, small worlds a few miles in diameter, rich in water and the other chemicals essential to life."

"Over periods of 10,000 years the distinctions between Western and Eastern and African cultures lose all meaning. Over a time span of 100,000 years we are all Africans. And over a time span of 300 million years we are all amphibians, waddling uncertainly out of dried-up ponds onto the alien and hostile land."

"Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague."

"Science as subversion has a long history. ... Davis and Sakharov belong to an old tradition in science that goes all the way back to the rebels Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley in the eighteenth century, to Galileo and Giordano Bruno in the seventeenth and sixteenth. If science ceases to be a rebellion against authority, then it does not deserve the talents of our brightest children. ... We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice."

"Gödel's theorem shows conclusively that in pure mathematics reductionism does not work. To decide whether a mathematical statement is true, it is not sufficient to reduce the statement to marks on paper and to study the behavior of the marks. Except in trivial cases, you can decide the truth of a statement only by studying its meaning and its context in the larger world of mathematical ideas."

"It is a curious paradox that several of the greatest and most creative spirits in science, after achieving important discoveries by following their unfettered imaginations, were in their later years obsessed with reductionist philosophy and as a result became sterile. Hilbert was a prime example of this paradox. Einstein was another."

"Starting from Einstein's theory of general relativity, Oppenheimer and Snyder found solutions... that described what happens to a massive star when it has exhausted its supplies of nuclear energy. The star collapses gravitationally and disappears from the visible universe, leaving behind only an intense gravitational field to mark its presence. The star remains in a state of permanent free fall, collapsing endlessly inward into the gravitational pit without ever reaching the bottom. ... In my opinion, the black hole is incomparably the most exciting and the most important consequence of general relativity. But Einstein ... was actively hostile to the idea of black holes. ... Oddly enough, Oppenheimer too in later life was uninterested in black holes, although... they were his most important contribution to science. ... Oppenheimer in his later years believed that the only problem worthy of attention of a serious theoretical physicist was the discovery of fundamental equations of physics. Einstein certainly felt the same way."

"The two great conceptual revolutions of twentieth-century science, the overturning of classical physics by Werner Heisenberg and the overturning of the foundations of mathematics by Kurt Gödel, occurred within six years of each other within the narrow boundaries of German-speaking Europe. ... A study of the historical background of German intellectual life in the 1920s reveals strong links between them. Physicists and mathematicians were exposed simultaneously to external influences that pushed them along parallel paths. ... Two people who came early and strongly under the influence of Spengler's philosophy were the mathematician Hermann Weyl and the physicist Erwin Schrödinger. ... Weyl and Schrödinger agreed with Spengler that the coming revolution would sweep away the principle of physical causality. The erstwhile revolutionaries David Hilbert and Albert Einstein found themselves in the unaccustomed role of defenders of the status quo, Hilbert defending the primacy of formal logic in the foundations of mathematics, Einstein defending the primacy of causality in physics. In the short run, Hilbert and Einstein were defeated and the Spenglerian ideology of revolution triumphed, both in physics and in mathematics. Heisenberg discovered the true limits of causality in atomic processes, and Gödel discovered the limits of formal deduction and proof in mathematics. And, as often happens in the history of intellectual revolutions, the achievement of revolutionary goals destroyed the revolutionary ideology that gave them birth. The visions of Spengler, having served their purpose, rapidly became irrelevant."

"Black holes are not rare, and they are not an accidental embellishment of our Universe. They are a fundamental driving force of its evolution. They are a dominant source of energy. For every ounce of matter consumed, they yield more than ten times as much energy as the nuclear reactions of fusion and fission that cause our sun to shine and our hydrogen bombs to explode."

"Rutherford's discovery was the beginning of the science that came to be called nuclear physics. ... The projectiles that he used to explore the nucleus were particles produced in the disintegration of radium ... discovered by Marie Curie in 1898. The particles are helium nuclei that are emitted at high speed when radium atoms decay ... The twenty years between 1909 and 1929 were the era of tabletop nuclear physics. ... Small and simple experiments were sufficient to establish the basic laws of nuclear physics."

"Rutherford did not pretend to understand quantum mechanics, but he understood that the Gamow formula would give his accelerator a crucial advantage. Even particles accelerated at much lower energies ... would be able to penetrate into nuclei. Rutherford invited Gamow to Cambridge in January 1929 ... [They] became firm friends and Gamow's insight gave Rutherford the impetus to go full steam ahead with the building of his accelerator."

"Astronomers have so far escaped the extreme specialization that has overtaken physicists. Telescopes are big, but they are not as complicated as accelerators. Observations with a big telescope can be carried out in hours rather than years."

"Nobody knows what dark matter is. It is another deep mystery waiting to be explored. We know only that it is there, and that it weighs more than the stuff that we can see."

"When all is said and done, science is about things and theology is about words. Things behave in the same way everywhere, but words do not. ... Theology works in one culture alone. If you have not grown up in Polkinghorne's culture, where words such as "incarnation" and "trinity" have a profound meaning, you cannot share his vision."

"It is a curious accident of history that the Christian religion became heavily involved with theology. No other religion finds it necessary to formulate elaborately precise statements about the abstract qualities and relationships of gods and humans. ... The idea that God may be approached and understood through intellectual analysis is uniquely Christian."

"It is probably not an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind. A thousand years of theological disputes nurtured the habit of analytical thinking that could also be applied to the analysis of natural phenomena. On the other hand, the close historical relations between theology and science have caused conflicts between science and Christianity that does not exist between science and other religions."

"It is more difficult for a modern scientist to be a serious Christian, like Polkinghorne, than to be a serious Muslim, like the Nobel Prize-winning physicisit Abdus Salam. Salam happily proclaimed his Muslim faith but did not feel any need to write books about it. For Salam, the idea of a conflict between his faith and his science was ludicrous. Muslim faith has nothing to do with science. But Polkinghorne writes books to prove to himself and to us that his theology and his science can live together harmoniously.."

"The common root of modern science and Christian theology was Greek philosophy. The historical accident that caused the Christian religion to become heavily theological was the fact that Jesus was born in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire at the time when the prevailing culture was profoundly Greek."

"I had the good luck a few years ago to visit the archeological site of Zippori in Israel ... I could see here displayed the Greek culture that Jesus decisively rejected, the same Greek culture that infiltrated the Christian religion soon after his death and has dominated Christianity ever since."

"Greene takes it for granted, and here the great majority of physicists agree with him, that the division of physics into separate theories for large and small objects is unacceptable. ... Greene believes that there is an urgent need to find a theory of quantum gravity that applies to large and small objects alike. ... As a conservative, I do not agree that a division of physics into separate theories for large and small is unacceptable. ... The essence of any theory of quantum gravity is that there exists a particle called the graviton ... I looked at various possible ways of detecting gravitons and did not find a single one that worked. Because of the extreme weakness of the gravitational interaction, any putative detector of gravitons has to be extremely massive. If the detector has normal density, most of it is too far from the source of gravitons to be effective, and if it is compressed to a high density around the source it collapses into a black hole. There seems to be a conspiracy of nature to prevent the detector from working."

"Mr Dyson is absolutely unusual in his ability and accomplishments. I can say without reservation that he is the best I have ever had or observed."

"When Freeman Dyson, the physicist, greeted John Forbes Nash, Jr. at the Institute for Advanced Study one day in the early 1990s, he hardly expected a response. A mathematics legend in his twenties, Nash had suffered for decades from a devastating mental illness. A mute, ghost-like figure who scrawled mysterious messages on blackboards and occupied himself with numerological calculations, he was known around Princeton only as “the Phantom.” To Dyson’s astonishment, Nash replied. He’d seen Dyson’s daughter, an authority on computers, on the news, he said. “It was beautiful,” recalled Dyson. “Slowly, he just somehow woke up.”"

"Freeman Dyson’s winning the took many people by surprise, including Dyson... the Templeton Foundation gave its... prize for "progress in religion"... In receiving a million dollars, Dyson may have lost his amateur status as a theologian. ...In Dyson's acceptance speech he sounded the themes... that good works... are better than volumes of theology; that both science and religion... grapple with mysteries; that God and mind... are one and actively present simultaneously at the microscopic level of atoms, at the macroscopic level of human beings, and at the cosmic level of the universe... that green technology... is reexerting its primacy over gray technology... machines and fossil fuels; that the marketing of high-tech and the capitalist system... must be tempered by ethics; that this attention to social justice will... help alleviate human misery and enlarge the global economy; and that we must utilize both... science and religion... Dyson should probably be placed somewhere between a pantheist and a deist whose God is a kind of meta-scientific, ."

"Many people know of the mathematician but not the engineer. Some had read of Dyson the physicist but not Dyson the diplomat. They had read Disturbing the Universe but not '. They might have known about Orion and but not about Socinus. ...Dyson had not won the... Nobel for... explaining way the infinities... when you get closer and closer to the electron... relying on an artful redefinition of the mass and charge... But he had won ...[the Templeton prize] for explaining the disparities that arise when you use science to explain the whole universe, physical and moral. Dyson's attempt at smoothing over potential conflicts between science and religion had swept the apparent incompatibility not under the carpet but out beyond the edge of the universe."

"You'll have received an application from Mr Freeman Dyson to come to work with you as a graduate student. I hope that you will accept him. Although he is only 23 he is in my view the best mathematician in England."

"Freeman’s gift? … It’s cosmic. He is able to see more interconnections between more things than almost anybody. He sees the interrelationships, whether it’s in some microscopic physical process or in a big complicated machine like Orion. He has been, from the time he was in his teens, capable of understanding essentially anything that he’s interested in. He’s the most intelligent person I know."

"Man occupies a special place in the Cartesian scheme. He alone is endowed with mind. Descartes believed that animals did not possess one, that they were simply extremely complicated automatons. Other thinkers have rejected this point of view and proposed to endow all matter in the universe — living or inanimate — with consciousness. This "panpsychism" has been promoted by, among others, Teilhard de Chardin and, more recently by the British-American physicist Freeman Dyson, who holds that mind is present in every particle of matter."

"If you could meet your grandkids as elderly citizens in the year 2100 … you would view them as being, basically, Greek gods… that's where we're headed."

"We actually have a candidate for the mind of God. The mind of God we believe is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace. That is the mind of God."

"I say looking at the next 100 years that there are two trends in the world today. The first trend is toward what we call a type one civilization, a planetary civilization... The danger is the transition between type zero and type one and that’s where we are today. We are a type zero civilization. We get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. But if you get a calculator you can calculate when we will attain type one status. The answer is: in about 100 years we will become planetary. We’ll be able to harness all the energy output of the planet earth. We’ll play with the weather, earthquakes, volcanoes. Anything planetary we will play with. The danger period is now, because we still have the savagery. We still have all the passions. We have all the sectarian, fundamentalist ideas circulating around, but we also have nuclear weapons. ...capable of wiping out life on earth. So I see two trends in the world today. The first trend is toward a multicultural, scientific, tolerant society and everywhere I go I see aspects of that birth. For example, what is the Internet? Many people have written about the Internet. Billions and billions of words written about the Internet, but to me as a physicist the Internet is the beginning of a type one telephone system, a planetary telephone system. So we’re privileged to be alive to witness the birth of type one technology... And what is the European Union? The European Union is the beginning of a type one economy. And how come these European countries, which have slaughtered each other ever since the ice melted 10,000 years ago, how come they have banded together, put aside their differences to create the European Union? ...so we’re beginning to see the beginning of a type one economy as well..."

"What happened before the Big Bang? Are there other universes? What lies on the other side of creation? The other side of a black hole? Are s possible? s? s? Do we live in a multiverse? All these questions cannot be answered with our present-day understanding."

"When Physicists speak of "beauty" in their theories, they really mean that their theory possesses at least two essential features: 1. A unifying symmetry 2. The ability to explain vast amounts of experimental data with the most economical mathematical expressions."

"Maxwell's equations... originally consisted of eight equations. These equations are not "beautiful." They do not possess much symmetry. In their original form, they are ugly. ...However, when rewritten using time as the fourth dimension, this rather awkward set of eight equations collapses into a single tensor equation. This is what a physicist calls "beauty," because both criteria are now satisfied."

"It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct."

"There are many examples of old, incorrect theories that stubbornly persisted, sustained only by the prestige of foolish but well-connected scientists. … Many of these theories have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness. .. Thus the yeoman work in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest."

"No other theory known to science [other than superstring theory] uses such powerful mathematics at such a fundamental level. ...because any unified field theory first must absorb the Riemannian geometry of Einstein's theory and the Lie groups coming from quantum field theory... The new mathematics, which is responsible for the merger of these two theories, is topology, and it is responsible for accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of abolishing the infinities of a quantum theory of gravity."

"Remarkably, only a handful of fundamental physical principles are sufficient to summarize most of modern physics."

"Mathematics... is the set of all possible self-consistent structures, and there are vastly more logical structures than physical principles."

"It is sometimes helpful to differentiate between the God of Miracles and the God of Order. When scientists use the word God, they usually mean the God of Order. ...The God of Miracles intervenes in our affairs, performs miracles, destroys wicked cities, smites enemy armies, drowns the Pharaoh's troops, and avenges the pure and noble. ...This is not to say that miracles cannot happen, only that they are outside what is commonly called science."

"It is as inescapable as the laws of physics that humanity will one day confront some type of extinction-level event. But will we, like our ancestors, have the drive and determination to survive and even flourish? . . . On a scale of decades, we face threats that are not natural but are largely self-inflicted [including] global warming . . . modern warfare as nuclear weapons proliferate in some of the most unstable regions of the globe, [or] weaponized microbes [that could conceivably] wipe out 98 percent of the human race. . . . On a scale of thousands of years, we face the onset of another ice age [or] the possibility that the supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park may awaken from its long slumber . . . . On a scale of millions of years, we face the threat of another meteor or cometary impact . . . . We now know that there are several thousand NEOs (near-Earth objects) that cross the orbit of the Earth and pose a danger to life on our planet. . . . If there is one lesson we can learn from our history, it is that humanity, when faced with life-threatening crises, has risen to the challenge and reached for even higher goals. In some sense, the spirit of exploration is in our genes and hardwired into our soul. [So] now we face perhaps the greatest challenge of all: to leave the confines of Earth and soar into outer space. . . . Perhaps our fate is to become a multiplanet species that lives among the stars."

""Killer asteroids are nature's way of asking, 'How's that space program coming along?'" - Anonymous"

"Michio Kaku... will talk, waxing rhapsodically, about the Mind of God and how everything is encrypted and encoded, and if we can get to the multiverse, and that really would be the singularity... I like Michio. He's very good as an entertainer, but I think the selling of physics is going to come back to haunt us... Just touting this stuff, and I'm guilty of it at times too, but I won't utter... "The Mind of God." What do you think about the danger that we, as people that are publicly facing, have of potentially compromising the true appreciation of the most magnificent things in the universe, which take a lot of background. You can't dumb it down, and you shouldn't. I will never do that with my audience."

"The oxide superconductors, particularly those recently discovered that are based on La2CuO4, have a set of peculiarities that suggest a common, unique mechanism: they tend in every case to occur near a metal-insulator transition into an odd-electron insulator with peculiar magnetic properties. This insulating phase is proposed to be the long-sought "resonating-valence-bond" state or "quantum spin liquid" hypothesized in 1973. This insulating magnetic phase is favored by low spin, low dimensionality, and magnetic frustration. The preexisting magnetic singlet pairs of the insulating state become charged superconducting pairs when the insulator is doped sufficiently strongly."

"It is seen as the application of a systematic “scientific method” involving wearing a white coat and being dull. I feel that too many young people come into science with this view, and that too many fields degenerate into the kind of work which results: automatic crank-turning and data-collecting of the sort which Kuhn calls “normal science” and Rutherford “stamp-collecting”. In fact, the creation of new science is a creative act, literally, and people who are not creative are not very good at it."

"My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance."

"I learned, practically in my cradle (actually from Bill McMillan's thesis), that the ground state wave function of a system of bosons should necessarily be real and positive, a fact which made his early Monte Carlo simulations infinitely easier."

"The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other."

"By symmetry we mean the existence of different viewpoints from which the system appears the same. It is only slightly overstating the case to say that physics is the study of symmetry. The first demonstration of the power of this idea may have been by Newton, who may have asked himself the question: What if the matter here in my hand obeys the same laws as that up in the sky—that is, what if space and matter are homogeneous and isotropic?"

"... the state of a really big system does not at all have to have the symmetry of the laws which govern it; in fact, it usually has less symmetry."

"Surely there are more levels of organization between human ethology and DNA than there are between DNA and quantum electrodynamics, and each level can require a whole new conceptual structure."

"That Big Science culture in the USA, and similar groups elswhere, tended to have separate, direct access to government and hence to funding sources. It was independent to a great extent of the rest of science, of which it was never a majority component except in funding."

"“Of course I am not religious—I don’t in fact see how any scientist who thinks at all deeply can be so ...”"

"All I can say to the younger theorists is: don’t trust anyone over 45, except maybe me, and I’m not so sure about me.”"

"My Harvard classmate, Thomas S. Kuhn wrote, some years ago, an influential book about scientific revolutions. Fortunately, many scientific revolutions do not follow his scenario, but the one he focused on, the discovery of quantum mechanics, is well described by his model, which is most valid for a revolution occurring in the central core of a mature science."

"“We atheists can . . . argue that, with the modern revolution in attitudes toward homosexuals, we have become the only group that may not reveal itself in normal social discourse”."

"Have the climate models been successful in predicting anything? They, of course, predict substantial global warming. This is not surprising given the expressed belief of some of the model builders in the global warming hypothesis and the many parameters in the model that need to be introduced. However, the models also predict unambiguously that the atmosphere is warming faster than the surface of the earth; but all the available observational data unambiguously shows the opposite! Truth in science is always determined from observational facts. One finds the truth by making a hypothesis and comparing observations with the hypothesis. It is absolutely essential that one should be neutral and not fall in love with the hypothesis. If the facts are contrary to any predictions, then the hypothesis is wrong no matter how appealing. "Truth by Assertion" is not science."

"If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be 'Shut up and calculate!'"

"Over the past fifty years or so, scientists have allowed the conventions of expression available to them to become entirely too confining."

"… coincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader. … We injure ourselves when we fail to make our discipline as clear and vibrant as we can to students - prospective scientists - and to the public who pay the taxes."

"An extrapolation of its present rate of growth reveals that in the not too distant future Physical Review will fill bookshelves at a speed exceeding that of light. This is not forbidden by general relativity since no information is being conveyed."

"I would like to describe an attitude toward quantum mechanics which, whether or not it clarifies the interpretational problems that continue to plague the subject, at least sets them in a rather different perspective. This point of view alters somewhat the language used to address these issues—a glossary is provided in Appendix C—and it may offer a less perplexing basis for teaching quantum mechanics or explaining it to nonspecialists. It is based on one fundamental insight, perhaps best introduced by an analogy. My complete answer to the late 19th century question "what is electrodynamics trying to tell us" would simply be this:Fields in empty space have physical reality; the medium that supports them does not.Having thus removed the mystery from electrodynamics, let me immediately do the same for quantum mechanics:Correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not."

"Quantum mechanics is the most useful and powerful theory physicists have ever devised. Yet today, nearly 90 years after its formulation, disagreement about the meaning of the theory is stronger than ever. New interpretations appear every year. None ever disappear. … The message from QBism is this: You needn't feel guilty about never getting nervous about this stuff. You were right not to be bothered. But for the sake of intellectual coherence, you had better reexamine what you wrongly may have thought you understood perfectly well about the nature of probability."

"It is a fundamental quantum doctrine that a measurement does not, in general, reveal a pre-existing value of the measured property. On the contrary, the outcome of a measurement is brought into being by the act of measurement itself, a joint manifestation of the state of the probed system and the probing apparatus. Precisely how the particular result of an individual measurement is brought into being—Heisenberg's "transition from the possible to the actual"—is inherently unknowable. Only the statistical distribution of many such encounters is a proper matter for scientific inquiry."

"It once made sense to exclude the scientist from scientific explanations of the physical world. This warded off superstitious, animistic, or religious explanations. But without endorsing superstition, animism, or religion, today it makes sense to insist that the scientist should not be excluded from a philosophical understanding of the nature of scientific explanation. Why shouldn't such an understanding involve the explainer, as well as the explained?"

"One of the most beautiful papers in physics that I know of is yours in the American Journal of Physics."

"The theory community, myself included - became rather troubled about the particle."

"You can’t imagine how wonderful it is to teach physics at MIT. The physics majors at MIT are there because they want to be there. Their love of physics is infectious...I've likened it to teaching art history in Rome."

"I feel I may be controversial in this, but I think that wisdom doesn't count for a lot in theoretical physics. It’s not like history and literature, where you accumulate a broader and broader world view. It’s not a question of energy; I have plenty of energy. I just wrote—just finished writing this massive book...I think most theoretical physicists do their best work when they're young, because they see problems fresh for the first time."

"Science is a field which grows continuously with ever expanding frontiers. Further, it is truly international in scope. Any particular advance has been preceded by the contributions of those from many lands who have set firm foundations for further developments. The Nobel awards should be regarded as giving recognition to this general scientific progress as well as to the individuals involved. Further, science is a collaborative effort. The combined results of several people working together is often much more effective than could be that of an individual scientist working alone."

"... I can't work well under the conditions at Bell Labs. Walter and I are looking at a few questions relating to point-contact transistors, but Shockley keeps all the interesting problems for himself."

"On the morning of 1 November 1956 the US physicist John Bardeen dropped the frying-pan of eggs that he was cooking for breakfast, scattering its contents on the kitchen floor. He had just heard that he had won the Nobel Prize for Physics along with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for their invention of the transistor. That evening Bardeen was startled again, this time by a parade of his colleagues from the University of Illinois marching to the door of his home bearing champagne and singing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow"."

"John Bardeen was an avid golfer and a good one. Whenever possible, he sought out golf courses during research or consulting trips. According to the stories, he was as proud of hitting a "hole in one" as he was to win a second Nobel Prize."

"Some years later I spoke to a mentally disturbed young man. Very agitatedly, he described to me how alien beings from outer space had invaded the earth. They were formed of mental substance, lived in human minds, and controlled human beings through the creations of science and technology. Eventually this alien being would have an autonomous existence in the form of giant computers and would no longer require humans–and that would mark its triumph and the end of humanity. Soon he was hospitalized because he was unable to shake off this terrible vision."

"I used to climb mountains in snow and ice, hanging onto the sides of great rocks. I was describing one of my adventures to an older friend once, and when I had finished he asked me, "Why do you want to kill yourself?" I protested. I told him that the rewards I wanted were of sight, of pleasure, of the thrill of pitting my body and my skills against nature. My friend replied, "When you are as old as I am you will see that you are trying to kill yourself.""

"I often dream about falling. Such dreams are commonplace to the ambitious or those who climb mountains. Lately I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness."

"Most physicists enjoy the outdoors. They are mushroom gatherers, bird watchers, hikers, amateur mountaineers whose idea of weekend relaxation is to climb a mountain. Several physics summer schools and research centers are located in or near mountainous areas. I have not seen such uniform recreational impulses in other professions, an observation which prompts speculation on the connection between the nature of inquiry in physics and mountain climbing."

"People did not always love the mountains. Just a few hundred years ago the high mountains were regarded as horrible, monstrous places filling people with terror and fear. The inhabitants near them were seen as awful demons, subhumans. But this attitude got transformed into just the opposite, especially by Romantic writers and painters in the nineteenth century. Seen by the Romantics, high mountains became places of impossible beauty, where the quality of light and the expansive solitary grandeur of the high peaks opened the heart of the individual. A man climbing a mountain became the image of self-conscious intelligence pitted against the eternal indifference of the forces of nature. Compared to these forces of nature, we are nothing save for the will that moves our limbs. Only that will is truly our own."

"Mountain climbing is an analogue of the research process in theoretical physics. In working on a problem in physics one is never assured of a solution, because there are many false leads and pitfalls. Likewise in climbing there is no certainty of attaining the summit; the route is often unknown, or sometimes one attains a false summit. But the important point is that if you reach the top, the view is enormous. There is no comparison between what you see from just below the summit and what you can see from the top. Similarly with finally solving an important problem in physics the view you get is enormous."

"Perhaps our thinking exemplifies a selective system. First lots of random scattered ideas compete for survival. Then comes the selection for what works best — one idea dominates, and this is followed by its amplification. Perhaps the moral [...] is that you never learn anything unless you are willing to take a risk and tolerate a little randomness in your life."

"Although the idea that the universe has an order that is governed by natural laws that are not immediately apparent to the senses is very ancient, it is only in the last three hundred years that we have discovered a method for uncovering that hidden order — the scientific-experimental method. So powerful is this method that virtually everything scientists know about the natural world comes from it. What they find is that the architecture of the universe is indeed built according to invisible universal rules, what I call the cosmic code — the building code of the Demiurge. Examples of this universal building code are the quantum and relativity theory, the laws of chemical combination and molecular structure, the rules that govern protein synthesis and how organisms are made, to name but a few. Scientists in discovering this code are deciphering the Demiurge's hidden message, the tricks he used in creating the universe. No human mind could have arranged for any message so flawlessly coherent, so strangely imaginative, and sometimes downright bizarre. It must be the work of an Alien Intelligence!"

"We surely stand at the threshold of a great adventure of the human spirit — a new synthesis of knowledge, a potential integration of art and science, a deeper grasp of human psychology, a deepening of the symbolic representations of our existence and feelings as given in religion and culture, the formation of an international order based on cooperation and nonviolent competition. It seems not too much to hope for these things. The future, as always, belongs to the dreamers."

"Facts are more mundane than fantasies, but a better basis for conclusions."

"If you ask me, it'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it."

"...new nuclear plants are simply unfinanceable in the private capital market, and the technology will continue to die of an incurable attack of market forces—all the faster in competitive markets. This is true not just in the U.S., where the last order was in 1978 and all orders since 1973 were cancelled, but globally."

"There are two kinds of micropower. One is co-gen and combined heat and power. That was about two-thirds of the new capacity and three-quarters of the new electricity last year. The rest was distributed or decentralized renewables, which was a $38 billion U.S. global market last year for selling equipment. That's wind, solar, geothermal, small hydro and biomass.... Micropower surpassed nuclear power in worldwide installed capacity in 2002, and surpassed nuclear in electricity generated per year just in the last few months."

"A widely heralded view holds that nuclear power is experiencing a dramatic worldwide revival and vibrant growth, because it’s competitive, necessary, reliable, secure, and vital for fuel security and climate protection. That’s all false. In fact, nuclear power is continuing its decades-long collapse in the global marketplace because it’s grossly uncompetitive, unneeded, and obsolete—so hopelessly uneconomic that one needn’t debate whether it’s clean and safe; it weakens electric reliability and national security; and it worsens climate change compared with devoting the same money and time to more effective options."

"Variable but forecastable renewables (wind and solar cells) are very reliable when integrated with each other, existing supplies and demand. For example, three German states were more than 30 percent wind-powered in 2007—and more than 100 percent in some months. Mostly renewable power generally needs less backup than utilities already bought to combat big coal and nuclear plants' intermittence."

"When asked if we have enough time to prevent catastrophe, she'd always say that we have exactly enough time -- starting now"

"The markets make a good servant but a bad master, and a worse religion"

"Fire made us human, fossil fuels made us modern, but now we need a new fire that make us safe,healthy, and durable. 2006-5-12"

"The new paradigm may be called a holistic world view, seeing the world as an integrated whole rather than a dissociated collection of parts. It may also be called an ecological view, if the term "ecological" is used in a much broader and deeper sense than usual. Deep ecological awareness recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and societies we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical process of nature."

"What I am trying to do is to present a unified scientific view of life; that is, a view integrating life's biological, cognitive, and social dimensions. I have had many discussions with social scientists, cognitive scientists, physicists and biologist who question that task, who said that this would not be possible. They ask, why do I believe that I can do that? My belief is based largely on our knowledge of evolution. When you study evolution, you see that there was, first of all, evolution before the appearance of life, there was a molecular type of evolution where structures of greater and greater complexity evolved out of simple molecules. Biochemist who study that have made tremendous progress in understanding that process of molecular evolution. Then we had the appearance of the first cell which was a bacterium. Bacteria evolved for about 2 billion years and in doing so invented, if you want to use the term, or created most of the life processes that we know today. Biochemical processes like fermentation, oxygen breathing, photosynthesis, also rapid motion, were developed by bacteria in evolution. And what happened then was that bacteria combined with one another to produce larger cells — the so-called eukaryotic cells, which have a nucleus, chromosomes, organelles, and so on. This symbiosis that led to new forms is called symbiogenesis."

"The influence of modern physics goes beyond technology. It extends to the realm of thought and culture where it has led to a deep revision in man's conception of the universe and his relation to it."

"If physics leads us today to a world view which is essentially mystical, it returns, in a way, to its beginning, 2,500 years ago. [...] This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism."

"A page from a journal of modern experimental physics will be as mysterious to the uninitiated as a Tibetan mandala. Both are records of enquiries into the nature of the universe."

"Both the physicist and the mystic want to communicate their knowledge, and when they do so with words their statements are paradoxical and full of logical contradictions."

"Whenever the essential nature of things is analysed by the intellect, it must seem absurd or paradoxical. This has always been recognized by the mystics, but has become a problem in science only very recently."

"The mathematical framework of quantum theory has passed countless successful tests and is now universally accepted as a consistent and accurate description of all atomic phenomena. The verbal interpretation, on the other hand – i.e., the metaphysics of quantum theory – is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model."

"Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction. The dance of Shiva is the dancing universe, the ceaseless flow of energy going through an infinite variety of patterns that melt into one another. For the modern physicists, then Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter. As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomenon. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our times, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance."

"The mystic and the physicist arrive at the same conclusion; one starting from the inner realm, the other from the outer world. The harmony between their views confirms the ancient Indian wisdom that Brahman, the ultimate reality without, is identical to Atman, the reality within."

"Mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches; scientists understand its branches but not its roots. Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but man needs both."

"We shall see how the two foundations of twentieth-century physics - quantum theory and relativity - both force us to see the world very much in the way a Hindu, Buddhist or Taoist sees it .."

"My main professional interest during the 1970s has been in the dramatic change of concepts and ideas that has occurred in physics during the first three decades of the century, and that is still being elaborated in our current theories of matter. The new concepts in physics have brought about a profound change in our world view; from the mechanistic conception of Descartes and Newton to a holistic and ecological view, a view which I have found to be similar to the views of mystics of all ages and traditions."

"What we need, then, is a new 'paradigm' – a new vision of reality; a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions, and values. The beginnings of this change, of the shift from the mechanistic to the holistic conception of reality, are already visible in all fields and are likely to dominate the present decade. The various manifestations and implications of this 'paradigm shift' are the subject of this book. The sixties and seventies have generated a whole series of social movements that all seem to go in the same direction, emphasizing different aspects of the new vision of reality. So far, most of these movements still operate separately and have not yet recognized how their intentions interrelate. The purpose of this book is to provide a coherent conceptual framework that will help them recognize the communality of their aims. Once this happens, we can expect the various movements to flow together and form a powerful force for social change. The gravity and global extent of our current crisis indicate that this change is likely to result in a transformation of unprecedented dimensions, a turning point for the planet as a whole."

"At the beginning of the last two decades of our century, we find ourselves in a state of profound, world-wide crisis. It is a complex, multi-dimensional crisis whose facets touch every aspect of our lives – our health and livelihood, the quality of our environment and our social relationships, our economy, technology, and politics. It is a crisis of intellectual, moral, and spiritual dimensions; a crisis of a scale and urgency unprecedented in recorded human history. For the first time we have to face the very real threat of extinction of the human race and of all life on this planet."

"In biology the Cartesian view of living organisms as machines, constructed from separate parts, still provides the dominant conceptual framework. Although Descartes' simple mechanistic biology could not be carried very far and had to be modified considerably during the subsequent three hundred years, the belief that all aspects of living organisms can be understood by reducing them to their smallest constituents, and by studying the mechanisms through which these interact, lies at the very basis of most contemporary biological thinking. This passage from a current textbook on modern biology is a clear expression of the reductionist credo: 'One of the acid tests of understanding an object is the ability to put it together from its component parts. Ultimately, molecular biologists will attempt to subject their understanding of cell structure and function to this sort of test by trying to synthesize a cell."

"As Eastern thought has begun to interest a significant number of people, and meditation is no longer viewed with ridicule or suspicion, mysticism is being taken seriously even within the scientific community An increasing number of scientists are aware that mystical thought provides a consistent and relevant philosophical back ground to the theories of Contemporary science, a conception of the world in which the scientific discoveries of men and women can be in perfect harmony with their SpirItual aims and religious beliefs."

"At the subatomic level, matter does not exist with certainty at definite places, but rather shows "tendencies to exist," and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show "tendencies to occur.""

"While the new physics was developing in the 20th century, the mechanistic Cartesian world view and the principles of Newtonian physics maintained their strong influence on Western scientific thinking, and even today many scientists still hold to the mechanistic paradigm, although physicists themselves have gone beyond it. However, the new conception of the universe that has emerged from modern physics does not mean that Newtonian physics is wrong, or that quantum theory, or relativity theory, is right. Modern science has come to realize that all scientific theories are approximations to the true nature of reality; and that each theory is valid for a certain range of phenomena."

"The term "paradigm," from the Greek paradeigma ("pattern"), was used by Kuhn to denote a conceptual framework shared by a community of scientists and providing them with model problems and solutions"

"[Capra for instance, uses the term "Paradigm" to mean] the totality of thoughts, perceptions, and values that form a particular vision of reality, a vision that is the basis of the way a society organizes itself"

"In 1929, Heisenberg spent some time in India as the guest of the celebrated Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, with whom he had long conversations about science and Indian philosophy. This introduction to Indian thought brought Heisenberg great comfort, he told me. He began to see that the recognition of relativity, interconnectedness, and impermanence as fundamental aspects of physical reality, which had been so difficult for himself and his fellow physicists, was the very basis of the Indian spiritual traditions. “After these conversations with Tagore,” he said, “some of the ideas that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense. That was a great help for me.”"

"The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realise that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent."

"The ideas set forth by organismic biologists during the first half of the twentieth century helped to give birth to a new way of thinking — "systems thinking" — in terms of connectedness, relationships, context. According to the systems view, the essential properties of an organism, or living system, are properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. They arise from the interactions and relationships among the parts. These properties are destroyed when the system is dissected, either physically or theoretically, into isolated elements. Although we can discern individual parts in any system, these parts are not isolated, and the nature of the whole is always different from the mere sum of its parts. The systems view of life is illustrated beautifully and abundantly in the writings of Paul Weiss, who brought systems concepts to the life sciences from his earlier studies of engineering and spent his whole life exploring and advocating a full organismic conception of biology."

"The realization that systems are integrated wholes that cannot be understood by analysis was even more shocking in physics than in biology. Ever since Newton, physicists had believed that all physical phenomena could be reduced to the properties of hard and solid material particles. In the 1920s, however, quantum theory forced them to accept the fact that the solid material objects of classical physics dissolve at the subatomic level into wavelike patterns of probabilities. These patterns, moreover, do not represent probabilities of things, but rather probabilities of interconnections. The subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities but can be understood only as interconnections, or correlations, among various processes of observation and measurement. In other words, subatomic particles are not “things” but interconnections among things, and these, in turn, are interconnections among other things, and so on. In quantum theory we never end up with any “things”; we always deal with interconnections."

"In the Germany of the 1920s, the Weimar Republic, both orga­nismic biology and Gestalt psychology were part of a larger intellectual trend that saw itself as a protest movement against the increasing fragmentation and alienation of human nature. The entire Weimar culture was characterized by an antimechanistic outlook, a "hunger for wholeness". Organismic biology, Gestalt psychology, ecology, and, later on, general systems theory all grew out of this holistic zeitgeist."

"Tektology was the first attempt in the history of science to arrive at a systematic formulation of the principles of organization operating in living and nonliving systems."

"Before the 1940s the terms "system" and "systems thinking" had been used by several scientists, but it was Bertalanffy's concepts of an open system and a general systems theory that established systems thinking as a major scientific movement"

"With the subsequent strong support from cybernetics, the concepts of systems thinking and systems theory became integral parts of the established scientific language, and led to numerous new methodologies and applications - systems engineering, systems analysis, systems dynamics, and so on."

"The Buddhist doctrine of impermanence includes the notion that there is no self... It holds that the idea of a separate, individual self is an illusion, just another form of maya, an intellectual concept that has no reality. To cling to this idea of a separate self leads to the same pain and suffering (duhkha) as the adherence to any other fixed category of thought."

"There is no self-awareness in ecosystems, no language, no consciousness, and no culture; and therefore no justice and democracy; but also no greed or dishonesty."

"Understanding ecological interdependence means understanding relationships. It requires the shifts of perception that are characteristic of systems thinking—from the parts to the whole, from objects to relationships, from contents to patterns. ...Nourishing the community means nourishing those relationships."

"A major clash between economics and ecology derives from the fact that nature is cyclical, whereas our industrial systems are linear. Our businesses take resources, transform them into products plus waste, and sell the products to consumers, who discard more waste..."

"The so-called free market does not provide consumers with proper information, because the social and environmental costs of production are not part of the current economic models. ...an ecological tax reform would be strictly revenue neutral, shifting the tax burden from income taxes to "eco-taxes." …the taxes would be added to existing products, forms of energy, services, and materials, so that prices would better reflect true costs."

"Partnership—the tendency to associate, establish links, live inside one another, and cooperate—is one of the hallmarks of life."

"Economics emphasizes competition, expansion, and domination; ecology emphasizes cooperation, conservation, and partnership."

"Lack of flexibility manifests itself as stress. ...stress will occur when one or more variables of the system are pushed to their extreme values, which induces increased rigidity throughout the system."

"The principle of flexibility... suggests a corresponding strategy of conflict resolution. ...the community will need stability and change, order and freedom, tradition and innovation. ...these unavoidable conflicts are much better resolved by establishing a dynamic balance."

"A diverse community is a resilient community, capable of adapting to changing situations."

"These, then, are some of the basic principles of ecology—interdependence, recycling, partnership, flexibiility, diversity, and, as a consequence of all those, sustainability ...the survival of humanity will depend on our ecological literacy, on our ability to understand these principles of ecology and live accordingly."

"One of the key insights of the systems approach has been the realization that the network is a pattern that is common to all life. Wherever we see life, we see networks."

"Organizations need to undergo fundamental changes, both in order to adapt to the new business environment and to become ecologically sustainable."

"Peter Senge (1990), Fritjof Capra (1996), Peter Checkland (1999), and other researchers have transferred systems thinking principles and theories into practice by applying them to real-world organizational-wide issues, thus encouraging the creation and development of learning organizations."

"... most physicists would probably agree that the place of local fields is nowhere so secure as in the theory of photons and gravitons, whose properties seem indissolubly linked with the space-time concepts of gauge invariance (of the second kind) and/or Einstein's equivalence principle."

"As everyone today knows, in specifying the value of a gauge coupling constant it is necessary to say not only what its value is but where — that is at what normalization scale — it has that value."

"Elementary particles are terribly boring, which is one reason why we're so interested in them."

"Considering the pervasive importance of quantum mechanics in modern physics, it is odd how rarely one hears of efforts to test quantum mechanics experimentally with high precision.…The trouble is that it is very difficult to find any logically consistent generalization of quantum mechanics. One obvious target for generalization is the linearity of quantum mechanics, but if we arbitrarily add nonlinear terms to the Schrodinger equation, how do we know that the theory we obtain will have a sensible physical interpretation? At least in part, it is the dearth of generalized versions of quantum mechanics that has made it so hard to plan experimental tests of quantum mechanics."

"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."

"So what happens to the effective field theories of electroweak, strong, and gravitational interactions at energies of order 1015–1018 GeV? I know of only two plausible alternatives. One possibility is that the theory remains a quantum field theory, but one in which the finite or infinite number of renormalized couplings do not run off to infinity with increasing energy, but hit a fixed point of the renormalizable group equations. ... The other possibility, which I have to admit is a priori more likely, is that at very high energy we will run into really new physics, not describable in terms of a quantum field theory. I think that by far the most likely possibility is that this will be something like a string theory."

"Either by God you mean something definite or you don't mean something definite. If by God you mean a personality who is concerned about human beings, who did all this out of love for human beings, who watches us and who intervenes, then I would have to say in the first place how do you know, what makes you think so? And in the second place, is that really an explanation? If that's true, what explains that? Why is there such a God? It isn't the end of the chain of whys, it just is another step, and you have to take the step beyond that."

"If you have bought one of those T-shirts with Maxwell's equations on the front, you may have to worry about its going out of style, but not about its becoming false. We will go on teaching Maxwellian electrodynamics as long as there are scientists."

"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

"One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment."

"In trying to get votes for the Superconducting Super Collider, I was very much involved in lobbying members of Congress, testifying to them, bothering them, and I never heard any of them talk about postmodernism or social constructivism. You have to be very learned to be that wrong."

"It seems to me that we are in the position of a company of players who have by chance found their way into a great theater. Outside, the city streets are dark and lifeless, but in the theater the lights are on, the air is warm, and the walls are wonderfully decorated. However, no scripts are found, so the players begin to improvise—a little psychological drama, a little poetry, whatever comes to mind. Some even set themselves to explain the stage machinery. The players do not forget that they are just amusing themselves, and that they will have to return to the darkness outside the theater, but while on the stage they do their best to give a good performance. I suppose that this is a rather melancholy view of human life, but melancholy is one of the distinctive creations of our species, and not without its own consolations."

"It seems that scientists are often attracted to beautiful theories in the way that insects are attracted to flowers — not by logical deduction, but by something like a sense of smell."

"There are those whose views about religion are not very different from my own, but who nevertheless feel that we should try to damp down the conflict, that we should compromise it. … I respect their views and I understand their motives, and I don't condemn them, but I'm not having it. To me, the conflict between science and religion is more important than these issues of science education or even environmentalism. I think the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief; and anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization."

"A superconductor of any kind is nothing more or less than a material in which a particular symmetry of the laws of nature, electromagnetic gauge invariance, is spontaneously broken. ... These rotations act on a two-dimensional vector, whose two components are the real and imaginary parts of the electron field, the quantum mechanical operator that in quantum field theories of matter destroys electrons. The rotation angle of the broken symmetry group can vary with location in the superconductor, and then the symmetry transformations also affect the electromagnetic potentials ... The symmetry breaking in a superconductor leaves unbroken a rotation by 180°, which simply changes the sign of the electron field. In consequence of this spontaneous symmetry breaking, products of any even number of electron fields have non-vanishing expectation values in a superconductor, though a single electron field does not. All of the dramatic exact properties of superconductors – zero electrical resistance, the expelling of magnetic fields from superconductors known as the Meissner effect, the quantization of magnetic flux through a thick superconducting ring, and the Josephson formula for the frequency of the AC current at a junction between two superconductors with different voltages – follow from the assumption that electromagnetic gauge invariance is broken in this way, with no need to inquire into the mechanism by which the symmetry is broken."

"If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. And that—in a way, although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we're starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves. That's not an entirely despicable role for us to play."

"There is a hope, which I nurse but I don't see being realized, that eventually we'll find that quantum mechanics as we know it now is just an approximation ..."

"'s kindness to me and my wife went beyond his help with this research. He had my wife and me to dinner at his house and at that dinner I went to the bathroom and I learned something about Källén that I don't think anyone knows. And that is that he had hand towels embroidered with the . And I mentioned this to Mrs. Källén and she said they were a present from Pauli."

"A theorist today is hardly considered respectable if he or she has not introduced at least one new particle for which there is no experimental evidence."

"In fact, there is something puzzling about the Higgs mass we now do observe. It is generally known as the “hierarchy problem.” Since it is the Higgs mass that sets the scale for the masses of all other known elementary particles, one might guess that it should be similar to another mass that plays a fundamental role in physics, the so-called Planck mass, which is the fundamental unit of mass in the theory of gravitation. (It is the mass of hypothetical particles whose gravitational attraction for one another would be as strong as the electric force between two electrons separated by the same distance.) But the Planck mass is about a hundred thousand trillion times larger than the Higgs mass. So, although the Higgs particle is so heavy that a giant particle collider was needed to create it, we still have to ask, why is the Higgs mass so small?"

"There’s something I’ve been working on for more than a year — maybe it’s just an old man’s obsession, but I’m trying to find an approach to quantum mechanics that makes more sense than existing approaches. I’ve just finished editing the second edition of my book, Lectures on Quantum Mechanics, in which I think I strengthen the argument that none of the existing interpretations of quantum mechanics are entirely satisfactory."

"It doesn't work to build half an accelerator. The particles need to go all the way around."

"Having taught quantum mechanics and written a book about it recently — a technical treatise — I find that I am not as happy about quantum mechanics as I used to be — not as dismissive of the critics. And it's a bad sign in particular that those physicists who are happy about quantum mechanics — who don't see anything wrong with it — don't agree with each other about what it means. ... And the problem has specifically to do with the act of measurement."

"Symmetry is not enough by itself. In electromagnetism, for example, if you write down all the symmetries we know, such as Lorentz invariance and gauge invariance, you don’t get a unique theory that predicts the magnetic moment of the electron. The only way to do that is to add the principle of renormalisability – which dictates a high degree of simplicity in the theory and excludes these additional terms that would have changed the magnetic moment of the electron from the value Schwinger calculated in 1948."

"One of the things that excited me so much about quantum chromodynamics after the work of Gross and Wilczek and Politzer was that it seemed to provide a rational explanation for what had always been mysterious to me — the fact that there were symmetries, like parity conservation, charge conjugation invariance, and strangeness conservation, that were very good symmetries of the strong and electromagnetic interactions — as far as we knew exact — and yet were not respected by the weak interactions. Why should nature have ... symmetries that are symmetries of part of nature but not other parts of nature?"

"... I found that I was unable to explain the foundations of quantum mechanics in a way that I found entirely satisfactory."

"In the Standard Model the masses of quarks and leptons take values proportional to the coupling constants in the interaction of these fermions with scalar fields, constants that in the context of this model are entirely arbitrary. But the peculiar hierarchical pattern of lepton and quark masses seems to call for a larger theory, in which in some leading approximation the only quarks and leptons with non-zero mass are those of the third generation, the tau, top, and bottom, with the other lepton and quark masses arising from some sort of radiative correction. Such theories were actively considered ... soon after the completion of the Standard Model, but interest in this program seems to have lapsed subsequently ..."

"... there are particles ... that we have never seen in a laboratory but astronomers tell us make up most of the matter in the universe — the so-called . It's dark because it doesn't radiate — it doesn't interact with light. We just know about it because of its gravitational field. What is the dark matter? ... We have a lot of ideas — all going in different directions. We don't know which is the right idea."

"Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. ...The most important thing accomplished by the three-degree radiation background in 1965 was to force us to take seriously the idea that there was an early universe."

"It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning. ... It is very hard to realise that this is all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realise that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."

"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."

"This book is written for readers who may not be familiar with classical physics, but who are willing to pick up enough... to be able to understand the rich tangle of ideas and experiments that make up the history of twentieth century physics. This background is provided in a number of "flashback"sections on the nature of electricity, Newton's laws of motion, electric and magnetic forces, conservation of energy, atomic weights and so on... inserted wherever... needed to allow the reader to understand the next point in the history. ...Generally ...the student or reader is ...is offered only one path ...ideal for ...physicists, but for many ...an impassable desert ...I invite the reader to plunge immediately into... key topics ...using each ...as an entreé into just those concepts and methods ...needed to understand that topic. ...Most of what I know about physics and mathematics I have learned only when there was no alternative ...in order to get on with my work. ...So the plan of this book may be closer to the actual education of working scientists than many ...My hope ...that this book may contribute to a radical revision in the way ...science is brought to the nonscientists. ...This book is intended to be comprehensible to readers who have no prior background in science, and no familiarity with mathematics beyond arithmetic. ...Appendices present some of the calculations that underlie the reasoning in the main text. ...The great scientific achievements described here form the a large part of the soil from which our... recent harvest of discoveries have sprung. ...I hope that scientists find some ...enlightening. I also hope that this book will be enjoyed by students and practitioners of the history of science."

"This is not intended to be yet another popular book that offers... the latest news in physics. Still, it would be a pity not to show the links between the historic discoveries... and the work of fundamental physics today. I have therefore taken the opportunity... of this new edition to point out these links... I now carry the story of the discovery of elementary particles... to the present day."

"By the end of the nineteenth century the idea of the atom had become familiar... but not yet universally accepted. Partly because of the heritage of Newton and Dalton, there was a disposition to use atomic theories in England. ...Resistance to atomism persisted in Germany ...under the influence of an empiricist school... centered on Ernst Mach... many [German physicists and chemists] held back from incorporating into... theories anything that—like atoms—could not be observed directly. ...It is said that the opposition to Boltzmann's work by the followers of Mach contributed to Boltzmann's suicide..."

"Under ordinary circumstances, visible light is absorbed or emitted when the electrons in an atom or molecule are excited into orbits of higher energy, or sink back into orbits of lower energy, respectively."

"The s and s in nuclei, like the electrons surrounding the nuclei, can be excited to states of higher energy or... fall back to a state of lower energy, but the energies... are typically a million times those need to excite the electrons..."

"Electrons are believed to be absolutely stable, and protons and neutrons (when bound...) live at least 1030 years. With few exceptions, all other particles have very short lifetimes..."

"The reader may... wonder why when amber is rubbed with fur the electrons go from the fur to the amber, but when glass is rubbed with silk the electrons go from the glass to the silk? ...[W]e still don't know. The question involves the physics of surfaces of complex solids... In a purely empirical way, there has been developed... the triboelectric sequence... The electrification is most intense for objects... well separated in the... sequence. ...It is ironic that we still do not have a detailed understanding of frictional electrification, even though it was the first... to be studied... But... often... science progresses... by selecting problems that are as free as possible from irrelevant complications and... provide opportunities to get at fundamental principles..."

"In 1709 Hauksbee observed that when air inside a glass vessel was evacuated... [to] 1/60 normal air pressure and the vessel was attached to... frictional electricity, a strange light would be seen... Flashes... similar... had... been noticed in the partial vacuum above... mercury in barometers. ...[T]oday we know ...[w]hen an electric current flows through a gas, the electrons knock into the gas atoms and give up some... energy... reemitted as as light. Today's fluorescent lights and neon signs are based on the same principle... but even at 1/60 atmospheric pressure the air interfered too much with the flow of electrons to allow their nature to be discovered. Real progress became possible only when the gas... could be removed..."

"In 1858 Johann Heinrich Geissler... invented a pump that used columns of mercury as pistons and consequently needed no gaskets. ...Geissler's pump was used... by ... [M]etal plates inside a glass tube were connected to a powerful source of electricity. ...[W]hen almost all of the air was evacuated ...the light disappeared through most of the tube, but a greenish glow appeared ...near the cathode. ...A few years later, ... introduced a name... s. We know now that these rays are streams of electrons. ...But this was far from obvious to nineteenth century physicists. ...Plücker ...observed that the position of the glow on the walls of the tube could be moved by ...a magnet ..."

"Plücker's student J. W. Hittorf... observed that solid bodies... near a small cathode would cast shadows... [and] deduced... the rays travel... in straight lines."

"Hertz showed... the... rays were not appreciably deflected by electrified metal plates. This seemed to rule out... electrically charged particles... Hertz concluded the rays were some sort of wave... the nature of light was... not well understood, and a magnetic deflection did not seem impossible. In 1891 Hertz made a further observation... to support the wave theory... The rays could penetrate thin foils of gold and other metals, much as light penetrates glass. ...We know now that... the... particles were traveling so fast, and the electric forces were so weak... the deflection was too small to observe."

"Perrin... showed in 1895 that the rays deposit negative electrical charge on a charge collector... inside... the tube."

"[I]n 1897 Thomson... detected a deflection... by electric forces between the rays and the electrified metal plates. ...due largely to the use of better vacuum pumps ...to where the effects of residual gas ...became negligible. (Some evidence for... deflection was [also] found... by Goldstein.) [D]eflection was toward the positively charged plate... away from the negatively charged one, confirming Perrin... that the rays carry negative electric charge."

"Thomson... exerted electric and magnetic forces on the rays and measured the amount... deflected."

"The laws of motion... were set out by... Newton at the beginning of... the Principia. ...[T]he key principle is ...in the Second Law... paraphrased as... the force to give an object a certain acceleration is proportional to the product of the and the ."

"Acceleration is the rate of change of . ...The units are ...velocity per unit time, or distance-per-time per time. ...[F]alling bodies ...near ...earth fall with an acceleration or 9.8 meters-per-second per second ...after the first second ...falling at speed ...9.8 meters per second, after two seconds... 19.6 ...and so on. [T]he units of velocity are length/time... and units of acceleration... (distance/time)/time, or equivalently distance/time2 ...[T]he acceleration near... Earth would be written 9.8 m/sec2 for short."

"As a special case of Newton's Second Law, a body... when acted on by zero force, will experience zero acceleration—that is, it will move with constant velocity. Newton listed this... as the First Law... The Third Law... action equals reaction: If one body exerts a force on another... the second... exerts an equal force in the opposite direction on the first."

"When the velocity and the acceleration are changing, we can define the instantaneous velocity or acceleration at any moment as the average values... over a vanishingly small time interval centered on that moment. Newton's Law actually relates the force to the instantaneous acceleration."

"Velocity, acceleration, and force are vectors... they have direction as well as magnitude. It is often convenient to describe... [vectors] in terms of their components along specified directions. ...Components of vectors can be negative as well as positive ...Newton's Second Law applies separately to each component... it says... the component of force in any direction is equal to the mass times the corresponding component of acceleration."

"When several forces act... the total force is the sum... each component of the total force is the sum of the corresponding components of the individual forces."

"Thomson used Newton's Second Law to obtain a general formula... to interpret measurements of the cathode-ray deflection... produced by... electric or magnetic forces... In his cathode ray tube, the ray particles pass through... the deflection region... subjected to electric and magnetic forces... at right angles to their original direction... then through a much longer force-free... drift region... in which they drift freely until they hit the end of the tube... [a] glowing spot... The forces exerted on the cathode ray particles give them an acceleration at right angles to the axis of the tube, so... the particles have a small component of velocity at right angles to their original motion... equal to the product of the acceleration and the time... in the [very short] deflection region... [T]he downward displacement of the ray when it hits the end of the tube is the downward velocity produced in the deflection region times the length of time... in the drift region... [T]he electric force... on a particle is proportional to the [particle's] electric charge... [U]nlike the electric force, the magnetic force... on a particle is proportional to the particle's velocity as well as its charge. By measuring... deflections due to... [both] forces, Thomson... could determine both the ray-particle velocities and the ratio of their charge and mass."

"Early speculation on about electric forces relied... on an analogy with Newton's theory of gravitational forces. At the end of Principia, Newton described gravitation as a cause that acts on the sun and the planets "according to the quantity of solid matter which they contain and propagates on all sides to immense distances, decreasing always as the inverse square of the distances." ...It was irresistible to guess that the electric force might obey a similar law, also proportional to the inverse square of the distance... with charge playing the role that mass plays..."

"(...Newton's theory... is now known only to be an approximation... for particles... not moving too fast and gravitational forces... not too strong. ...It is one of the consequences of General Relativity that gravitation is produced by and acts on energy as well as mass, so that it even affects particles of zero mass, like the photon."

"Coulomb used a... device of his own invention, the torsion balance, to measure forces between small pith balls. The inverse-square law was found to hold accurately..."

"It is... convenient to state Coulomb's law in modern terms, first used... by James Clerk Maxwell. The electric force... is always proportional to the electric charge... We call the factor of proportionality the electric field so...Electric force... = Electric charge... x Electric field"

"The years since the mid-1970s have been the most frustrating in the history of particle physics. We are paying the price of our own success: theory has advanced so far that further progress will require the study of processes at energies far beyond the reach of existing facilities. In order to break out of this impasse, physicists began in 1982 to develop plans for a scientific project of unprecedented size and cost, known as the Superconducting Super Collider."

"It is with Isaac Newton that the modern dream of a final theory really begins."

"The last thirty years of Einstein's life were largely devoted to a search for a so-called unified field theory that would unify James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism with the general theory of relativity, Einstein's theory of gravitation. Einstein's attempt was not successful, and with hindsight we can now see that it was misconceived. Not only did Einstein reject quantum mechanics; the scope of his effort was too narrow. ... Nevertheless Einstein's struggle is our struggle today. It is the search for a final theory."

"The best military historians in fact do recognize the difficulty in stating rules of generalship. They do not speak of a science of war, but rather of a pattern of military behavior that cannot be taught or stated precisely but that somehow or other sometimes helps in winning battles. This is called the art of war. In the same spirit I think that one should not hope for a science of science, the formulation of any definite rules about how scientists do or ought to behave, but only aim at a description of the sort of behavior that historically has led to scientific progress—an art of science."

"I managed to get a quick PhD — though when I got it I knew almost nothing about physics. But I did learn one big thing: that no one knows everything, and you don't have to."

"Another lesson to be learned, to continue using my oceanographic metaphor, is that while you are swimming and not sinking you should aim for rough water."

"As you will never be sure which are the right problems to work on, most of the time that you spend in the laboratory or at your desk will be wasted. If you want to be creative, then you will have to get used to spending most of your time not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientific knowledge."

"Finally, learn something about the history of science, or at a minimum the history of your own branch of science. The least important reason for this is that the history may actually be of some use to you in your own scientific work."

"Many people do simply awful things out of sincere religious belief, not using religion as a cover the way that Saddam Hussein may have done, but really because they believe that this is what God wants them to do, going all the way back to Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac because God told him to do that. Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing."

"Maybe at the very bottom of it... I really don't like God. You know, it's silly to say I don't like God because I don't believe in God, but in the same sense that I don't like Iago, or the Reverend Slope or any of the other villains of literature, the god of traditional Judaism and Christianity and Islam seems to me a terrible character. He's a god who will... who obsessed the degree to which people worship him and anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don't worship him in the right way. Now I realise that many people don't believe in that any more who call themselves Muslims or Jews or Christians, but that is the traditional God and he's a terrible character. I don't like him."

"I have a friend — or had a friend, now dead — Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it... and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too."

"There is one constant that seems to be fine tuned...and that is dark energy."

"I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just... you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?"

"In 1999 I finished my three volume book on the quantum theory of fields (..."QTF"), and... set... the task of learning... the theory underlying the great progress in cosmology in the previous two decades. ...Review articles ...gave good summaries of the data, but ...often quoted formulas without ...derivation, and sometimes ...without reference to the original derivation. Occasionally the formulas were wrong, and extremely difficult for me to rederive. ...[O]riginal ...articles sometimes had gaps in their arguments, or relied on hidden assumptions, or used unexplained notation. Often massive computer programs had taken the place of analytic studies. In many cases... it was easiest to work out the relevant theory myself. This book is the result. Its aim... self-contained explanations of the ideas and formulas... used and tested in modern cosmological observations."

"I have tried... to present analytic calculations of cosmological phenomena, and not just report results obtained elsewhere by numerical computation. The calculations... in the literature... necessarily take many details into account, which either make an analytic treatment impossible, or obscure the main physical features of the calculation. Where this is the case, I have not hesitated to sacrifice some degree of accuracy for greater transparency."

"So much has happened in cosmology since the 1960s that this book... bears little resemblance to... Gravitation and Cosmology. On occasion I refer back to (..."G&C") for material that does not seem worth repeating... Classical general relativity has not changed much since 1972 (apart from a great strengthening of its experimental verification) so it did not seem necessary to cover gravitation... I provide a brief introduction in Appendix B. Other appendices deal with technical material... I have also supplied a glossary of symbols..."

"I decided to exclude material that was highly speculative... cosmological theory in higher dimensions... anthropic reasoning... holographic cosmology... conjectures about the details of inflation, or many other new ideas. ...The present book is largely concerned with ...mainstream cosmology: ...inflation driven by one or more scalar fields ...followed by a big bang dominated by radiation, , baryonic matter, and ."

"Where I knew them I have included references to... the Cornell archive, ...arxiv.org, as well as to the published literature. ...I have quoted the latest measurements of cosmological s known to me, in part... to give the reader a sense of what is... observationally possible. ...I have not tried to combine measurements from observations of different types because... it would [not] add... additional physical insight and any... cosmological concordance would... soon be out of date."

"I hope the readers will let me know of any mistakes... I will post them on... zippy.ph.utexas.edu/~weinberg/corrections.html."

"The visible universe seems the same in all directions... larger than about 300 million light years. The ... (...[~]one part in 105) in the cosmic microwave background... radiation... traveling... [~]14 billion years, supporting the conclusion..."

"Almost all of modern cosmology is based on this Robert-Walker metric, at least as a first approximation."

"Consider the geometry of a three-dimensional homogeneous and isotropic space. ...[G]eometry is encoded in a metric g_{ij}(\mathbf{x}) (with i and j running over the three coordinate directions), or equivalently a line element ds^2 \equiv g_{ij} dx^i dx^j, with summation over repeated indices... ds is the proper distance between \mathbf{x} and \mathbf{x}+\mathbf{dx}, meaning... the distance measured by a surveyor who uses a... Cartesian [coordinate system] in a small neighborhood of... point \mathbf{x}.) One... homogeneous isotropic three-dimensional space with positive definite lengths is flat space, with line elementds^2=d\mathbf{x}^2...The coordinate transformations that leave this invariant are... ordinary three-dimensional rotations and translations. ...Another ...possibility is a four-dimensional with some radius a, with line elementds^2=d \mathbf{x}^2+dz^2,\;\;z^2 + \mathbf{x}^2 = a^2,...Here the transformations that leave the line element invariant are four-dimensional rotations; the direction of \mathbf{x} can be changed to any other direction by a four-dimensional rotation that does not change z. ...[T]he only other possibility (up to a coordinate transformation) is a hyperspherical surface in four-dimensional , with line elementds^2 = d\mathbf{x}^2 - dz^2,\;\;z^2 - \mathbf{x}^2 = a^2,...where a^2 is (so far) an arbitrary positive constant. The coordinate transformations that leave this invariant are four-dimensional pseudo-rotations, just like s, but with z instead of time."

"[In] the case of Euclidean space...ds^2 = a^2[d\mathbf{x}^2 + K \frac{(\mathbf{x} \cdot d\mathbf{x}^2)}{1-K\mathbf{x}^2}]...where K ="

"[T]o extend this to the geometry of spacetime... include a term... in the spacetime line element, with a now an arbitrary function of time (known as the Robertson-Walker scale factor):d\tau^2 \equiv -g_{\mu\nu}(x) dx^\mu dx^\nu = dt^2-a^2(t)[d\mathbf{x}^2 + K \frac{(\mathbf{x} \cdot d\mathbf{x}^2)}{1-K\mathbf{x}^2}]"

"Consider... [the formula given by special relativity for the magnitude of the ]P \equiv m_0 \sqrt{g_{ij}\frac{dx^i}{d\tau}\frac{dx^j}{d\tau}}...where d\tau^2 = dt^2 - g_{ij} dx^i dx^j. [This holds because in] a locally inertial Cartesian coordinate system, for which g_{ij} = \delta_{ij}, we have d\tau = dt\sqrt{1 - \mathbf {v}^2} where v^i = \frac{dx^i}{dt}... [The P] is evidently invariant under arbitrary changes in the spatial coordinates, so we can evaluate it... in Robertson-Walker coordinates. ...[T]o save work ...adopt a spatial coordinate system in which the particle position is near the origin x^i = 0, where \tilde{g}_{ij} = \delta_{ij} + \mathit0(\mathbf{x}), and we can therefore ignore the purely spatial components of \Gamma_{jk}^i of the . General relativity gives [the momentum]... with a metric g_{ij} = a^2(t)\delta_{ij}...P(t) \propto 1/a(t)... for any non-zero mass, however small... Hence, although for photons both m_0 and d\tau vanish... [the momentum relation] is still valid."

"[T]he property of being a geodesic is invariant under coordinate transformations... so the path of the photon or particle will... be a geodesic in any spatial coordinate system..."

"In 1929 Hubble announced... a "roughly linear" relation between and distance. ...His data points ...did not really support a linear relation. But in the early 1930s he had measured redshifts and distances out to the , with a redshift z \eqsim 0.02, corresponding to... 7,000 km/sec and a linear relation... was evident. The conclusion... the universe is really expanding. ...At the time of writing, the largest... z=6.96. It may eventually become possible to measure the expansion rate H(t) \equiv \dot{a}(t)/a(t) at times t earlier than the present, by observing the change in very accurately measured redshifts of individual galaxies over times as short as a decade."

"Modern cosmological theories can exhibit horizons of two... types. which limit the distances at which past events can be observed or at which it will ever be possible to observe future events. These are called Rindler s and s, respectively."

"[T]he distance at present isd_{\mathrm{max}}(t_0) = \frac{1}{H_0} \int_{0}^{1} \frac{dx}{x^2 \sqrt{\Omega_\Lambda+\Omega_K x^{-2}+\Omega_M x^{-3}}}...[T]here may have been a time before the radiation-dominated era in which there was nothing in the universe but , in which case the particle horizon distance would... be infinite. But as far as telescopic observations... [d_{max}(t_0)] gives the proper distance beyond which we cannot now see."

"In the case where the universe does not recollapse, the proper distance to the is...d_{MAX}(t) = a(t) \int_{0}^{r_{MAX}(t)} \frac{dr}{\sqrt{1-Kr^2}} = a(t)\int_{0}^{\infty} \frac{dt'}{a(t')}... In the absence of a cosmological constant, a(t) grows like t^{\frac{2}{3}}, and the integral diverges, so there is no event horizon. But with a cosmological constant, a(t) will eventually grow as exp(Ht) with H = H_0 \Omega^{1/2}_\Lambda constant and... an event horizon... approaches... d_{MAX}(\infty) = 1/H. As time passes all sources of light outside our gravitationally bound will move beyond this... and become unobservable. The same is true for the quintessence theory... In that case a(t) eventually grows as exp(const \times\, t^{2/{(2+\frac{\alpha}{2})}}), so for any \alpha \ge 0 the integral... [d_{MAX}(t)] converges."

"The development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s was the greatest advance in physical science since the work of Isaac Newton. It was not easy; the ideas of quantum mechanics present a profound departure from ordinary human intuition. Quantum mechanics has won acceptance through its success. It is essential to modern atomic, molecular, nuclear, and elementary particle physics, and to a great deal of chemistry and condensed matter physics as well."

"The principles of quantum mechanics are so contrary to ordinary intuition that they can best be motivated by taking a look at their prehistory."

"Perhaps the most important immediate consequence of Planck’s work was to provide long-sought values for atomic constants."

"Planck’s quantization assumption applied to the matter that emits and absorbs radiation, not to radiation itself. As George Gamow later remarked, Planck thought that radiation was like butter; butter itself comes in any quantity, but it can be bought and sold only in multiples of one quarter pound. It was Albert Einstein (1879–1955) who in 1905 proposed that the energy of radiation of frequency ν was itself an integer multiple of hν."

"In this derivation Bohr had relied on the old idea of classical radiation theory, that the frequencies of spectral lines should agree with the frequency of the electron’s orbital motion, but he had assumed this only for the largest orbits, with large n. The light frequencies he calculated for transitions between lower states, such as n=2 → n=1, did not at all agree with the orbital frequency of the initial or final state. So Bohr’s work represented another large step away from classical physics."

"Heisenberg’s starting point was the philosophical judgment, that a physical theory should not concern itself with things like electron orbits in atoms that can never be observed. This is a risky assumption, but in this case it served Heisenberg well."

"To start, we will consider a single particle moving in three space dimensions under the influence of a general central potential. Later we will specialize to the case of a Coulomb potential, and work out the spectrum of hydrogen. One other classic problem, the harmonic oscillator, will be treated at the end of this chapter."

"My own conclusion is that today there is no interpretation of quantum mechanics that does not have serious flaws. This view is not universally shared. Indeed, many physicists are satisfied with their own interpretation of quantum mechanics. But different physicists are satisfied with different interpretations. In my view, we ought to take seriously the possibility of finding some more satisfactory other theory, to which quantum mechanics is only a good approximation."

"Steven Weinberg is famous as a scientist, but he thinks deeply and writes elegantly about many other things besides science.… he is not only preeminent as a mathematical physicist. He has also made important contributions to the discussion of history and politics."

"Asked what single mystery, if he could choose, he would like to see solved in his lifetime, Weinberg doesn’t have to think for long: he wants to be able to explain the observed pattern of quark and lepton masses."

"Weinberg’s paper “A Model of Leptons”, published in Physical Review Letters (PRL) on 20 November 1967, determined the direction of high-energy particle physics through the final decades of the 20th century. Just two and a half pages long, it is one of the most highly cited papers in the history of theoretical physics. Its contents are the core of the Standard Model of particles physics, now almost half a century old and still passing every experimental test."

"Here he unwittingly puts his finger on what I believe is the actual source of the near-century of discomfort and disagreement. There is an implicit assumption, shared by almost all physicists, that the scientist must be separated from the science. The usual appeals to measurement with classical outcomes, it seems to me, are unsuccessful attempts to objectify and impersonalize processes in which an individual scientist acts on and is reacted upon by the world. The collapse of the wavefunction after measurement represents nothing more than the updating of that scientist’s expectations, based on his or her experience of the world’s response to the measurement. Weinberg hopes to keep the scientist out of the laws of nature, but our chronic failure to agree on the meaning of quantum mechanics demonstrates the futility of his hope. Nor does Weinberg’s hope make sense to me. Science is a highly developed form of human language. Embedded in books and papers, it is a distillation of the communicated individual experiences of all scientists. Why insist that science should make no reference to the process that has established it? The laws of quantum mechanics are exactly the same for everyone who uses them. In that important sense they are entirely objective. If a scientific law involves both the scientist and the world, it does not mean that science can tell us nothing about people, as Weinberg mysteriously worries, any more than it means that science can tell us nothing about the world."

"By inclination, Weinberg is an extreme reductionist. But he is also a realist and acknowledges when something is not working the way he might want it to. In 1987 the arch-reductionist concluded that certain facts seemed to be inconsistent with any explanation based on the usual kind of mathematical reasoning. Instead, it seemed they might be true only because if they were not, we observers could not be here to observe them. Weinberg undoubtedly disliked such anthropic-principle explanations. But when, to his disappointment, he found that the anthropic principle might explain the apparent vanishing of the cosmological constant, he said so loudly and clearly, despite the great hostility of the physics community toward the principle."

"... I vividly remember sitting in front of Wheeler, who told me his opinion of the leading particle theorists at various major universities and ended with the pronouncement that Steve Weinberg was the best of the upcoming generation."

"It is not even impossible to imagine that the effects of an atomic war fought with greatly perfected weapons and pushed by the utmost determination will endanger the survival of man."

"If we stay strong, then I believe we can stabilize the world and have peace based on force. Now, peace based on force is not as good as peace based on agreement, but in the terrible world in which we live, in the world where the Russians have enslaved many millions of human beings, in the world where they have killed men, I think that for the time being the only peace we can have is the peace based on force. Furthermore, I do not think that this peace based on force is, can be, or should be, an ultimate end. Our ultimate end must be precisely what Dr. Pauling says, peace based on agreement, on understanding, on universally agreed and enforced law. I think this is a wonderful idea, but peace based on force buys the necessary time, and in this time we can work for better understanding, for closer collaboration, first with the countries which are closest to us, which we understand better, our allies, the western countries, the NATO countries, which believe in human liberties as we do. Then, as soon as possible, with the rest of the free world, and eventually, I hope, with the whole world, including Russia, even though it may take many years to come."

"I don't want to kill anybody. I am passionately opposed to killing, but I'm even more passionately fond of freedom. The freedom of Dr. Pauling and of myself expressing our opinions freely on any subject, however broad, however far removed of our proper competence, but particularly, to be able to express our opinions in the fields we really know; this would not be possible in Russia."

"Ladies and gentlemen, I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. First of all, these energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels. But I would [...] like to mention another reason why we probably have to look for additional fuel supplies. And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. [....] Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. [....] The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it? Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect [....] It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe."

"At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the radiation leaving the earth. Our planet will get a little warmer. It is hard to say whether it will be 2 degrees Fahrenheit or only one or 5. But when the temperature does rise by a few degrees over the whole globe, there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise. Well, I don’t know whether they will cover the Empire State Building or not, but anyone can calculate it by looking at the map and noting that the icecaps over Greenland and over Antarctica are perhaps five thousand feet thick."

"On May 7, a few weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington. I was there to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous."

"By having simplified what is known, physicists have been led into realms which as yet are anything but simple. That at some time, they, too, will appear as simple consequences of a theory of which no one has yet dreamed is not a statement of fact. It is a statement of faith."

"The preservation of peace and the improvement of the lot of all people require us to have faith in the rationality of humans. If we have this faith and if we pursue understanding, we have not the promise but at least the possibility of success. We should not be misled by promises. Humanity in all its history has repeatedly escaped disaster by a hair's breadth. Total security has never been available to anyone. To expect it is unrealistic; to imagine that it can exist is to invite disaster. What we do have in our technological capacities is an opportunity to use our inventiveness, our creativity, our wisdom and our understanding of our fellow beings to create a future world that is a little better than the one in which we live today."

"There's no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool."

"A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective."

"Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution."

"Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not."

"No, I'm the infamous Edward Teller."

"We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding."

"Religion was not an issue in my family; indeed, it was never discussed. My only religious training came because the Minta required that all students take classes in their respective religions. My family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement, when we all fasted. Yet my father said prayers for his parents on Saturdays and on all the Jewish holidays. The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if He existed: We needed Him desperately but had not seen Him in many thousands of years."

"I contributed; Ulam did not. I'm sorry I had to answer it in this abrupt way. Ulam was rightly dissatisfied with an old approach. He came to me with a part of an idea which I already had worked out and difficulty getting people to listen to. He was willing to sign a paper. When it then came to defending that paper and really putting work into it, he refused. He said, "I don't believe in it.""

"My name is not Strangelove. I don't know about Strangelove. I'm not interested in Strangelove. What else can I say?... Look. Say it three times more, and I throw you out of this office."

"The eyes of childhood are magnifying lenses."

"When you fight for a desperate cause and have good reasons to fight, you usually win."

"At the end of the war, most people wanted to stop. I didn't. Because here was more knowledge. And in the coming uncertain period, with a dangerous man like Stalin around, and our incomplete knowledge, I felt that more knowledge is necessary. Among the people who knew a great deal about the hydrogen bomb, I was the only advocate of it. And that is, I think, my contribution. Not that I invented it, others would have — and others in the Soviet Union did. But I was the one person who put knowledge, and the availability of knowledge, above everything else."

"There is no case where ignorance should be preferred to knowledge — especially if the knowledge is terrible."

"Secrecy in science does not work. Withholding information does more damage to us than to our competitors."

"When you come to the end of all the light you know, and it's time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on or you will be taught to fly."

"If we could have ended the war by showing the power of science without killing a single person, all of us would now be happier, more reasonable and much more safe."

"I hate doubt, yet I am certain that doubt is the only way to approach anything worth believing in."

"I believe in good. It is an ephemeral and elusive quality. It is the center of my beliefs, but it cannot be strengthened by talking about it."

"I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil."

"I believe in excellence. It is a basic need of every human soul. All of us can be excellent, because, fortunately, we are exceedingly diverse in our ambitions and talents."

"I believe that no endeavor that is worthwhile is simple in prospect; if it is right, it will be simple in retrospect."

"A stands for atom; it is so small No one has ever seen it at all. B stands for bombs; the bombs are much bigger. So, brother, do not be too fast on the trigger. F stands for fission; that is what things do When they get wobbly and big and must split in two. And just to confound the atomic confusion What fission has done may be undone by fusion. H has become a most ominous letter; It means something bigger, if not something better. S stands for secret; you can keep it forever — Provided there's no one abroad who is clever."

"(Are there any scientists who may be well known, but who repulse you?) IA: Oh, sure. Edward Teller. I mean, there's my idea of a scientific villain."

"Business institutions universities Both are quite the circus where the killer wants his way I think of Edward Teller and his moribund reprise Then I look to Nevada and I can't believe my eyes It's time for him to die!"

"Dr. Teller has a mind very different from mine. I think one needs both kinds of minds to make a successful project. I think Dr. Teller's mind runs particularly to making brilliant inventions, but what he needs is some control, some other person who is more able to find out just what is the scientific fact about the matter. Some other person who weeds out the bad from the good ideas."

"Teller's mistake was his failure to foresee that a large section of the public would not consider his appearance at the Oppenheimer hearing to be decent behavior. Had Teller not appeared, the outcome of the hearing would almost certainly have been unaffected, and the moral force of Teller's position would not have been tainted."

"Before Bethe married, he was so often a guest in the Teller home that he became almost one of the family. In April, 1954, that was all over. There could be no real reconciliation. Bethe had lost one of his oldest friends. But Teller had lost more. Teller, by lending his voice to the cause of Oppenheimer's enemies, had lost not only the friendship but the respect of many of his colleagues, and he was portrayed by newspaper writers and cartoonists as a Judas, a man who had betrayed his leader for the sake of personal gain."

"When we came back through the trees to the house, we heared a strange sound coming through the open door. The children stopped their chatter and we all stood outside the door and listened. It was my old friend from long ago, Bach's Prelude No. 8 in E-flat minor. Superbly played. Played just the way my father used to play it. For a moment I was completely disoriented. I thought: What the devil is my father doing here in California? We stood in front of our Berkeley house and listened to that prelude. Whoever was playing it was putting into it his whole heart and soul. The sound floated up to us like a chorus of mourning from the depths, as if the spirits in the underworld were dancing to a slow pavane. We waited until the music came to an end and then walked in. There, sitting at the piano, was Edward Teller. We asked him to go on playing, but he excused himself."

"The physicist Edward Teller, known as the “father of the H-bomb,” went further to deny that omnicide—a concept he derided—was remotely feasible. In answer to a question I posed to him as late as 1982, he said emphatically it was “impossible” to kill by any imaginable use of thermonuclear weapons that he had co-invented “more than a quarter of the earth’s population.” At the time, I thought of this assurance, ironically, as his perception of “the glass being three-quarters full.” (Teller was, along with Kahn, Henry Kissinger, and the former Nazi missile designer Wernher von Braun, one of Kubrick’s inspirations for the character of Dr. Strangelove.) And Teller’s estimate was closely in line with what the JCS actually planned to do in 1961, though a better estimate (allowing for the direct effects of fire, which JSC calculations have always omitted) would have been closer to one-third to one-half of total omnicide. But the JCS were mistaken in 1961, and so was Herman Kahn in 1960, and so was Teller in 1982. Nobody’s perfect. Just one year after Teller had made this negative assertion (at a hearing of the California state legislature which we both addressed, on the Bilateral Nuclear Weapons Freeze Initiative), the first papers appeared on the nuclear-winter effects of smoke injected into the stratosphere by firestorms generated by a thousand or more of the fifty thousand existing H-bombs used on cities. Contrary to Kahn and Teller, an American Doomsday Machine already existed in 1961—and had for years—in the form of pre-targeted bombers on alert in the Strategic Air Command (SAC), soon to be joined by Polaris submarine-launched missiles. Although this machine wasn’t likely to kill outright or starve to death literally every last human, its effects, once triggered, would come close enough to that to deserve the name Doomsday."

"He is a danger to all that is important. I do really feel it would have been a better world without Teller."

"After he suffered a stroke three years ago, a nurse quizzed him to probe his lucidity. "Are you the famous Edward Teller?" she queried. "No," he snapped. "I'm the infamous Edward Teller.""

"Think, for a moment, of a cheetah, a sleek, beautiful animal, one of the fastest on earth, which roams freely on the savannas of Africa. In its natural habitat, it is a magnificent animal, almost a work of art, unsurpassed in speed or grace by any other animal. Now, think of a cheetah that has been captured and thrown into a miserable cage in a zoo. It has lost its original grace and beauty, and is put on display for our amusement. We see only the broken spirit of the cheetah in the cage, not its original power and elegance. The cheetah can be compared to the laws of physics, which are beautiful in their natural setting. The natural habitat of the laws of physics is higher-dimensional space-time. However, we can only measure the laws of physics when they have been broken and placed on display in a cage, which is our three-dimensional laboratory. We can only see the cheetah when its grace and beauty have been stripped away."

"Our understanding of the four basic concepts of Physics -- space, time, matter and force -- has undergone radical change in the course of work on unification, starting with Maxwell's unification of electricity with magnetism, all the way to present day string theory. What started as four independent concepts, with space and time postulated and the possible forms of matter and force arbitrarily chosen, now appear as different aspects of a rich and novel dynamically determined structure."

"Scientific collaborations are akin to marriages, or temporary marriages. Their breakup is not unlike a divorce and rarely avoids acrimony."

"I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that this delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it. I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes. There the snow lay around my doorstep — great heaps of protons quietly precessing in the earth's magnetic field. To see the world for a moment as something rich and strange is the private reward of many a discovery."

"It is an old story in physics that higher resolving power leads to new effects. We remember that the magnetic moment of the nucleus was itself discovered through the hyperfine structure of lines in the visible spectrum. The nuclear resonance line in a liquid or gas can be remarkably narrow, as you have already seen. As soon as the reason for this was recognized, it became clear that the only practical limit on resolution was the inhomogeneity of the magnetic field applied to the specimen."

"Motion at low Reynolds number is very majestic, slow, and regular."

"It was a bank holiday, and Mr Tompkins, the little clerk of a big city bank, slept late and had a leisurely breakfast. Trying to plan his day, he first thought about going to some afternoon movie and, opening the morning paper, turned to the entertainment page. But none of the films looked attractive to him. He detested all this Hollywood stuff, with infinite romances between popular stars. If only there were at least one film with some real adventure, something unusual and maybe even fantastic about it. But there was none. Unexpectedly, his eye fell on a little notice in the corner of the page. The local university was announcing a series of lectures on the problems of modern physics, and this afternoon's lecture was to be about Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Well, that might be something!"

"There was a young fellow from Trinity, Who took the square root of infinity. But the number of digits, Gave him the fidgets; He dropped Math and took up Divinity."

"It is well known that theoretical physicists cannot handle experimental equipment; it breaks whenever they touch it. Pauli was such a good theoretical physicist that something usually broke in the lab whenever he merely stepped across the threshold. A mysterious event that did not seem at first to be connected with Pauli's presence once occurred in Professor J. Franck's laboratory in Göttingen. Early one afternoon, without apparent cause, a complicated apparatus for the study of atomic phenomena collapsed. Franck wrote humorously about this to Pauli at his Zürich address and, after some delay, received an answer in an envelope with a Danish stamp. Pauli wrote that he had gone to visit Bohr and at the time of the mishap in Franck's laboratory his train was stopped for a few minutes at the Göttingen railroad station. You may believe this anecdote or not, but there are many other observations concerning the reality of the Pauli Effect!"

"With very few exceptions, philosophers do not know much science and do not understand it, which is quite natural because science lies beyond the boundaries of typical philosophical subjects such as ethics, aestetics, and gnosiology. But while in the free countries philosophers are quite harmless, in the dictatorial countries they constitute a great danger for the development of science. In Russia, state philosophers are bred in the Communist Academy in Moscow and are placed in all the educational and research institutions to prevent the professors and researchers from falling into idealistic, capitalistic heresies. The state philosophers are usually familiar with the subject of the research institution they are going to supervise, being either former schoolteachers or having taken in the academy a one-semester course on the subject in question. But they rank in the their power above the scientific directors of the institution and can veto any research project on publication which deviates from the correct ideology. One notable example of philosophical dictatorship in Russian science was the prohibition of Einstein's theory of relativity on the ground that it denied world ether, "the existence of which follows directly from the philosophy of dialectical materialism". It is interesting to note that the existence of the "world ether" was doubted long before Einstein by Engels, who in one of his letter to friend wrote "...the world ether, if it exists"."

"I decided to get Ph.D. in experimental physics because experimental physicists have their own room in the Institute where they can hang their coat, whereas theoretical physicists have to hang their coat at the entrance."

"I feel that matter has properties which physics tells you."

"So I am just sitting and waiting, listening, and if something exciting comes, I just jump in."

"If the expansion of the space of the universe is uniform in all directions, an observer located in anyone of the galaxies will see all other galaxies running away from him at velocities proportional to their distances from the observer."

"It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!"

"The physicist George Gamow was also an entertaining popularizer. He once told the story of how with his wife and their baby daughter he visited the Leaning Tower of Pisa. As they climbed the steps, they noticed an increasingly musty smell, which they first attributed to the ancient walls of the building. Then, however, they began to suspect their little girl, and by the time they reached the top it was clear that she needed immediate attention. “And from the very place,” explained Gamow, raising his arm and his voice dramatically, “where Galileo launched his experimental objects, we also propelled…”"

"Rutherford did not pretend to understand quantum mechanics, but he understood that the Gamow formula would give his accelerator a crucial advantage. Even particles accelerated at much lower energies... would be able to penetrate into nuclei. Rutherford invited Gamow to Cambridge in January 1929... [They] became firm friends and Gamow's insight gave Rutherford the impetus to go full steam ahead with the building of his accelerator."

"Take a look at George Gamow, who is now recognized as one of the great cosmologists of the last hundred years. I speculate that he probably didn't win the Nobel Prize because people could not take him seriously. He wrote children's books. His colleagues have publicly stated his writing children's books on science had an adverse effect on his scientific reputation, and people could not take him seriously when he and his colleagues proposed that there should be a cosmic background radiation, which we now know to be one of the greatest discoveries of 20th-century physics."

"Gamow was rather childlike, always wanting to play, and introducing a sort of light humor into all occasions. He was very fond of drawing pictures of Mickey Mouse. He added a lot to the entertainment that we had. He had some good ideas, applications which led to important developments in quantum theory, but I do not think he did any work which was very deep."

"If contribution in life is measured by the influence of a person's best ideas, then George Gamow's contribution has been immense. He explained radioactive decay, described reaction mechanisms and rates in the interior of stars, proposed how the elements were made, and suggested how DNA might provide the code for protein synthesis. Those topics have evolved into major fields of science..."

"Es Gamow't wieder"

"Gamow was fantastic in his ideas. He was right, he was wrong. More often wrong than right. Always interesting; … and when his idea was not wrong it was not only right, it was new."

"By an incredible coincidence, Gamow and Edward Condon, who had discovered simultaneously and independently the explanation of radioactivity (one in Russia, the other in this country), came to spend the last ten years of their lives within a hundred yards of each other in Boulder."

"[Duesberg] is absolutely correct in saying that no one has proven that AIDS is caused by the AIDS virus. And he is absolutely correct that the virus cultured in the laboratory may not be the cause of AIDS."

"The community as a whole doesn't listen patiently to critics who adopt alternative viewpoints. Although the great lesson of history is that knowledge develops through the conflict of viewpoints. If you simply have a consensus, it generally stultifies. It fails to see the problems of that consensus and it depends on the existence of critics to break up that iceberg and permit knowledge to develop. This is in fact one of the underpinnings of democratic theory. It is one of the reasons why we believe in notions of free speech and it's one of the great forces in terms of intellectual development."

"I would not be surprised if there were another cause of AIDS and even that HIV is not involved."

"I am afraid that those comments go back to the late 80's. At that time I was a skeptic — the argument based on Koch's postulates to try to distinguish between cause and association. … Today I would regard the success of the many antiviral agents which lower the virus titers (to be expected) and also resolve the failure of the immune system (only expected if the virus is the cause of the failure) as a reasonable proof of the causation argument"

"Possibly we will find an elegant model, in agreement with observation, that yields the pattern of lepton masses as well as the pattern of quark bare masses and even relates hadrons and leptons. This is our dream; touch us!"

"Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behaviour of the whole."

"I thought of killing myself but soon decided that I could always try MIT and then kill myself later if it was that bad but that I couldn't commit suicide and then try MIT afterwards. The two operations, suicide and going to MIT, don't commute..."

"Just because things get a little dingy at the subatomic level doesn't mean all bets are off."

"Three principles — the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the "unreasonable effectiveness" of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality — are thus consequences of the underlying law of the elementary particles and their interactions. Those three principles need not be assumed as separate metaphysical postulates. Instead, they are emergent properties of the fundamental laws of physics."

"You don't need something more to get something more. That's what emergence means. Life can emerge from physics and chemistry plus a lot of accidents. The human mind can arise from neurobiology and a lot of accidents, the way the chemical bond arises from physics and certain accidents. Doesn't diminish the importance of these subjects to know they follow from more fundamental things plus accidents."

"If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs."

"Niels Bohr brain-washed a whole generation of physicists into believing that the problem had been solved fifty years ago [Gell-Mann's comment on the Copenhagen interpretation]"

"While many questions about quantum mechanics are still not fully resolved, there is no point in introducing needless mystification where in fact no problem exists. Yet a great deal of recent writing about quantum mechanics has done just that."

"The principal distortion disseminated ... is the implication, or even the explicit claim, that measuring the polarization, circular or plane, of one of the EPRB] photons somehow affects the other photon. In fact, the measurement does not cause any physical effect to propagate from one photon to the other. ...If on one branch of history, the plane polarization of one photon is measured and thereby specified with certainty, then on the same branch of history the circular polarization of the other photon is also specified with certainty. On a different branch of history the circular polarization of one of the photons may be measured, in which case the circular polarization of both photons is specified with certainty. On each branch, the situation is like that of Bertlmann's socks, described by John Bell... Bertlmann... always wears one pink and one green sock. If you see just one... you know immediately the other... Yet no signal is propogated... Likewise no signal passes from one photon to the other in the experiment that confirms quantum mechanics. No action at a distance takes place."

"The false report that measuring one of the photons immediately affects the other leads to all sorts of unfortunate conclusions. ...the alleged effect ...would violate the requirement of relativity theory that no signal... can travel faster than the speed of light. If it were to do so, it would appear to observers in some states of motion that the signal were traveling backward in time."

"I had barely sat down when he began to tell me... that science writers were "ignoramuses" and a "terrible breed" who invariably got things wrong: only scientists were really qualified to present their work to the masses. As time went on, I felt less offended, since it became clear that Gell-Mann held most of his scientific colleagues in contempt as well."

"One of the things that makes Gell-Mann so insufferable is that he is almost always right."

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

"The Feynman [Problem-Solving] Algorithm: (1) Write down the problem. (2) Think real hard. (3) Write down the solution."

"That which is not forbidden is mandatory."

"My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racial genetic in origin and thus not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in environment."

"I am overwhelmed by an irresistible temptation to do my climb by moonlight and unroped. This is contrary to all my rock climbing teaching & does not mean poor training, but only a strong-headedness."

"Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectual rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably used by the pragmatic man-in-the street."

"I had one experience which gave me some slant on the way large organizations run. I was not allowed to take spherical trigonometry because I'd sprained my ankle. Because I'd sprained my ankle I had an incomplete in gym, phys ed. And the rule was that if you had an incomplete in anything, you were not allowed to take an overload. I argued with some clerical person in the administration office, and was stopped there. It's an experience which I've remembered since, and advised people not to be stopped at the first point."

"If you take a bale of hay and tie it to the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and if you then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the energy expended by yourself in the striking of the match, you will understand the concept of amplification."

"The Big Bang theory says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged."

"It is said that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But the universe is the ultimate free lunch."

"The recent developments in cosmology strongly suggest that the universe may be the ultimate free lunch."

"It becomes very tempting to ask whether, in principle, it's possible to create a universe in the laboratory—or a universe in your backyard—by man-made processes."

"It turns out that the energy of a gravitational field—any gravitational field—is negative. During inflation, as the universe gets bigger and bigger and more and more matter is created, the total energy of matter goes upward by an enormous amount. Meanwhile, however, the energy of gravity becomes more and more negative. The negative gravitational energy cancels the energy in matter, so the total energy of the system remains whatever it was when inflation started—presumably something very small. ...This capability for producing matter in the universe is one crucial difference between the inflationary model and the previous model."

"We should not act like we know that the universe began with the Big Bang... we'll see that there are strong suggestions that the Big Bang was perhaps not really the beginning of existence, but really just the beginning of our local universe, often called a pocket universe."

"What the Big Bang theory tells us, is that at least our region of the universe 13.82 billion years ago, was an extremely hot, dense uniform soup of particles which in the conventional standard Big Bang model filled literally all of space—and now we certainly believe that it filled essentially all of the space that we have access to—uniformly. ...This is contrary to a popular cartoon image of the Big Bang, which is just plain wrong. The cartoon image of the Big Bang is the image of a small egg of highly dense matter that then exploded and spewed out into empty space. That is not the scientific picture of the Big Bang. ...If there was a small egg that exploded into empty space, you would certainly expect that today you would see something different if you were looking towards where the egg was, versus looking the opposite direction, but we don't see any effect like that. When we look around the sky the universe looks completely uniform, on average, in all directions, to a very high degree of accuracy... So we don't see a sign of an egg having happened anywhere. Rather, the Big Bang seems to have happened everywhere, uniformly."

"The conventional Big Bang theory does not say anything about what caused the expansion. It really is only a theory about the aftermath of a bang. In the scientific version of the Big Bang, the universe starts with everything already expanding, with no explanation of how that expansion started... So the Scientific version of the Big Bang theory is not really a theory of a bang, it's really a theory of the aftermath of a bang."

"The conventional Big Bang theory says nothing about where all the matter came from. The theory really assumes that for every particle that we see in the universe today, there was, at the very beginning, at least some precursor particle, if not the same particle, with no explanation of where all those particles came from."

"In short what I like to say is that the Big Bang says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged. It really has no bang in the Big Bang. It is a bangless theory, despite its name."

"Inflation is a prequel to the conventional Big Bang theory. ...It does provide a theory of the propulsion that drove the universe into this humungous episode of expansion which we call the Big Bang."

"The miracle of physics that I'm talking about here is something that was actually known since the time of Einstein's general relativity; that gravity is not always attractive. Gravity can act repulsively. Einstein introduced this in 1916... in the form of the cosmological constant, and the original motivation of modifying the equations of general relativity to allow this was because Einstein thought that the universe was static, and he realized that ordinary gravity would cause the universe to collapse if it was static. ...The fact that general relativity can support this gravitational repulsion, still being consistent with all the principles that general relativity incorporates, is the important thing which Einstein himself did discover.."

"Inflation takes advantage of this possibility... to let gravity be the repulsive force that drove the universe into the period of expansion that we call the Big Bang. In fact, when one combines general relativity with conventional ideas, now, in particle physics there really is a pretty clear indication, I should say, not quite a prediction... that at very high energy densities one expects to find states of matter which literally turn gravity on its head and cause gravity to become repulsive."

"What it takes to produce a gravitational repulsion is a negative pressure. According to general relativity, it turns out... both pressures and energy densities can produce gravitational fields, unlike Newtonian physics, where it's only mass densities that produce gravitational fields."

"A positive pressure produces an attractive gravitational field... Positive pressures are just sort of normal pressures and attractive gravity is normal gravity, so normal pressures produce normal gravity, but it is possible to have negative pressures, and negative pressures produce repulsive gravity, and that's the secret of what makes inflation possible."

"A very plausible choice for when inflation might have happened would be when the energy scales of the universe were at the scale of grand unified theories... which unify the weak, strong and electromagnetic interactions into a single unified interaction. ..we're talking about energies which are about 1016 times the equivalent energy of a proton mass. ...the initial patch would only have to be the ridiculously small size of about 10-28 cm across to be able to lead ultimately to the creation of everything that we see on the vast scale of which we see it."

"The gravitational repulsion created by this small patch of repulsive gravity material would be, then, the driving force of the Big Bang and it would cause the region to undergo exponential expansion... there is a certain doubling time, and if you wait the same amount of time it doubles again, and if you wait the same amount of time it doubles again... and it's because these doublings build up so dramatically, it doesn't take very much time to build the whole universe. In about 100 doublings this tiny patch of 10-28 cm can become large enough, not to be the universe, but to be a small marble-sized region which will then ultimately become the observed universe, as it continues to coast outward after inflation ends."

"The discovery of the CMB cemented the notion of a big bang. But for all its elegance, the theory had thrown up some intractable problems. Soon after the CMB was discovered, Dicke went to Cornell to talk about... the flatness problem. ...the universe seemed to be flat, meaning that the ratio of actual matter density to the critical density... Omega, was very close to 1. And for today's universe to have Omega anywhere near 1, its value just one second after the big bang had to be exactly 1 to a precision of about fourteen decimal places. Nothing in the laws of physics suggested why... In Dicke's audience was a young postdoc named Alan Guth. He was a particle physicist who had no interest in cosmology. But something about the talk tickled his fancy and set him on a journey that would solve the big-bang theory's most frustrating problem."

"Most of what we know, or believe we know, about the early moments of the universe is thanks to an idea called inflation theory first propounded in 1979 by a junior particle physicist, then at Stanford, now at MIT, named Alan Guth. He was thirty-two years old and, by his own admission, had never done anything much before. He would probably never have had his great theory except that he happened to attend a lecture on the Big Bang given by none other than Robert Dicke. The lecture inspired Guth to take an interest in cosmology, and in particular in the birth of the universe."

"We now address two of the drawbacks [of the standard Big Bang theory]... the flatness problem and the horizon problem. In the early 1980's, Alan Guth resolved these two problems with his inflationary theory. His basic idea was that the universe enters a false vacuum state shortly after the Big Bang, then tunnels out and expands exponentially. We choose to discuss Guth's original model (now called classical model or old inflation) for pedagogic reasons. Guth's model has many nice qualitative features; it does not work quantitatively. Therefore, A. Linde, A. Albrecht, P. Steinhardt, and others constructed new models as remedies. It is not clear which of the new models is correct..."

"According to Guth, he had discovered the equations of De Sitter's cosmology (1917), written in the form introduced somewhat later by Georges Lemaitre (1925), as part of his MIT Thesis, before introducing inflation as the starting point of his new cosmology. After taking care, by means of inflation of the "monopole problem". ...Guth went one step further to solve the so called "flatness problem". ...Guth finally goes on to explain how his theory of inflation solves the "horizon problem". ...we will analyze in some detail to what extent the "monopole problem", the "flatness problem" and the "horizon problem" require, or not, cosmic inflation as a problem solving "paradigm"."

"Prior to the downfall of the GUT in the mid 1980s, Alan Guth, an elementary particle theorist, was trying to explain the scarcity of the magnetic monopoles in the universe. The standard cosmological model predicted that there should be as many monopoles as there are nucleons! Since all attempts at finding a monopole had failed, Guth suggested that the universe must have had an inflation phase during which it expanded exponentially. This exponential growth was so rapid that it diluted any existing monopoles so much so that today there may be only a few in our observable universe."

"One of the issues with the then generally accepted theory of the Big Bang was the uniformity of temperature measured in any direction out in the universe, no explosion on Earth could occur as uniformly. In the early 1980's Alan Guth postulated that the universe initially grew from a small enough volume, a fraction of the size of an atom, for temperature to have equalized, within its first billionth of a second of age, to then expand exponentially..."

"It was fortunate that Alan Guth did his work at the same time that another idea came into fashion, which was the theory that we could understand why the universe contains matter and not antimatter in terms of some asymmetry, some favoritism for matter over antimatter in the early universe; it's no good having a scheme that can inflate the universe to enormous dimension of it's not possible to create matter to fill that large universe."

"Science is not about status quo. It’s about revolution."

"We are honored for research which is today referred to as the "Two Neutrino Experiment". How does one make this research comprehensible to ordinary people? In fact "The Two Neutrinos" sounds like an Italian dance team. How can we have our colleagues in chemistry, medicine, and especially in literature share with us, not the cleverness of our research, but the beauty of the intellectual edifice, of which our experiment is but one brick? This is a dilemma and an anguish for all scientists because the public understanding of science is no longer a luxury of cultural engagement, but it is an essential requirement for survival in our increasingly technological age: In this context, I believe this Nobel Ceremony with its awesome tradition and pomp has as one of its most important benefits; the public attention it draws to science and its practitioners."

"Are we making more mistakes now? I don't think so. Science is a high-risk activity. And when you do science—this is very important incidentally for the general public, and for policy makers—if you are not wasting some of your money, you are not doing good science. It's a funny way to say this. You've got to back high-risk opportunities. And high-risk opportunities means some fraction of them are going to fail. And I think in any science funding scenario, you've got to say, 10, 20, maybe even 30% of your funds are going to be invested in failures."

"I went into physics to hang around with the bright kids. I wasn't doing anything else and I didn't want to look dumb, so I thought I'd pretend to be a physicist, just like the others. It was five or ten years after my Ph.D. before I realized I was pretty good."

"That's the eureka moment, when suddenly you know something. Your hands sweat, you get into all kinds of symptoms of tremendous excitement. First of all, it's fear. Is it right? And it's incredible humor. 'How could it be any other way? It had to be that way! How could we have been so stupid, not to see this?'"

"A time traveler from the year 1899 would be continually amazed by our advanced technology—our cars and airplanes, our skyscraper cities, our TV, radio, computers, and communication abilities. Probably the traveler would be most shaken by our science, from astronomy to zoology. The only place in which this visitor would be comfortably at home is in most of our high schools."

"Particle physics suffers more from being infected by the socio-political mood of the day than from lack of spectacular opportunities for major and profound discoveries."

"The main virtue of the physics-chemistry-biology sequence is the hierarchical nature of the sciences. Physics comes first because it serves as a powerul prerequisite for chemistry and because it can more clearly illustrate the nature of the scientific process."

"... I said I am doing experiments on pions. Einstein said, "Pions! Pions! We don't understand the electron. Why do you bother with pions? ...""

"Leon is a giant in our field in particle physics. ... he was an all-around approachable person. ... he had an open-door policy. ..."

"The standard SU(3)×SU(2)×U(1) theory of strong, electromagnetic, and weak interactions appears to correctly describe physics down to the smallest distance scales yet probed."

"(Jokingly) Sex in ten dimensions is impossible... topologically."

"The problem with general relativity is that the principles are pretty simple and the computations are always ugly."

"A straight line is a special case of a curve. It's a curve which is uncurved."

"Elegance requires that the number of defining equations be small. Five is better than ten, and one is better than five. On this score, one might facetiously say that String Theory is the ultimate epitome of elegance. With all the years that String Theory has been studied, no one has found even a single defining equation! The number at present count is zero. We know neither what the fundamental equations of the theory are nor even if it has any."

"Most constants are adjusted with a deviation of one percent, which means that if the value differs by one percent everything collapses. Physicists can certainly claim that this is a fluke, but it must be acknowledged that this cosmological constant is adjusted to an accuracy of 1/10120. No one thinks that this is solely a fluke. It is the most extreme example of hyperfine regulation..."

"My physics has been extremely mainstream, ... It's not true that I'm some sort of a [radical thinker], not at all."

"... Lenny Susskind ... is very well known for his technical work, for his popular work, for his semi-technical books, The Theoretical Minimum, and, within the physics community, as a storyteller, a mentor, and a guiding visionary of the field."

"Dozens of other popular authors have written about black holes and string theory, but Gefter’s excitement makes even such overdone subjects seem fresh. And through the whole process, she and her father remain awed by the physicists whose work they’re studying—late in the book, her father even asks Susskind for an autograph."

"I think the weird thing about being a scientist, or an academic in general, is you have to believe really strongly in what you do, while questioning it all the time ... and that's a hard balance to have."

"The universe has its secrets. Extra dimensions of space might be one of them. If so, the universe has been hiding those dimensions, protecting them, keeping them coyly under wraps. From a casual glance, you would think that the cheese man ate cheese but you wrong."

"When it comes to the world around us, is there any choice but to explore?"

"Physics has entered a remarkable era. Ideas that were once the realm of science fiction are now entering our theoretical — and maybe even experimental — grasp. Brand-new theoretical discoveries about extra dimensions have irreversibly changed how particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists now think about the world. The sheer number and pace of discoveries tells us that we've most likely only scratched the surface of the wondrous possibilities that lie in store. Ideas have taken on a life of their own."

"We certainly don't yet know all the answers. But the universe is about to be pried open."

"Secrets of the cosmos will begin to unravel. I, for one, can't wait."

"When I was in school I liked math because all the problems had answers. Everything else seemed very subjective."

"Sometimes I have a sense of what I'm seeing being a small fraction of what's there. Not always there, but probably more often than I realize. Something will come up, and I'll realize I'm thinking about the world a little differently than my friends."

"In the history of physics, every time we've looked beyond the scales and energies we were familiar with, we've found things that we wouldn't have thought were there. You look inside the atom and eventually you discover quarks. Who would have thought that? It's hubris to think that the way we see things is everything there is."

"If we don't do it now, we'll probably never do it. We've built up the technology; we're at a point where if we don't continue, we'll lose that expertise, and we'll have to start all over again. True, it's expensive, but at the end of the day I believe it will be worth it. It makes a difference in terms of who we are, what we think, how we view the world. These are the kinds of things that get people excited about science, so you have a more educated public."

"Science is not religion. We're not going to be able to answer the "why" questions. But when you put together all of what we know about the universe, it fits together amazingly well."

"Religion asks questions about morals, whereas science just asks questions about the natural world. But when people try to use religion to address the natural world, science pushes back on it, and religion has to accommodate the results. Beliefs can be permanent, but beliefs can also be flexible. Personally, if I find out my belief is wrong, I change my mind. I think that's a good way to live."

"Faith just doesn't have anything to do with what I'm doing as a scientist. It's nice if you can believe in God, because then you see more of a purpose in things. Even if you don't, though, it doesn't mean that there's no purpose. It doesn't mean that there's no goodness. I think that there's a virtue in being good in and of itself. I think that one can work with the world we have."

"I think it's a problem that people are considered immoral if they're not religious. That's just not true. This might earn me some enemies, but in some ways they may be even more moral. If you do something for a religious reason, you do it because you'll be rewarded in an afterlife or in this world. That's not quite as good as something you do for purely generous reasons."

"I've said many times that you can't stop science... God made man in his own image. God intended for man to become one with God. We are going to become one with God. We are going to have almost as much knowledge and almost as much power as God. Cloning and the reprogramming of DNA is the first serious step in becoming one with God."

"We are going to become Gods, period. If you don't like it, get off. You don't have to contribute, you don't have to participate but if you are going to interfere with me becoming a God, you're going to have trouble. There'll be warfare."

"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."

"In short, the greatest contribution to real security that science can make is through the extension of the scientific method to the social sciences and a solution of the problem of complete avoidance of war."

"If physics is too difficult for the physicists, the nonphysicist may wonder whether he should try at all to grasp its complexities and ambiguities. It is undeniably an effort, but probably one worth making, for the basic questions are important and the new experimental results are often fascinating. And if the layman runs into serious perplexities, he can be consoled with the thought that the points which baffle him are more than likely the ones for which the professionals have not found satisfactory answers."

"When Born and Heisenberg and the Göttingen theoretical physicists] first discovered matrix mechanics they were having, of course, the same kind of trouble that everybody else had in trying to solve problems and to manipulate and to really do things with matrices. So they had gone to Hilbert for help and Hilbert said the only time he had ever had anything to do with matrices was when they came up as a sort of by-product of the eigenvalues of the boundary-value problem of a differential equation. So if you look for the differential equation which has these matrices you can probably do more with that. They had thought it was a goofy idea and that Hilbert didn’t know what he was talking about. So he was having a lot of fun pointing out to them that they could have discovered Schrödinger’s wave mechanics six month earlier if they had paid a little more attention to him."

"By an incredible coincidence, Gamow and Edward Condon, who had discovered simultaneously and independently the explanation of radioactivity (one in Russia, the other in this country), came to spend the the last ten years of their lives within a hundred yards of each other in Boulder."

"Quantum mechanics is reformulated, in a way which eliminates its present dependence on the special treatment of observation of a system by an external observer."

"As an analogy one can imagine an intelligent amoeba with a good memory. As time progresses the amoeba is constantly splitting, each time the resulting amoebas having the same memories as the parent. Our amoeba hence does not have a life line, but a life tree."

"The physical "reality" is assumed to be the wave function of the whole universe itself."

"[The Many-worlds interpretation is the] only completely coherent approach to explaining both the contents of quantum mechanics and the appearance of the world."

"Hugh Everett's work has been described by many people in terms of many worlds, the idea being that every one of the various alternative histories, branching histories, is assigned some sort of reality."

"If you want to get an interesting perspective do not think of Hugh as a traditional 20th century physicist but more of a Renaissance man with interests and skills in many different areas. He was smart and lots of things interested him and he brought the same general conceptual methodology to solve them. The subject matter was not so important as the solution ideas."

"Someone once noted that Hugh Everett should have been declared a "national resource," and given all the time and resources he needed to develop new theories."

"My father, Hugh Everett, III, author of the Many Worlds Theory, was a quiet man during the eighteen or so years I shared a house with him. Turns out he was depressed over a sad childhood and then being dismissed as a kook, only later - too late - to be recognized as a genius."

"I think about how angry I was that my dad didn't take better care of himself. How he never went to a doctor, let himself become grossly overweight, smoked three packs a day, drank like a fish and never exercised. But then I think about how his colleague mentioned that, days before dying, my dad had said he lived a good life and that he was satisfied. I realize that there is a certain value in my father's way of life. He ate, smoked and drank as he pleased, and one day he just suddenly and quickly died. Given some of the other choices I'd witnessed, it turns out that enjoying yourself and then dying quickly is not such a hard way to go."

"We can assume that in a relatively short time — perhaps within 100 million years — the one celled organism evolved into a colony of cells. With the further passage of time, groups of cells within those colonies assumed specialized functions of food-gathering, digestion, the structural features of an outer skin, and so on; thus began the stage of evolution leading to the complex, many-celled creatures which dominate life today. The fossil record contains no trace of these preliminary stages in the development of many-celled organisms. The first clues to the existence of relatively advanced forms of life consist of a few barely discernible tracks, presumably made in the primeval slime by soft, wriggling wormlike animals. These are found in rocks about one billion years old. These meager remains are the earliest traces of many-celled animal life on the planet."

"When a scientist writes about God, his colleagues assume he is either over the hill or going bonkers. In my case it should be understood from the start that I am an agnostic in religious matters. My views on this question are close to those of Darwin, who wrote, "My theology is a simple muddle. I cannot look at the Universe as the result of blind chance, yet I see no evidence of beneficent design in the details.""

"At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

"I believe that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed."

"So with each advance in understanding come new questions. So we need to be very humble. We shouldn't have hubris and think that we can understand everything. But history tells us that there is good reason to believe that we will continue making fantastic progress in the years ahead."

"If I get a parking ticket, there is always a parallel universe where I didn't. On the other hand, there is yet another universe where my car was stolen."

"... I would rather have questions that I can't answer than answers that I can't question. (variation of a remark by Richard Feynman)"

"Yet the complexity of all this pales in comparison to the patterns of information processing in your brain. Your roughly 100 billion neurons are constantly generating electrical signals (“firing”), which involves shuffling around billions of trillions of atoms, notably sodium, potassium, and calcium ions. The trajectories of these atoms form an extremely elaborate braid through spacetime, whose complex intertwining corresponds to storing and processing information in a way that somehow gives rise to our familiar sensation of self-awareness. There’s broad consensus in the scientific community that we still don’t understand how this works, so it’s fair to say that we humans don’t yet fully understand what we are. However, in broad brush, we might say this: You’re a pattern in spacetime. A mathematical pattern. Specifically, you’re a braid in spacetime—indeed, one of the most elaborate braids known."

"Imagine all the food you have eaten in your life and consider that you are simply some of that food, rearranged."

"We have to get away from this idea today with some fact-checking sites which might themselves have an agenda and you just trust it because of its reputation. You want to have these sort of systems [where] they earn your trust and that is completely transparent."

"Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. At low temperatures, can flow upward. At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity; to me, an electron colliding with a and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums... On astronomically large scales... weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes... put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… [also,] the leading theory for what happened [in the early universe] suggests that space isn’t merely really really big, but actually infinite, containing infinitely many exact copies of you, and even more near-copies living out every possible variant of your life in two different types of parallel universes."

"What is real? Is there more to reality than meets the eye? Yes! was Plato’s answer over two millennia ago. In his famous cave analogy, he likened us to people who’d lived their entire lives shackled in a cave, facing a blank wall, watching the shadows cast by things passing behind them, and eventually coming to mistakenly believe that these shadows were the full reality. Plato argued that what we humans call our everyday reality is similarly just a limited and distorted representation of the true reality, and that we must free ourselves from our mental shackles to begin comprehending it."

"I... ended up at the , focusing on environmental issues. I wanted to... make our planet a better place, and felt that the main problem... [was] that we didn't properly use... technology... I... was intrigued by... creating economic incentives that aligned... egoism with the common good. ...I soon grew disillusioned, concluding that economics was... intellectual prostitution... rewarded for saying what the powers that be wanted to hear. ...[T]he book that changed everything: ' ...[W]hat did Feynman see that I missed in high school? ...I sat down with... '... and started reading, "If... all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed... " ...I read on ...I felt like I was having a religious experience I finally got it!"

"[W]hat I had been missing... and what Feynman realized: physics is the ultimate intellectual adventure, the quest to understand the deepest mysteries of our Universe. ...[I]t makes us see more clearly, adding to the beauty and wonder of the world ...[T]he lens of physics adds more beauty to the world ..."

"So this book... [is] my personal quest for the ultimate nature of reality."

"We're all born with curiosity, but at some point, school usually manages to knock that out of us. ...[M]y main responsibility as a teacher isn't to convey facts, but to rekindle that lost enthusiasm for asking questions."

"[W]e've repeatedly underestimated not only the size of our cosmos, but also the power of our human mind to understand it."

"There's no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible..."

"Eratosthenes... knew that the Sun was straight overhead in... Syene at noon on the summer solstice, but that it was 7.2 degrees south of straight overhead in , located 794 kilometers farther north. He concluded... 794 kilometers corresponded to 7.2 degrees out of the 360 degrees... around Earth's circumference, so that the circumference must be... 39,700 km..."

"Aristarchos of Samos... was able to use to figure out... the distance between the Earth and the Sun. His conclusion... the Sun was about twenty times farther... than the Moon and therefore twenty times bigger than the Moon. In other words, the Sun was... over five times bigger than the Earth in diameter. This insight prompted Aristarchos to propose the heliocentric hypothesis long before Nicolaus Copernicus... It turned out to be quite difficult to tell precisely when the Moon was 50% illuminated, and the correct Sun-Moon angle... isn't 87 degrees but about 89.85 degrees... This makes... the Sun... almost twenty times further away... and about 109 times larger than the Earth... [T]his wasn't corrected until almost two thousand years later, so when Copernicus came along... the overall scale of his Solar System model was about twenty times too small..."

"Some ancients speculated that the stars were small holes in a black sphere through which distant light shone through. ...Giordano Bruno suggested that they were... like our Sun, just much farther away, perhaps with their own planets and civilizations... the Catholic Church had him burned at the stake in 1600."

"The very fabric of our physical world, space itself, could be a purely mathematical object in the sense that its only intrinsic properties are mathematical... as dimensionality, and topology."

"... achieved a breakthrough. Please hold your thumb at arm's length and alternate closing your left and right eyes a few times. ...[Y]our thumb appears to jump left and right by a certain angle relative to the background... [M]ove your thumb closer... and you'll see this jump angle growing. Astronomers call this jump angle '... [W]e can... compare telescopic photographs taken six months apart, when Earth is on opposite sides of the Sun. ...Bessel noticed ... ...moved a tiny angle, revealing its distance to be almost a million times that to the Sun... Now that Bessel knew the distance he used... [the] to figure out how luminous it was... in the same ballpark as the Sun... Giordano Bruno had been right after all!"

"In 1814... Joseph von Fraunhofer invented... a spectrograph, which let him separate white light into into a rainbow of colors... He discovered mysterious dark lines in the rainbow... and... the detailed positions of these lines... depended on what the light source was made of, constituting a kind of spectral fingerprint. During the following decades such spectra were measured and catalogued for many... substances. ...Sensationally, the spectrum of sunlight revealed that the Sun... contained elements... such as . Moreover... it revealed that stars are made of roughly the same mixture of gases as the Sun! This clinched it in favor of Bruno: stars are distant suns..."

"(…) the '. Here we interpret the wavefunction for an object as describing not some funky imaginary ensemble of possibilities for what the object might be doing, but rather the actual spatial collection of identical copies of the object that exist in our infinite space. Moreover, quantum uncertainty that you experience simply reflects your inability to self-locate in the Level I multiverse, i.e., to know which of your infinitely many copies throughout space is the one having your subjective perceptions."

"It’s absolutely crucial that we don’t conflate this internal reality with the external reality that it’s tracking, because the two are very different. My brain’s internal reality is like the dashboard of my car: a convenient summary of the most useful information. Just as my car’s dashboard tells me my speed, fuel level, motor temperature, and other things useful for a driver to be aware of, my brain’s dashboard/reality model tells me my speed and position, my hunger level, the air temperature, highlights of my surroundings and other things useful for the operator of a human body to be aware of."

"(…) the bottom line is that if you believe in an external reality independent of humans, then you must also believe that our physical reality is a mathematical structure. Nothing else has a baggage-free description. In other words, we all live in a gigantic mathematical object—one that’s more elaborate than a dodecahedron, and probably also more complex than objects with intimidating names such as Calabi-Yau manifolds, tensor bundles and Hilbert spaces, which appear in today’s most advanced physics theories. Everything in our world is purely mathematical—including you."

"A famous thorny issue in philosophy is the so-called infinite regress problem. For example, if we say that the properties of a diamond can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its carbon atoms, that the properties of a carbon atom can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its protons, neutrons and electrons, that the properties of a proton can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its quarks, and so on, then it seems that we’re doomed to go on forever trying to explain the properties of the constituent parts. The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis offers a radical solution to this problem: at the bottom level, reality is a mathematical structure, so its parts have no intrinsic properties at all!"

"(…) time is not an illusion, but the flow of time is. So is change. In spacetime, the future exists and the past doesn’t disappear."

"This implication of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis is pretty radical, so please pause (…) take it in and think about it. What you’re aware of right at this moment feels not like a photo but like a movie clip. This movie isn’t reality—it exists only in your head, as part of your brain’s reality model. It contains lots of information about the actual external physical reality—as long as you aren’t dreaming or hallucinating—but still constitutes only a very heavily edited version of reality, akin to the evening news on TV, mainly featuring certain highlights of patterns nearby in space and time that your brain thinks are useful for you to be aware of."

"(…) no spectator is needed, because your consciousness basically is your reality model. I think that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways. Since the different parts of your brain interact with each other, different parts of your reality model can interact with each other, so the model of you can interact with your model of the outside world, giving rise to the subjective sensation of the former perceiving the latter."

"My guess is that we’ll one day understand consciousness as yet another phase of matter. I’d expect there to be many types of consciousness just as there are many types of liquids, but in both cases, they share certain characteristic traits that we can aim to understand."

"We humans replace the bulk of both our "hardware" (e.g., our cells) and our "software" (e.g., our memories) many times in our life span. Nonetheless, we perceive ourselves as stable and permanent. Likewise, we perceive objects other than ourselves as permanent. Or rather, what we perceive as objects are those aspects of the world that display a certain permanence. For instance, when observing the ocean, we perceive the moving waves as objects because they display a certain permanence, even though the water itself is only bobbing up and down. Similarly (…) we perceive only those aspects of the world that are fairly stable against quantum decoherence."

"If there’s a singularity, would the resulting AI, or AIs, feel conscious and self-aware? Would they have an internal reality? If not, they’re for all practical purposes zombies. Of all traits that our human form of life has, I feel that consciousness is by far the most remarkable. As far as I’m concerned, it’s how our Universe gets meaning, so if our Universe gets taken over by life that lacks this trait, then it’s meaningless and just a huge waste of space."

"But I’ve suddenly changed my mind and turned more optimistic about our cosmic significance. Why? Because I’ve come to believe that advanced evolved life is very rare, yet has huge future potential, making our place in space and time remarkably significant."

"Let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate. What’s replicated isn’t matter (made of atoms) but information (made of bits) specifying how the atoms are arranged. When a bacterium makes a copy of its DNA, no new atoms are created, but a new set of atoms are arranged in the same pattern as the original, thereby copying the information. In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware."

"How is technology changing the hierarchical nature of our world? History reveals an overall trend toward ever more coordination over ever-larger distances, which is easy to understand: new transportation technology makes coordination more valuable (by enabling mutual benefit from moving materials and life forms over larger distances) and new communication technology makes coordination easier. When cells learned to signal to neighbors, small multicellular organisms became possible, adding a new hierarchical level. When evolution invented circulatory systems and nervous systems for transportation and communication, large animals became possible. Further improving communication by inventing language allowed humans to coordinate well enough to form further hierarchical levels such as villages, and additional breakthroughs in communication, transportation and other technology enabled the empires of antiquity. Globalization is merely the latest example of this multi-billion-year trend of hierarchical growth."

"Why is at the beginning of time so low, and the entropy in a black hole so high? ...We ...don't know that the entropy was low ...We don't even know if there was a beginning of time. ...[E]ntropy ...is this measure of how messy things are, so my room ...tends to get higher and higher entropy, messier and messier. Why... eggs fall on the floor and break, and not fly up and unbreak? People argued about that for a very long time until the shocking insight... that it was very low 13.4 billion years ago at the time when those baby pictures of the universe were given off... the cosmic microwave background. So our flow of time... has something to do with the origin of our universe? That... we have learned. ...[I]f you take seriously the idea of inflation and also the theory that the does not collapse, according to Hugh Everett, you can do some math and get an explanation... but... it's a wonderful mystery, and I'm open to all ideas... and black holes... there are great truths yet to be discovered."

"For Neils Bohr and the Copenhagen interpretation, I respond with Hamlet, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." ...The does not collapse. ...There is absolutely no experimental evidence for it. It appears to collapse, yes, but what Hugh Everett showed so beautifully... in the... 50s and 60s is that even if it does not collapse... If you just drop that entirely and just... go with the Schrödinger equation all the way, it's going to appear like it collapses... according to all the usual Copenhagen interpretation rules... [I]t doesn't even have anything particularly fundamental to do with quantum mechanics. ...If you have any sort of physics which lets you make copies of an observer, classically or quantum mechanically, you will experience apparent randomness. ...Suppose you ...clone yourself ...so you can get twice as much done? ...One copy ...wakes up in Room 1 and the other... in Room 2... Are you going to see... a sign that says Room 1 or will you see a 2? You cannot predict this... because... there will be two experiences. ...It seems random. I'm going to see either... with equal probability. This is what fundamentally is happening in quantum physics too. The quantum reality is just bigger than the one we thought we lived in before quantum mechanics, and it has this ability that it can start with something which is one way and make [it] effectively being in two ways. [W]hen we make a measurement, sometimes we find out which copy we were. So I wouldn't worry too much about the way a function collapse[s]."

"It depends... on what you measure outrageousness in... If what you mean is that something is more extravagant if it... involves somehow having more particles, or reality being bigger... then sure. But... maybe the kind of simplicity that we should value with Occam's razor is rather that the math is simple. The equations are simple."

"Here... is the Schrödinger equation [i \hbar \frac{d}{d t}\vert\Psi(t)\rangle = \hat H\vert\Psi(t)\rangle]... and what it's actually saying is that the state of the world, that's this Greek letter Ψ there with the bracket around it... It's saying that the rate of change of it... depends on the current state of the world, when you do this operation on it and for the math nerds, this is a linear operation... and what that just means is, as Everett has pointed out and many others have known for a very long time is that, in some circumstances, two different solutions to this can do their parallel thing. We can talk at... length about the discoveries... about decoherence and why it is that sometimes these different parallel branches are unaware or each other, but my point is... if you give a science nerd colloquium... at a physics department... ideally, you should also start in the same way you start discussing this with your grandma. Just at a very high level... here are the cool ideas, and then you can go as deep as the audience or the listener wants, from there."

"We don't know for sure that the Schrödinger equation is actually that accurate a description of nature either. That's why it's so exciting to see what's going to happen with the quantum computer efforts... Will they ultimately fail because physics isn't fully described by the Schrödinger equation, or will they actually succeed... This is where ultimately our experimental friends will... give us crucial insights..."

"I'll be the first to admit that we ultimately don't know what's going on exactly with quantum mechanics, and my personal guess... is that even quantum mechanics is probably an emergent theory, maybe an approximation of... something deeper. Maybe we can get it out of GU somehow, but... I also would guess... the opposite of Roger Penrose... that gravity doesn't really have much to do with this. I think you can... be in a spaceship far away... from any... important gravitating objects and do your little quantum experiments with a Schrödinger-like apparatus and you would get all the same fascinating things happening. So... ignoring gravity... ignoring relativistic effects altogether, you still have this thing people love fighting about. Does the wave function collapse or not, and that's why I'm so interested in this kind of discussion..."

"[I]t's... a big mistake as a species if we don't create institutions and governments which support science. There have been a number of... economic studies that have shown... that investing in basic science is the highest return on investment, basically ever... Inventing the ... just basic... physics research... has benefited us so much, in so many ways... Inventing calculus... didn't cost that much, but it's... so, so valuable... This comes back to the whole media question again. There are much more people who have heard about the Kardashians than... can name three living scientists... let alone twenty. ...[W]e've created a culture where scientists... not only are they not particularly known... or viewed as role models or heroes, but they are even very actively attacked by... folks with power with whom what scientists are saying is inconvenient... One of the best things we can do for science funding is to create a less screwed-up media landscape where we actually appreciate how much we benefit from scientific research. That governments will actually support it again. ...We spend two billion dollars a day or more, in this county alone, on military... If you can get a puny, puny fraction of that into scientific research, we wouldn't even be having to have this conversation about how we get funding."

"My favorite movie of all time is... Life of Brian. We really should try and reenact this epic skit, "What have the Romans ever done for us?" by saying "What has physics ever done for us? ...But ...besides ...the internet and transistors, what has physics ever done for us?""

"Physicists, we have a sort of arrogance... which has harmed us a lot. ...We forget that we're in a bubble and ...that there's actually a science of how you persuade people ...of how to communicate, and other people have studied that at great length. ...[T]he average person who works making cigarette ads is much more scientific about the way they get their message out than the average physicist. ...[I]t comes not from stupidity ...but from arrogance ...We're not going to stoop so low that we're going to be scientific about how we communicate... about how we advocate. We have to get off our high horses... If you get invaded by Hitler's army, you shouldn't just say... "Tanks are immoral, we're going to fight them with swords." We have to be scientific also about standing up for ourselves and our ideas... A second mistake... spending much more time infighting within our community of physicists, or... having one science pitted against another... for a few more tax dollars... losing sight of the fact that there's a tiny trickle of money that flows to all of the sciences combined... compared to... generic fruits of... corporate lobbying and random waste... So, get out of our bubble again. If we look at the big picture, it's kind of pathetic... that you have physicists, biologists, chemists, who together have built up most of the wealth of the world, and managed to be so incredibly navel-gazing and busy with infighting, and old-fashioned in how they communicate, that they have to come begging for money, and people don't listen to them."

"Tegmark’s career is a rather unusual story, mixing reputable science with an increasingly strong taste for grandiose nonsense. In this book he indulges his inner crank, describing in detail an utterly empty vision of the "ultimate nature of reality." What's perhaps most remarkable about the book is the respectful reception it seems to be getting... Before publishing his first paper, he changed his name from Shapiro to Tegmark (his mother’s name), figuring that there were too many Shapiros in physics for him to get attention... A very odd aspect of this whole story is that while Tegmark's big claim is that Math=Physics, he seems to have little actual interest in mathematics and what it really is as an intellectual subject. ...[W]hile "mathematical structures" are invoked in the book as the basis of everything, there's little to no discussion of the mathematical structures that modern mathematicians find interesting (although the idea of "symmetries" gets a mention). ...Perhaps the explanation of all this is somehow Freudian, since Tegmark’s father is the mathematician Harold Shapiro."

"The primary challenge of this cosmological transformation of consciousness is the awareness that each being in the universe is an origin of the universe. "The center of the cosmos" refers to that place where the great birth of the universe happened at the beginning of time, but it also refers to the upwelling of the universe as river, as star, as raven, as you, the universe surging into existence anew. The consciousness that learns it is at the origin point of the universe is itself an origin of the universe. The awareness that bubbles up each moment that we identify as ourselves is rooted in the originating activity of the universe. We are all of us arising together at the center of the cosmos."

"Earth was once molten rock, and now it makes spaceships."

"This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes, and humans."

"With the appearance of the human, the coding process of life burst beyond the DNA molecule and began carving its information in stone!"

"If you if you take Buddhism and Christianity and so forth there's a kind of battle — a subtle sort of struggle taking place because they're not standing in a common ground but … take the Earth or ecology then suddenly they can begin to explore what they have to offer. So I do think I do think absolutely that … there will be a flourishing of religions, not a withering away. And they will flourish to the degree that they will move into the context of planet and universe. I even think that as a matter of fact that … some of the central insights of the religions are more powerfully presented by what we know about the universe now then when they were first formulated."

"There's a great phrase from Eric Jantsch … and he says, "these self-organizing dynamics are in every place in the universe, waiting at their marks". I love that phrase because you get that … the power for making water exists everywhere in the universe but the conditions have to be right. But if the conditions are right, then these self-organizing dynamics leap to it. So I think it's something like that, that the possibility for sentience has always been there but has been waiting for a chance to really display."

"The more I learn about light the more I realize, man, we don't know anything about light... It's just bizarre... a particle has its own proper time which slows down as you speed up. But at the speed of light... there's no time. That's bizarre … that we can, right now, as you know, see — interact with the light that has come from the birth of the universe. So … from our point of view, that light traveled for 14 billion years but from the point of view of the light it's the moment of creation."

"I think the discovery of nonlocality is touching in on the whole. So that these these seemingly separate events are somehow connected through the whole. … you have this larger enveloping field and we're, you know, just beginning to understand something about that... so I love that discovery although I don't think we're anywhere near really knowing what we've come upon."

"The break-through moments are unimaginable until they happen."

"I have a sense that something amazing is at work … I think our planet is actually moving into a time of profound harmony and fecundity and peace but whether that's going to take 600 years or 6 days I don't know. I mean, I think that as humans begin to take seriously... the planetary dimension of conscious self-awareness, then we will become homonized versions of natural selection — so that we will begin to make decision with the large scale dynamic of the planet in mind. So I see that we're actually entering into a transformation of the human species out of the modern period into this new era... It may take centuries... but like the past and it's catastrophes I think that's... what's taking place in the midst of so many hardships."

"What's evil for the hawk is the mouse because, you know, the mouse is quick and gets away but I did this one realization every scientist goes through at one point... if you gave the hawk power, the power of God, the first thing the hawk might do is to slow down the mouse. But then the hawk would lose it's speed. And then if you slow the mouse all the way down, so it can just barely move, the hawk would lose its flight. So that in a weird way the tension between those two say natural enemies is what gives birth to their beauty. So I definitely feel that the tension we have right now within the human community in particular — that those are ultimately going to be resolved with a deeper harmony and a deeper appreciation for one another."

"Every moment we're making decisions. If you want to understand the universe as a whole you'd have to include all those decisions including our own lives so that even in the future our presence is going to be felt one way or the other — so I think … our death as being — it's a death to a micro-phase self or a small self … it's a death into our larger self in that … this whole vast adventure is our larger identity."

"(By moving) I'm making sounds on the drums of spacetime"… "Space itself wobbles and rumbles like a drum... Black holes can bang on spacetime like mallets on a drum."

"People used to try to hijack quantum mechanics and its inherent mystery to cast a cloud around determinism, in the hope that free will could survive modern physics. But that never worked very well. Since when does random chance equal free will? The only salvation for volition is a soul and faith and you’re not allowed to ask me about that."

"It might seem limited to impose our human perception to try to deduce the grandest cosmic code. But we are the product of the universe and I think it can be argued that the entire cosmic code is imprinted in us. Just as our genes carry the memory of our biological ancestors, our logic carries the memory of our cosmological ancestry. We are not just imposing human-centric notions on a cosmos independent of us. We are progeny of the cosmos and our ability to understand it is an inheritance."

"Topology and number theory are my faves."

"Deep Democracy is our sense that the world is here to help us to become our entire selves, and that we are here to help the world to become whole."

"Optics is an example of the different ways a human is able to see things in the world. The same goes for the color of a person's skin and even though optics present that there are differences in color, these do not state that they should necessarily be treated as different."

"The increasing demand for electricity, the shortage of fuels on earth, and concern about widespread use of nuclear energy have led to consideration of . ... has studied the SSPS concept, which is the location in geosynchronous orbit of stations converting solar into electrical energy, to be sent down as microwave power for conversion to direct current or to a power line frequency at the earth's surface."

"Clearly our first task is to use the material wealth of space to solve the urgent problems we now face on Earth: to bring the poverty-stricken segments of the world up to a decent living standard, without recourse to war or punitive action against those already in material comfort; to provide for a maturing civilization the basic energy vital to its survival."

"Is the surface of a planet really the right place for expanding technological civilization?"

"We should ask, critically and with appeal to the numbers, whether the best site for a growing advancing industrial society is Earth, the Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else entirely. Surprisingly, the answer will be inescapable — the best site is "somewhere else entirely.""

"There's no point in going out into space if the future that we'll see there is a sterile future living in tin cans. We have to able to recreate in space habitats which are as beautiful as earth-like as the loveliest parts of planet Earth and we can do that."

"My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: So? Did you learn anything today? But not my mother. "Izzy," she would say, "did you ask a good question today?" That difference — asking good questions — made me become a scientist."

"I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up, and they keep their curiosity."

"What more do you want, mermaids?"

"Who ordered that?"

"While politicians wrangled on the front pages of our newspapers, quiet revolutions looked within. Only occasionally did the news I thought most notable make the front page. All of it hinged on the steady building of connections which marks modern science."

"Science is about continuity of ideas, a web of connections."

"Bureaucracy increases as a doubling function in time, given resources. At the personal level, the cause is the persistent desire of every manager to hire at least one assistant. This provides the time constant for growth. Eventually this collides with the carrying capacity of society."

"I agree with the Emperor. Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."

"Ideas about existence pale, beside the fact of existence."

"“Costly,” Zeb fretted. “How will I ever pay—” “The dead do not worry about debts,” she said. “You have such an engaging way of putting matters.” “Subtlety is wasted here.”"

"—Y’know, fact that nobody understands you doesn’t mean you’re some kinda genius."

"I started out with nothing and still have most of it left."

"She had once looked up the term ‘lawyer’ and found it was someone who helped you fight laws."

"When you have a Ph. D., you call them hypotheses, not guesses."

"Wars don’t determine who’s right, only who’s left."

"She could not understand why people feared new ideas. She was frightened by the old ones."

"Talkers never acted when they could talk."

"“You know, my dear, you’re wrong that suffering ennobles people.” She’d stopped to massage her hip, wincing. “It simply makes one cross.”"

"As Kurt Vonnegut pointed out in his first novel, Player Piano, some people love problem-solving and tinkering—and that is the final, irreducible driver of human history. Wars and faiths and leaders come and go, but the problem-solvers’ slow, steady work is the fulcrum upon which history turns."

"Trouble comes looking for you if you’re a fool."

"Must admit it felt good. First time in years anybody ever admitted I was right."

"He went to Los Angeles to do the work even though he hated the city; it was full of happy homogeneous people without structure or direction. While on the bus to work, it seemed to him Los Angeles went on long after it had already made its point."

"But the answers come when they will, one piece at a time."

"I would have to look, try to find a bridge that would make plausible what I knew but could scarcely prove. The standards of science are austere, unforgiving—and who would have it differently? I would have to hedge, to take one step back for each two forward, to compare and suggest and contrast, always sticking close to the data. And despite what I thought I knew now, the data would have to lead, they would have to show the way."

"A science fiction writer is—or should be—constrained by what is, or logically might be. That can mean simple fidelity to facts (which, in science, are always more important than theories—though Lord knows the two help shape each other, undermining the convenient, complacent separation of observer and observed). To me it also means heeding the authentic, the actual and concrete. Bad fiction uses the glossy generality; good writing needs the smattering of detail, the unrelenting busy mystery of the real."

"Thunder impresses, but it’s lightning does the work."

"In its studies and learned colloquy, Faz saw and felt the tales of Men. They seemed curiously convoluted, revolving about Self. What mattered most to those who loved tales was how they concluded. Yet all Men knew how each ended. Their little dreams were rounded with a sleep. So the point of a tale was not how it ended, but what it meant. The great inspiring epic rage of Man was to find that lesson, buried in a grave."

"Nothing could be sure it was itself the original. So the only intelligent course lay in enjoying whatever life a being felt—living like a mortal, in the moment."

"The role of boredom in human history is underrated."

"Every age is known by its pleasures, Fielding reads from the library readout. The twentieth introduced two: high speed and hallucinogenic drugs. Both proved dangerous in the long run, which made them even more interesting."

"Schools praised diversity but were culturally the same. Different skin color, same opinions."

"Marches don’t stop markets."

"Manufacturing creates wealth, services distribute it."

"A rich bank account did not mean rich ideas; in fact, often the reverse. The bigger your ass, the more you want to cover it."

"He didn’t regret growing older, it was a privilege denied to many."

"Boundaries got redrawn at the point of a sword, and the legal frame followed."

"Disintegration of structure equals information loss."

"Organic forms are in the universe of things and also reside in the universe of essences. There we cannot go. … You are a spontaneous product of the universe of things. We are not. This seems to give you … windows. It was difficult for me to monitor your domestic transmissions, they fill up with branches, spontaneous paths, nuances…"

"They will do anything for the worker, except become one."

"“The peers just fill the air with their speeches.” “And from what I've seen, vice versa.”"

"Only fools get to join."

"At least being prosperous set one apart in England; here it guaranteed nothing, not even taste."

"Everybody feels he has a right to a life of luxury — or at least comfort — so there’s a lot of frustration and resentment when the dream craps out."

"Yes, perhaps that was it. For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable. Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right."

"It was an example of what he thought of as the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available."

"To shine is better than to reflect."

"All right, he thought, so the details were not perfect. But maybe, in a sense, that was part of the magic, too."

"There was something about such reflex stupidity that never failed to irritate him."

"“One of the laws of nature,” Gordon said, “is that half the people have got to be below average.” ”For a Gaussian distribution, yeah,” Cooper said. “Sad, though.”"

"(Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable."

"Somehow to them, the press was always the judge of things scientific."

"“Free will again,” Cathy said. “Or free won’t,” Peterson said mildly."

"If you were damned certain you weren’t looking for something, there was a very good chance you wouldn’t see it."

"Religions do not teach doubt."

"You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience, to replace everyday life’s pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with — no not with certainty but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial."

"No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal."

"It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure."

"The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail."

"Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future."

"Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living."

"Major Sánchez grunted. “Nice word, ‘trivial.’ Means you got it—cojones—you got no worry. If you don’t—”"

"Every boy knows he is immortal, but his parents, they are not so sure."

"That thing doesn’t care about you. It won’t reward you when you take risks. It is simply indifferent. That’s the fact about it that most never learn. They hate it and fear it and finally ignore it. Because of that. It would be easier if it hated us. Maybe even if it hunted us. But it doesn’t care. Remember."

"“You’ll never get it to follow orders.” “Slaves follow orders, Colonel. You want something done a slave can’t, you don’t ask for a slave to do it.”"

"Man doesn’t have to take a gamble just ’cause it’s there. You got to learn that."

"“There’s plenty—” “Plenty is exactly what there’s none of.”"

"Soldiers for equality, uh? Glad you warned me. I’d have thought you were just thieves."

"You got to learn to wait people out. Hear what they got to say. Not enough to have a majority rule, y’know. Otherwise, the minority won’t be convinced and they won’t support the plan. No point havin’ people at your elbow who’re against what you’re doin’. So we just got to talk it out Quaker-style till ever’body agrees. More efficient in the long run."

"Manuel stared at the place where Piet had been. The man he had known so little would now lie in this place far beyond the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome and the hammer of Marx, in a territory open and without plan, beyond man and his encasing theories, his filters, beyond the closed rooms of the civilized mind."

"Once introduced into this world, life would never leave—there was no end to the explosive, consuming, voracious lust of long chain molecules to link and match and make of themselves yet more and more and again more."

"Life was growing and spreading here the way a disease propagates and eats and in the eating must kill. There should be something more, he thought. A kind of being might come into the universe that did not want to finally eat everything or to command all or to fill every niche and site with its own precious self. It would be a strange thing, with enough of the brute biology in it to have the quick, darting sense of survival. But it would also have to carry something of the machine in it, the passive and accepting quality of duty, of waiting, and of thought that went beyond the endless eating or the fear of dying. To such a thing the universe would not be a battleground but a theater, where eternal dramas were acted out and it was best to be in the audience. Perhaps evolution, which had been at the beginning a blind force that pushed against everything, could find a path to that shambling, curiously lasting state."

"The past was a jigsaw puzzle and you never had all the pieces."

"But no, the friend’s indictment was off target; he simply liked them tall, as long as they didn’t slump down in a forlorn effort to appear shorter. It seemed obvious to him that no woman looked good trying to be something she wasn’t."

"That was what drew him to mathematics. Not because it was rarefied, but because it probed to the subtle, deeper reality. People said that mathematicians were unworldly, and yammered on about how Einstein couldn’t make correct change. Nonsense. Einstein just didn’t give a damn. It was the subtle, the beautiful that concerned him."

"It was one thing to be instantly attracted to a woman, and another to like her independence, the way she took no notice of what he thought of her, one way or the other. She was indeed a modern woman—not aggressive, yet not submissive. A self-possessed apartness, a lack of cling... Yes, that was what held his attention: her reserve. The promise of depths you could not guess merely by seeing her in a swimsuit."

"“We will be just like the USA. Only we will be more honest.” ”We’ve got two parties.” “No you do not. You have only the party of the banks, of the money men, and they divide it into two pieces for your voting.”"

"Archeology is mostly a process of making associations between objects, and every discovery opens up possible resonances with things we already have. Sometimes, simply wandering through a museum or a site can open your eyes."

"Professors everywhere deplored examinations as an archaic technique, a fossil that recalled little red schoolhouses and memorizing the capitals of all the states. Regular progress and daily diligence mattered more, they felt, not an hour spent compressing months of learning onto a few sheets of paper. Far better to stress homework, classroom participation and the professor’s judgment. Regrettably, the large size of classes, and the requirements of society itself for pseudo-objective standards kept the exam structure firmly in place."

"She stood up. “Professional? Ha! My father used to say, you have to be able to tell a tracheotomist from a cutthroat. Well, I can.”"

"Maybe is not a theory, you know, it is merely maybe."

"Just because something’s crazy, doesn’t mean it’s wrong."

"She always dressed well, but he recognized the signs of insecurity; certitude was inversely proportional to the amount of makeup."

"Still, Claire hated Charlotte Brontë’s comment that she would have given all her talent to be beautiful. That condemned you always to play somebody else’s game—and, when your looks failed—finally to lose."

"This was what never failed to stir her—the unfathomable gulf between today’s thinking and the way the ancients thought. They were truly alien, not merely innocent agrarians with a foolish faith."

"In popularizing a scientific development it was always crucial to sail the narrow strait between the Scylla of professional contempt and the Charybdis of public befuddlement."

"Hubris. They disliked questions unless there were clear answers. They believed so much in their method that they conjured up certainty out of undeniable risk."

"Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced."

"He watched her putting away bacon and toast. “I remember breakfasts like that.” “First Law of Thermodynamics still applies. If you eat it, and you don’t burn it off, you sit on it.” “You burn it, looks like. Exercise? “Worry. Saves time and you don’t have to shower.”"

"A particle detector that ran beautifully was either obsolete or hadn’t been designed close enough to the cutting edge of the technology."

"Engineers never liked the unexplained, whereas physicists lived for it."

"Teaching was all very fine, but research made the heart sing."

"“So he looks like a potential Mr. Right?” “No, just Mr. Right Now.”"

"The problem with the unknown was its lack of road signs."

"She felt a tingling, curiously pleasurable: her “curiosity reflex,” she had called it in high school, when she had first glimpsed the serene certainties of physics, starkly contrasting with the world’s raw hubbub."

"A damned big clue, but pointing at what? When in doubt, get some numbers."

"The desire to find something could provoke what she called “wantum mechanics,” fishing a result out of nothing but noise."

"When in enough doubt, let your subconscious work on the problem."

"Only senators and simpletons thought science took place in neatly drawn boxes."

"“Diversity” had come to mean Balkanization."

"But in the divisions among students lay a deeper strategy. The administration practiced tactics of divide-and-conquer, turning each student faction into a client, supplicants to the ever-expanding executive corps who thought of themselves as “management,” of faculty as workers and students as captive customers. In this they merely mirrored the national political style, a legacy of the Twen Cen."

"She needed some fresh illumination, all right, but not the kind that comes through the west window of a church."

"Data always overruled theory."

"“Ummm,” Alicia said, trying to be polite. “Still sounds like we’re just making this up as we go along.” “We are.” Max grinned. “Invent, then check. It’s really the only way to make progress.”"

"“Law of the universe,” she said. “The longer the menu description, the worse the food.”"

"I like Orange County, though. It’s like L.A. without caffeine."

"She was grateful for something more than smooth, meaningless phrases. Better, the man had not reverted to the hedged-in, minimize-possible-damage style. And the first of all the commandments shall be: Cover Thy Ass."

"The ship of theory could set sail on tides of mathematical grandeur and hope alone, but only data could fill its sails."

"To believe anything so far-fetched, I’d have to see a solid calculation."

"She sighed. “We’re just guessing.” “When you have a Ph. D., you call them hypotheses, not guesses.”"

"She had changed her name from the African Aleix to Alicia when she went away to college, fresh beginnings and all. Her parents had been into black roots and the rest of it when she was born, then had rapidly backed away. Her father’s political evolution had followed a trajectory away from what he termed in one of his op-ed pieces “the narcissism of minor differences.” He had approved her abandoning the Africa-nodding of Aleix, remarking only that his thinking in those days had been mere mulling over food and folktales. She had been surprised when he wrote a series of columns on his emergence, his recovery from her mother’s death in an auto accident, and one entirely about her. This was on his long march abandoning, in his phrase, “obligatory blackitude,” so he had folded it into a thesis about the hollowness of hauling out costumes and traditional foods from lands you had never even visited. He had taken a stand against a black group insisting on carrying their “cultural weapons” to political rallies, on grounds that they stood for a precious cultural inheritance which should be beyond criticism. Tom Butterworth (“Uncle Tom” to his enemies, of course) then argued that a ban on spears was scarcely an attack on their culture, since none of them knew much more about real spears than which was the business end."

"Information wants to be free—remember that old saw? Some truth to it, only it’s backwards. This isn’t an information economy—we’re drowning in that—it’s an attention economy. That’s what everybody’s vying for."

"Indeed, she had tried to follow books and films about science, but they featured rugged, style-conscious folk who transacted their work in ornate bars, atmospheric dens thickly mired in a high-contrast noir underworld future where bizarre ornamentation passed for any sense of newness. She had never known anybody who could design an experiment or do a calculation on table napkins, sipping hip drinks while guitar riffs wailed in the smoky background, but in movies and TV this was standard, apparently to make matters more interesting to a weary public with the attention span of a commercial. Scientists were either aggressively hip, often clad in tight leather, or else pitiful, hopeless nerds, obsessional neurotics nobody would trust for a moment with the discoveries they had, quite implausibly, ushered into the world while anxiously trying to get laid."

"Ours is not to reason why, ours is to measure and report—the experimenter’s credo."

"Her eyes flipped down through the usual scandal, gossip, and politics, noting that there didn’t seem to be much difference between them anymore."

"Orange County, with its signature long lines of tall palm trees, was working toward being “max-frilled,” as the slang had it, but at least it didn’t have the touches of L.A. The post office didn’t offer valet parking yet. On rainy days parking tickets weren’t slipped inside protective envelopes, as in Beverly Hills. There were no water bars, with fifty chilled varieties at two bucks a glass, with no ice because it would erase the regional subtleties. And when you called the police department and got put on hold, no classical music played."

"Outside the Sea Lounge were ranks of motorcycles, mostly Harleys. Through the open windows she could see a jammed crowd raising beer glasses to the monotonous thump of the live band. Being Harley guys, they were of course rebels, rugged lone wolves, individual spirits, as was obvious because they were all wearing the same jackets and jeans, bandannas and sunglasses, big brass belt buckles and tattoos, probably even the same underwear."

"Inside, the place had enough bare concrete and ribbed ducts and stark lighting to be a surrealist theme bar. Very hip but still just another joint where luncheon was lunch for six bucks extra."

"Prolonged exposure to journalists made her distrust any news report; they got matters wrong so casually, even the simple ones."

"But these were mere passing irritants. Deeper were the systemic troubles. She stressed the many unknowns; the media wanted sharp answers to huge questions, preferably in a compact one-liner. She tried to emphasize the progressive questioning of her method and how all answers were provisional, awaiting confirmation; reporters liked zippy adventure and exciting guesses with, of course, striking visuals in primary colors."

"The barely awake public, trained to the attention span of a commercial, thought that science had two children: either consumer yummies, served up by the handmaiden of technology, or else awesome wonders like the beauties of astronomy. The unsettling side they largely ignored, unless for the momentary shock value of, say, swollen insects doing disgusting things. But the root promise of science was of a world unshaped by humans. The expanses of time and space that stretched out from the human community were terrifying, and most avoided even thinking of them."

"As a political commentator of the time put it, most real-world people she knew thought of Washington, D.C., as a whorehouse where every four years ordinary folk got to elect a new piano player."

"That mood had persisted when she finally got home and, unable to sleep, watched some TV. It was as usual, a cacophony, which combined with the other audio media gave a disposable pop culture that made every moment but the present seem quaint, bloodless, dead."

"Thing about crazies is, they’re crazy. You can’t even understand them in retrospect."

"Indeed, high-blown rhetoric plus uncheckable consequences were the two sure signatures of the crank."

"One of the better aspects of aging was that she no longer practiced dragging on cigarettes before the mirror, striving to get the right dissipated look, or tried on sunglasses until she found the kind the latest hip singer wore. Had she really worn those mirrorshades? Perfect holdovers from the Me Decade, because they let the viewer watch himself."

"Given a choice between existential despair and rapt religious fervor, her crowd chose marijuana."

"Well, this was what dads were for: saying the unsayable when you needed it."

"All the way up through the academic world she had spent a lot of energy fending off the blandly patronizing efforts to enter her in what she termed the Oppression Sweepstakes. Now that she had done something worth noting, blackness attached itself to her like a lamprey."

"“Sure,” Max said offhand, “there are plenty of archbishops wringing their hands, mumbling philosophers and New Age gab pouring out in the media, but so what?” She laughed. He said New Age as one word, “newage,” rhyming with “sewage.”"

"There were the usual anxieties, starkly revealing the uneasiness that ordinary intellectuals had with science."

"Physicists had abandoned God long ago and hoped that firing repeated questions at nature would get to the truth. What scientists really believed in was that the think-check-think-again style of scientific method would yield some species of Truth."

"He whispered, “Honey, it’s good ol’ love makes the world go round.” “Actually, it’s inertia.”"

"Women lurching around on heels they couldn’t manage (“sexy evening columns” as Frederick’s termed them)—further proof yet again that money can’t buy a clue."

"Einstein said that the only incomprehensible thing about the universe was that it was comprehensible. But resorting to God forgets what biology says—that our minds came out of the physical world, y’know, through evolution of early brain stems and neural systems to higher levels of complexity."

"“Boy, do I hate these holier-than-thou types.” “Clerics.” “Anybody who tries to hem science in, tell it what it can and cannot do. Boundaries are best defined by pushing against them. Expanding our horizons, our sense of wonder.” She smiled. “There’s nothing holier than wow!?”"

"Science’s success did not need a God to explain it; the world was enough."

"Minds embodies in strange shapes would still find themselves sharpened against evolution’s ceaseless whetstone. What challenges would they face? In the end the universe as a whole was life’s ultimate opponent."

"Government doesn’t often move quickly, but when they do, it’s like an elephant stampede."

"To peer through the quick stubble of mathematics and see the wonders lurking behind was to momentarily live in the infinite, beyond the press of the ordinary world where everyone else dwelled in ignorance."

"“I’ll be thinking of you as they roll me into a grave marked ‘Nobody Special.’”"

"She had long ago stopped counting how many times the 0.38 g of Mars had helped them through crucial moments. It had proved the only useful aspect of the planet."

"Whole world is sitting on ass, watching glorious Twenty-first century on TV."

"That’s how business works. There’s always somebody coming in on your blind side."

"All the astronauts were easy on the eyes. No coincidence. NASA didn’t train people the public wouldn’t want to watch."

"“It was just good luck, last minute luck.” “Your ‘luck’ was mostly sweat and intuition.”"

"That’s absurd. This is real life, not some tabloid fantasy."

"“Viktor! Don’t tell me you cheated! A gentleman doesn’t cheat at cards.” “Am captain, not gentleman.”"

"Media bloomed with florid discussions between completely uninformed people about every detail imaginable."

"Science was a systematic way to avoid fooling yourself, after all."

"Exercise erased cares."

"After weeks of indoor work it actually felt good to be doing something—clean, direct, muscles and mind."

"Not sure. When don’t know, do experiment."

"He’s an order of magnitude better than mere diplomats. He’s a conniver."

"Shanna put on the last movement of Beethoven’s Fifth and turned up the gain. Ludwig von Cornball, they had called him back at Moonbase One. Hipitude: post-postmodern irony. All because she played ol’ Ludwig so much—but who was more appropriate? What spirit better expressed the grandeur of an expedition to the edge of the solar system?"

"Puzzled frowns in the audience. Science reporters they might be, but high school chemistry was going a bit too deep for most."

"Nobody out here was going to find an alternative here to Earth’s tiresome clash of selfish individualisms and stifling collectivisms."

"She had always admired the way bureaucracies spontaneously produced leaden prose, blandly sliding from the mouths of people who absolutely believed everything they said."

"“Quite patently artificial,” she said. “Looks like it to me, and I’m just a physicist.” “I thought you were an engineer-pilot.” “Hey, physicists can do anything.” “Um. So they think. But not biology…”"

"“I think,” Jordin said mildly, “a professional biologist would label that aggressive behavior.”"

"Would an alien outsider judge America’s performance by My Lai and Wounded Knee or by Lincoln and Jefferson?"

"Definitions, her grandmother once said, had to be like a fat man’s belt—big enough to cover the subject but elastic enough to allow for change."

"Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them."

"Anyway, the Shanna woman was abrasive, self-obsessed, smug—and those were her good points. Julia suspected that in a pinch the woman might also be careless, the one sin reality never forgave."

"There was more known, but always more to be known. Yes, she thought, and the unknown can masquerade as the unknowable."

"They had a legend about a Chemical pinned to a piece of dead matter and allowed to die that way—Diminished to extinction! Apparently a commonplace among Chemicals. Yet after this fearsome loss, the identity emerged from its full subtraction—to claim life again. Such a desperate story! Elementary knowledge tells us that such things do not happen, of course."

"“Why paired?” Viktor asked. “Have two sexes?” “Hard to imagine how electromagnetic creatures could,” Mary Kay said. Viktor grinned. “Lack of imagination is not an argument. Especially lately.”"

"Better be a bit more diplomatic. Translation: cover your scientific ass."

"None of the above. That’s often the right answer, and bugger the exams."

"The evolutionary routes are many, she knew, wending through the howling wilderness of the maladaptive, on to their severely narrowed destinations. Biology abounded with convergent examples, destinations arrived at along very different paths. Fruiting bodies of slime molds and myxobacteria alike evolved multicelled advances. Warmbloodedness came forth several times, as did live birth and even penile tumescence. The eyes did indeed have it—as seen in the camera-like eyes of vertebrates and octopi, and the similar tiny preceptors of worms and jellyfish. Nature invented over and over again the mechanisms used by diverse organisms to hear, smell, echolocate, sense the prickle of electric and magnetic fields."

"But then, growing up was not supposed to be easy. One Mom remarked offhandedly, “It’s the toughest work you’ll ever do.”"

"Naturals felt best in groups of a hundred or so, and better if only a few dozen were involved. Hunting parties had been about that size, for the long-extinct big game. Many important institutions were of the same rough scale: the ancient village, governing councils of nations, commanding elites of vast armies, teams playing games, orchestras, family fests. All human enterprises that worked were of that size, and nearly everything that failed was not."

"In his view, the true deep human fantasy was the conviction of safety. Men believed their women were devoted; wives felt that their men were dependable. Both ignored contrary evidence."

"From birth it had integrated each experience with its innate sense of balance and appropriate scale—indeed, this was the sole purpose of its conscious being."

"For her it was a slippery descent into a labyrinth where twin urges fought, revenge versus survival. These two instincts, already ancient before the first hominid walked, rarely married with any security. Yet if she did not feel the pinch of their competition, she would not be, by her own judgment, a true human."

"“You humans have emotions,” Seeker said slowly, “but more often emotions have you.”"

"They all lived as ants in the shadow of mountains of millennia, and time’s sheer mass shaded every word."

"History held counterexamples to any facile rule."

"Good food was like sex, one of life’s blessings, but they both lost their edge when talked about too much."

"You need friends to keep you on your feet, and enemies to keep you on your toes."

"In any case, caution outweighed theory, as mice knew about elephants."

"“How can you shrug off history?”… “By studied neglect.”"

"Nothing is eternal—including prisons."

"Individual recollections of the past are easily shaped by others. After a while they need have little bearing on the once-lived events."

"The intellectual breeds of humans think in terms of abstractions. But most people have emotions and think they are having ideas."

"Seeker laughed. “You are so—well, human. You always think you are the ultimate.” “And…we’re not.” Seeker inspected the ceiling. “It seems unlikely.”"

"Uncompromising zeal doesn’t look in the mirror much."

"Curious, how any tool properly made acquires a beauty."

"While a gigantic amount has been written or spoken, culture in the end is the fraction that gets remembered."

"Propaganda of sufficient age became art."

"Great error, seen up close, can look like true greatness."

"Evolution was still at work, pruning the failures from the gene pool with unblinking patience."

"Weeds sprouted in spaces where once-important people had proclaimed that their presumptions were imperishable."

"“So many people, close-packed.” “Your kind apparently enjoys the crowding.” “I…I can sort of see why it might be exciting. Like a never-ending party.” Speaker grimaced. “Just the sort of horror I imagined, yes.”"

"Nature’s nature was change. It was not a museum."

"To us, most human morality is carefully thought-through self-congratulation."

"When you know nothing, you are free to hope."

"“The price of such seeing will be death,” Seeker said quietly. She blinked. “We’ve done fine so far.” “A numerical series can have many terms yet be finite.”"

"Quantum uncertainty, chaos—these forever screen precise knowledge of the future from our eyes."

"An animal that liked abstractions? Maybe that wasn’t all that bad a definition of being human."

"“He was guilty of the heresy of humanism.” “How can that be heresy?” “The narcissistic devotion to things human? ‘Man is the measure of all things?’ Easily.”"

"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.)"

"The desire to economize time and mental effort in arithmetical computations, and to eliminate human liability to error is probably as old as the science of arithmetic itself."

"Originally one thought that if there were a half dozen large computers in this country, hidden away in research laboratories, this would take care of all requirements we had throughout the country."

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."

"The current worldview has it that everything is made of matter, and everything can be reduced to the elementary particles of matter, the basic constituents — building blocks — of matter. And cause arises from the interactions of these basic building blocks or elementary particles; elementary particles make atoms, atoms make molecules, molecules make cells, and cells make brain. But all the way, the ultimate cause is always the interactions between the elementary particles. This is the belief — all cause moves from the elementary particles. This is what we call "upward causation." So in this view, what human beings — you and I think of as our free will does not really exist. It is only an epiphenomenon or secondary phenomenon, secondary to the causal power of matter. And any causal power that we seem to be able to exert on matter is just an illusion. This is the current paradigm.Now, the opposite view is that everything starts with consciousness. That is, consciousness is the ground of all being. In this view, consciousness imposes "downward causation." In other words, our free will is real. When we act in the world we really are acting with causal power. This view does not deny that matter also has causal potency — it does not deny that there is causal power from elementary particles upward, so there is upward causation — but in addition it insists that there is also downward causation. It shows up in our creativity and acts of free will, or when we make moral decisions. In those occasions we are actually witnessing downward causation by consciousness."

"I had a dream that felt like an admonition to me. I heard it so clearly: "The Tibetan Book of the Dead is correct. It's your job to prove it!" ... There are residue dreams which are an extension of our waking life. Then there are what Carl Jung calls "big dreams" and my dream about the Tibetan Book of the Dead was one of those big dreams. One of those can change your life. It can change it for awhile or forever. Those dreams are in the same local time domain as when we have an experience of Holy Spirit."

"I find that a paradigm shift takes place in two ways. First, for all scientists to start working on the new paradigm like happened with Newtonian physics, it takes a long time. But there is another way where a group of people hang onto a model that they are all happy with and they are all finding new problems to work on within that model. For me that model has been that consciousness is the ground of being and now, lots of people are accepting that model. This is a great achievement. This change has happened in less than three generations. That's a tremendous achievement. Old paradigmers, like some of my colleagues from the U of O physics department, will take a long time to change."

"In Self Awareness Universe the breakthrough is that consciousness is the ground of being. We have to introduce consciousness into science, but to do this consciousness must have some structure to manifest itself. That structure requires mind, vital energies, supra-mentality, soul in other words. All of that was lacking in the "self aware universe model." If I had stayed with that model I would have felt as dissatisfied as I was before the "self aware universe model.""

"Mystics, contrary to religionists, are always saying that reality is not two things — God and the world — but one thing, consciousness. It is a monistic view of reality based on consciousness that mystics claim to directly intuit. The problem with science has always been that most scientists believe that science must be done within a different monistic framework, one based on the primacy of matter. And then, quantum physics showed us that we must change that myopic prejudice of scientists, otherwise we cannot comprehend quantum physics. So now we have science within consciousness, a new paradigm of science based on the primacy of consciousness that is gradually replacing the old materialist science. Why? Not only because you can't understand quantum physics without this new metaphysics but also because the new paradigm resolves many other paradoxes of the old paradigm and explains much anomalous data."

"The atoms become like a moth, seeking out the region of higher laser intensity."

"I'm the least-educated person in my immediate family. My two other brothers have multiple advanced degrees, and I only have one. [...] Actually, now that I've got a Nobel Prize, I feel equal."

"I called my mother up when they announced the Nobel Prize, waiting until 7 in the morning. She said, “That’s nice — and when are you going to see me next?”"

"I was a kind of a one-man army. I could solder circuits together, I could turn out things on the lathe, I could work with rockets and balloons. I'm a kind of a hybrid between an engineer and a physicist and astronomer."

"All this is very good in theory, but in practice, you take a piece of iron, wind a wire around it, then plug the wire in. The core gets hot, the wires smoke, and the fuse blows. So you see, there are practical limitations to theory."

"As soon as we started looking at them, we saw the most remarkable situation. My first thought was, "Great guns! Something's gone wrong with the apparatus!" But then we got later North American tapes and everything seemed normal again."

"Apparently, something happens on the sun. It sends out a burst of gases. The reservoirs above our earth shake like a bowl of jelly. The radiation droozles out at the ends and makes the auroral displays at the North and South Poles."

"After a vast research program, which depended very heavily upon the use of a number of highspeed computers, I am pleased to offer you the result: "Space is that in which everything else is." In other words, "Space is the hole that we are in.""

"A man is a fabulous nuisance in space right now. He's not worth all the cost of putting him up there and keeping him comfortable and working."

""This is John Lear, Science Editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, calling from New York". (Heavy emphasis on "calling from New York," then a long pause waiting for me to recover from the thrill of hearing from such an important person, in New York, no less.) Actually, I did know who he was and had often characterized him as the anti-science editor of the Saturday Review. He continued: "I read of your recent report of the discovery of radiation belts of the Earth and thought that I would do a piece on the subject. What I found remarkable was that such important work had been done at a midwestern state university." Well, I don't think that I responded with any profanity but I did manage to convey a suggestion as to what he could do with his piece and hung up. The next day, the president of my university, Virgil M. Hancher, called me to report that Mr. Lear had called him to complain about my discourtesy. I then gave a brief explanation of my reaction, at the end of which Hancher replied "I promised Lear that I would call you and you may now consider that I have done so. And, by the way, Van, my congratulations!" I never heard from the matter again. It's great to have a boss like that."

"One of the principal objects of theoretical research is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in the greatest simplicity."

"His true monument lies not on the shelves of libraries, but in the thoughts of men, and in the history of more than one science."

"In all these papers we see a love of honest work, an aversion to shams, a caution in the enunciation of conclusions, a distrust of rash generalizations and speculations based on uncertain premises. He was never anxious to add one more guess on doubtful matters in the hope of hitting the truth, or what might pass as such for a time, but was always ready to take infinite pains in the most careful testing of every theory. With these qualities was united a modesty which forbade the pushing of his own claims and desired no reputation except the unsought tribute of competent judges."

"The laws of thermodynamics, as empirically determined, express the approximate and probable behavior of systems of a great number of particles, or, more precisely, they express the laws of mechanics for such systems as they appear to beings who have not the fineness of perception to enable them to appreciate quantities of the order of magnitude of those which relate to single particles, and who cannot repeat their experiments often enough to obtain any but the most probable results."

"We avoid the gravest difficulties when, giving up the attempt to frame hypotheses concerning the constitution of matter, we pursue statistical inquiries as a branch of rational mechanics."

"Mathematics is a language."

"The whole is simpler than its parts."

"Anyone having these desires will make these researches."

"I wish to know systems."

"A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane."

"If I have had any success in mathematical physics, it is, I think, because I have been able to dodge mathematical difficulties."

"Unassuming in manner, genial and kindly in his intercourse with his fellow-men, never showing impatience or irritation, devoid of personal ambition of the baser sort or of the slightest desire to exalt himself, he went far toward realizing the ideal of the unselfish, Christian gentleman. In the minds of those who knew him, the greatness of his intellectual achievements will never overshadow the beauty and dignity of his life."

"In the last generation, this country produced one of the most eminent men of science in the whole world. His name was quite unknown among us while he lived, and it is still unknown. Yet I may say without too great exaggeration that when I heard it mentioned in a professional assembly in the Netherlands two years ago, everybody got down under the table and touched their foreheads to the floor. His name was Josiah Willard Gibbs."

"On the one hand, the student has been informed by some writers that the only certain way lies in the use of the entropy-function and the thermodynamic potentials; on the other hand, he is told with equal authority that the method used by the original investigators has been the consideration of cyclic processes, and that the former method is nothing but a mathematical (perhaps unnecessary) refinement of the results obtained by the latter. These extreme attitudes appear to me to be unfortunate, and more especially when one observes the physical clearness introduced by the use of cyclic processes, but at the same time remembers that most of the results obtained by separate investigators using cyclic processes had, with a great many more, previously been found by J. Willard Gibbs by means of a purely analytical method."

"Let a drop of wine fall into a glass of water; whatever be the law that governs the internal movement of the liquid, we will soon see it tint itself uniformly pink and from that moment on, however we may agitate the vessel, it appears that the wine and water can separate no more. All this, Maxwell and Boltzmann have explained, but the one who saw it in the cleanest way, in a book that is too little read because it is difficult to read, is Gibbs, in his Principles of Statistical Mechanics."

"Willard Gibbs is the type of the imagination at work in the world. His story is that of an opening up which has had its effect on our lives and our thinking; and, it seems to me, it is the emblem of the naked imagination —which is called abstract and impractical, but whose discoveries can be used by anyone who is interested, in whatever "field"— an imagination which for me, more than that of any other figure in American thought, any poet, or political, or religious figure, stands for imagination at its essential points."

"...only one man lived who could understand Gibbs's papers. That was Maxwell, and now he is dead."

"Maxwell, and then Boltzmann, and then... J. Willard Gibbs... expended enormous intellectual effort in devising... , or... . The uses... extend far beyond gases... describing electric and magnetic interactions, chemical reactions, phase transitions... and all other manner of exchanges of matter and energy. The success... has driven the belief among many physicists that it could be applied with similar success to society. ...[E]verything from the flow of funds in the stock market to the flow of traffic on interstate highways ..."

"Many men have had intuitions well ahead of their time; and this is not least true in mathematical physics. Gibbs' introduction of probability into physics occurred well before there was an adequate theory of the sort of probability he needed. But for all these gaps it is, I am convinced, Gibbs rather than Einstein or Heisenberg or Planck to whom we must attribute the first great revolution of twentieth century physics."

"[Gibbs' 1878] paper stands today as one of the most profound contributions to the world of human thought and […] places him with the greatest of the world's geniuses."

"... a comparison of the American regard for inventive skill as opposed to skill in pure science. Our greatest inventive genius, Thomas A. Edison, was all but canonized by the American public, and a legend has been built around him. One cannot, I suppose, expect that achievements in pure science would receive the same public applause that came to inventions as spectacular and as directly influential on ordinary life as Edison’s. But one might have expected that our greatest genius in pure science, Josiah Willard Gibbs, who laid the theoretical foundations for modern physical chemistry, would have been a figure of some comparable acclaim among the educated public. Yet Gibbs, whose work was celebrated in Europe, lived out his life in public and even professional obscurity at Yale, where he taught for thirty-two years. Yale, which led American universities in its scientific achievements during the nineteenth century, was unable in those thirty-two years to provide him with more than a half dozen or so graduate students who could understand his work, and never took the trouble to award him an honorary degree."

"... the magnificent structure of Gibbsian statistical mechanics [cannot] be viewed as founded upon ideal classical gases, Boltzmannian kinetic theory, and the virial and cluster expansions for dilute fluids! True, this last route was still frequently retravelled in textbooks more than 50 years after Gibbs’ major works were published; but it deeply misrepresents the power and range of statistical mechanics... asking ‘‘What does statistical mechanics convey to a physicist?’’ and replying: ‘‘It means that one can compute the second-virial coefficient to correct the ideal gas laws!’’ Of course, historically, that is not a totally irrelevant remark; but it is extremely misleading and, in effect, insults one of America’s greatest theoretical physicists, Josiah Willard Gibbs."

"The possibility and significance of fractional angular momentum is discussed, and some simple physical realizations of it are mentioned. This leads naturally to consideration of the possibility of fractional quantum statistics, which is seen to be a possibility inherent in the kinematics of 2+1 dimensional quantum mechanics. Both sorts of fractionalization are intimately related to theories, and the classic considerations of Aharonov and Bohm on the significance of the vector potential in quantum mechanics. The meaning and importance of discrete gauge invariance in continuum theories is pointed out. Fractional statistics is shown to have a simple dynamical realization in the dynamics of charge-flux tube composites. Fractional statistics is shown to occur very naturally in the most geometrical quantum field theories in 2+1 dimensions, that is in the nonlinear sigma model and in quantum electrodynamics."

"Quite undeservedly, the ether has acquired a bad name."

"The answer to the ancient question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable."

"Exoplanet astronomy will systematically survey our galaxy, gathering information on the masses, orbits, geology, and atmospheres of millions of planets. As a byproduct, we will learn how rare life is and what conditions it requires. What we discover might support tests and refinements of anthropic reasoning."

"How do we get from symmetric laws to asymmetric appearances? (arrow of time problem) ... Why are the fundamental laws symmetric? ("naturality" problem) ..."

"To me, dark matter is matter. It looks like matter, it quacks like matter, it waddles like matter. It has many, many properties that indicate it's matter. And I think I know what matter it is!"

"17:48 of 40:44"

"[S]ome scientists focus on ideal beauty, others on empirical truth. My own approach, following a great tradition going back to Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, has been to use beauty as a guide to truth."

"Physics is my religious belief. In the sense that in physics we discover a fantastically wonderful world out there that’s rich in potential, rich in realization, and that has ample scope for fantasy, because the laws are so strange and there’s so much stuff out there to understand. And when you understand it, you understand how that could be. I learn that I myself am very small. But I am also very large because I contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman said. I can process information. I can understand things. I can imagine. I can have fun. That’s the essence of my religion. I learn my religion from the study of what the world is and how it works."

"Does Michael Jackson or Archie Bunker or the president of General Motors need to know about quantum mechanics? Of course not. You can live a full life without that. But if you don’t believe that the universe is understandable, then it leads to the notion that one idea is just as good as another. And that’s horrible."

"Science teaches us to be very suspicious of grand generalizations...Aristotle had a set theory of the universe, and he didn’t get too far. Galileo started with simple things like pendulums and balls sliding down inclined planes, and he got much further. You never find surprises when you think in terms of broad generalities. Both quantum mechanics and relativity grew out of trying to really understand essentially simple things."

"If you don’t have all the clues, you can still do parts of the puzzle. There may be huge parts of the puzzle that we don’t even know about...It means that future generations can have the same kind of fun that we’re having."

"The bases of music are rhythm and harmony. Rhythm is ordered recurrence in time... As the planets move around the sun, they repeat their orbits periodically; thus there is already a primitive kind of rhythm in their motion. ...Harmony ...can be considered a special kind of rhythm. ...pure musical tones are produced when the vibrations are... periodic or... repeat themselves regularly in time. Two tones harmonize if their intervals of repetition are in rhythm—or, in mathematical language, if their periods are in proportion. Kepler... in the third book of Harmonice mundi... attempted to make other... related, connections between musical harmony and mathematical proportion."

"So let us listen to the light—what music do we hear? For one thing, we can elicit from each chemical element its own, unique chord. You may sometimes have noticed that a bright yellow flash is produced if ordinary table salt is sprinkled on a flame...a first bare hint of the subject of flame spectra... The fact that different elements emit light with different color characteristics is exploited by the makers of fireworks."

"If you pass the light from a sodium flash through a prism, you get a pattern very different from the familiar continuous rainbow that Newton elicited from natural sunlight. Instead of a continuous pattern, in which all gradations of pure color are apparently represented, the sodium flash generates a series of lines of light. ...in the musical analogy, sodium produces a chord where sunlight produced all possible tones—"white noise." Other elements produce other chords."

"To understand this radiation [ cosmic microwave background ], it is easier to begin thinking about the radiation from a very hot gas like that inside a neon light. The same neon... is, at room temperature, utterly transparent... The character of matter in general changes abruptly when it gets heated above 3,000 degrees or so. Below this temperature, matter is electrically neutral... At high temperatures in a neon light, the electrically charged pieces of atoms become unstuck. Frequent and violent collisions break down neutral atoms into electrons and unbalanced nuclei. Matter in this state is called plasma, and it radiates much of its collision energy in the form of light. ...a gas of neutral atoms (like air) is virtually transparent. The free [charged] nuclei and electrons of plasma, by contrast, couple to light's electromagnetic fields and absorb it very efficiently. ...You ...see light only from the borderline layer of neon between opaque plasma and transparent neutral atoms."

"Sam Treiman... has quoted something he called Treiman's theorem... Impossible things usually don't happen. ...With the discovery of radioactivity... it suddenly became apparent that the "impossible" was happening all the time. Uranium, thorium, radium... fit all the requirements of chemical elements. They could not be broken down by any of the standard methods... But occasionally... atoms of these elements spontaneously changed into other kinds of atoms. ...So what is left of the doctrine of the elements? Is alchemy reinstated? Not at all. The point is that the doctrine fails only under rare or special conditions. ...We can isolate the conditions in which they do, and retain a more restricted but still useful concept of the "impossible.""

"As the idea of permanence of objects has faded, the idea of permanence of physical laws has become better established and more powerful."

"What is conserved, in modern physics, is not any particular substance or material but only much more abstract entities such as energy, momentum, and electric charge. The permanent aspects of reality are not particular materials or structures but rather the possible forms of structures and the rules for their transformation."

"What should be most significant to us are not physical artifacts, but the meaning they embody. ...whenever we create paintings, songs, poems, books, computer programs—or ideas in the minds of children—we do something of this sort."

"The most abstract conservation laws of physics come into their being in describing equilibrium in the most extreme conditions. They are the most rigorous conservation laws, the last to break down. The more extreme the conditions, the fewer the conserved structures... In a deep sense, we understand the interior of the sun better that the interior of the earth, and the early stages of the big bang best of all."

"Why can stars do better than the big bang? ...During the big bang, there were only a few minutes when nuclei could form. Very rare processes, or slow ones, played little role. A case in point is the key process from which the sun derives its energy. In this reaction, two protons collide to produce a deuterium nucleus, a neutrino, and a positron. ...This reaction belongs to the family of weak interactions. ...It remains... a remarkable—and for humanity, remarkably fortunate—circumstance that the central reaction that drives the sun is so rare. It is only this extraordinary rarity that allows the average proton in the sun to last so long, billions of years, even though it is colliding with other protons millions of times a second. ...an entertaining example of Treiman's theorem."

"Once helium burning has occurred... the next possible reaction—carbon burning—is not necessarily slow... This reaction involves ...a strong as opposed to a weak interaction. ...Carbon burning results in magnesium. ...Taking a cross section of a highly evolved star would reveal a system of many layers. The inner layers have been subjected to the largest pressures, thereby forced to the highest temperatures, and burned the furthest; the outermost layers, by contrast, have not burned at all. Thus, as we proceed from outside in, there will be an outermost layer with the initial mix of hydrogen and helium, a layer of mostly helium, a layer of carbon, a layer of magnesium, and so on. ...So we arrive at the picture of a star, in the latest stages of its evolution... now composed of mostly carbon nuclei and other explosive material."

"It is delightful in itself when we are able to interpret features of the present as signs confirming our understanding of the past."

"In a sense, all of Earth glows in the dark. The energy release from natural radioactivity, the lingering fluorescence of stellar explosions, keeps Earth dynamic. It melts the core and keeps it flowing, and heats the crust and mantle, with consequences ranging from the generation of earth's magnetic field to earthquakes and the motion of continents. By contrast, Luna and Mars, because they are smaller, derive less energy from radioactive decays. Geologically, they are dead."

"The result will be points of quiescence—technically known as nodes—where the air's density varies not at all, and no sound is heard. Note the paradox here: either sphere alone creates a sound wave at this point; two spheres together add up to no sound there at all. Two sources can add up to give less than one. This is the essence of destructive interference. (When two sources are giving the same instruction, the resulting vibration bears not twice but four times the energy. This phenomenon, oxymoronically known as constructive interference, may seem puzzling.)"

"In science... the ultimate judges are not experts but experiments."

"Particles that, like 4He, show constructive interference are said to be bosons—a shorthand term for "particles obeying Bose–Einstein statistics." …One way to recognize bosons is their tendency to imitate one each other. ...the presence of one boson increases the chance that another of its identical siblings will also appear in the same spot. There's an attraction between them. We will speak ...of an attractive identity force drawing together identical bosons. Lasers are a spectacular example..."

"When two identical 3He atoms collide... the interference is destructive. Particles that behave like 3He atoms are called fermions, short for "particles obeying Fermi–Dirac statistics." ...while bosons imitate one another... the "identity force" between fermions acts like a repulsion, and the probability of finding a fermion at some point in space is reduced if some of its identical siblings are nearby. ...It is the repulsive identity forces between electrons that support white dwarf stars... against their own gravity."

"There is a simple rule for composite objects, such as nuclei or atoms. The rule is that if such an object contains an odd number of fermions, the composite object is a fermion. Otherwise, it is a boson. ...this simple rule doesn't care at all about the number of bosons in the composite object."

"If grand unified theories are correct, we ought to be able to derive the relative power of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions at accessible energies from their presumed equality at much higher energies. When this is attempted, a wonderful result emerges. ...in the form first calculated by Howard Georgi, Helen Quinn, and Steven Weinberg ...The couplings of strong-interaction gluons decrease, those of the [weak interaction] W bosons stay roughly constant, and those of the [electromagnetic interaction] photons increase at short distances [or high energies]—so they all tend to converge, as desired."

"In the table—and in nature—we find (leaving aside the antineutrino) fifteen fundamental fermions, with diverse strong, weak, and electromagnetic charges. ...They are so closely related by symmetry transformations that they are, so to speak, no more than different faces of the same cube."

"When we view nature stripped to essentials, so to speak, in this Unification Table, what we see is... a five bit register. ...It is in just this form that data is stored and manipulated within a digital computer. ...Every particle, then, can be specified by a five-bit word and stored in a five-bit register. It's eerie that even the odd restriction on how many minus signs are allowed is reminiscent of a trick used in computers, to detect errors in transmission. You see, if allowed words must have an odd number of minus signs, any single error in transmission of a word can be detected. ...our world might be an intricate program working itself out on a gigantic computing machine."

"Thinking along these lines will help prepare us for the day when we—or more likely, our distant descendents—will develop the machinery and cleverness to begin to program [create] worlds ourselves..."

"It is quite easy to include a weight for empty space in the equations of gravity. Einstein did so in 1917, introducing what came to be known as the cosmological constant into his equations. His motivation was to construct a static model of the universe. To achieve this, he had to introduce a negative mass density for empty space, which just canceled the average positive density due to matter. With zero total density, gravitational forces can be in static equilibrium. Hubble's subsequent discovery of the expansion of the universe, of course, made Einstein's static model universe obsolete. ...The fact is that to this day we do not understand in a deep way why the vacuum doesn't weigh, or (to say the same thing in another way) why the cosmological constant vanishes, or (to say it in yet another way) why Einstein's greatest blunder was a mistake."

"The main problem with many nonscientific world models is the vigor with which they insist upon their rightness. Once a world model claims to be completely right, it is no longer open to any changes. ...Closed systems can be comforting, but they are limited. ...It's not the best we can do. Neither is extreme "open-mindednesss" that slides into "empty headedness"—the ideal that we can never really know anything."

"The whole idea of science is really to listen to nature, in her own language, as part of a continuing dialogue."

"We have heard that nature can sing some strange and unfamiliar songs. In coming to appreciate these songs, we develop a heightened perception... leavened by an admixture of our own creation..."

"We evolved to be good at learning and using rules of thumb, not at searching for ultimate causes and making fine distinctions. Still less did we evolve to spin out long chains of calculation that connect fundamental laws to observable consequences. Computers are much better at it!"

"For many centuries before modern science, and for the first two and a half centuries of modern science, the division of reality into matter and light seemed self-evident. ...As long as the separation between the massive and the massless persisted, a unified description of the physical world could not be achieved."

"An ordinary mistake is one that leads to a dead end, while a profound mistake is one that leads to progress. Anyone can make an ordinary mistake, but it takes a genius to make a profound mistake."

"Different ways of writing the same equation can suggest very different things, even if they are logically equivalent. ...In Einstein's original 1905 paper, you do not find the equation E = mc2. What you find is m = E/c2. ...the title of the paper is a question: "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?" …If we can explain mass in terms of energy, we'll be improving our description of the world. We'll need fewer ingrediants in our world-recipe."

"E = mc2 really applies only to isolated bodies at rest. In general, when you have moving bodies, or interacting bodies, energy and mass aren't proportional. E = mc2 simply doesn't apply. ...For moving bodies, the correct mass-energy equation is E=\frac {mc^2} {\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2} {c^2}}} where v is the velocity. For a body at rest (v=0), this becomes E = mc2. ...we must consider the special case of particles with zero mass... examples include photons, color gluons, and gravitons. If we attempt to put m = 0 and v = c in our general mass-energy equation, both the numerator and denominator on the right-hand-side vanish, and we get the nonsensical relation E = 0/0. The correct result is that the energy of a photon can take any value. ...The energy E of a photon is proportional to the frequency f of the light it represents. ...they are related by the Planck-Einstein-Schrödinger equation E = hf, where h is Plank's constant."

"Knowing how to calculate something is not the same as understanding it. Having a computer to calculate the origin of mass for us may be convincing, but is not satisfying. Fortunately we can understand it too."

"Intelligent creatures [that] evolved to live deep within the atmosphere of a gas giant planet could be deluded, for eons, into thinking that the Universe is an approximately homogeneous expanse of gas, filling a three-dimensional space, but featuring anisotropic laws of motion (which we would ascribe to the planet’s gravitational field). Are we human scientists comparably blinkered?"

"If the “universe” contains everything that exists, what can be outside it? If the answer is “Things that don’t exist”, then “multiverse” becomes an idea in the domain of psychology, not physics."

"The “Copernican Principle” or “Cosmic Mediocrity”... states, basically, that Earth does not occupy a privileged place in the universe. Universality asserts more, namely that there are no privileged places or times."

"In the past scientists have repeatedly reached “intellectual closure” on inadequate pictures of the universe, and underestimated its scale."

"A common habit of thought... is the idea that space is [a] simple receptacle in which bodies move around, with no two bodies present at the same point. ...In modern quantum physics generally, and in the standard model of fundamental physics in particular, physical space appears as a far more flexible framework. Many kinds of particles can be present at the same point in space at the same time. Indeed, the primary ingredients of the standard model are not particles at all, but an abundance of quantum fields, each a complex object in itself, and all omnipresent."

"The traditional “cosmological” Multiverse considers that there might be physical realms inaccessible to us due to their separation in space-time. The quantum Multiverse arises from entities that occupy the same space-time, but are distant in Hilbert space – or in the jargon, decoherent."

"The happy coincidences between life’s requirements and nature’s choices of parameter-values might be just a series of flukes, but one could be forgiven for beginning to suspect that something deeper is at work. That suspicion is the first deep root of anthropic reasoning."

"The phase transition paradigm: The standard model of fundamental physics incorporates, as one of its foundational principles, the idea that “empty space” or “vacuum” can exist in different phases, typically associated with different amounts of symmetry. Moreover, the laws of the standard model itself suggest that phase transitions will occur, as functions of temperature. Extensions of the standard model to build in higher symmetry (gauge unification or especially supersymmetry) can support effective vacua with radically different properties, separated by great distance or by domain walls. That would be a form of failure of universality, in our sense, whose existence is suggested by the standard model."

"In most theoretical embodiments of inflationary cosmology, the currently observed universe appears as a small part of a much larger multiverse. In this framework to hold throughout the universe need not hold through all space. They can be accidents of our local geography, so to speak. If that is so, then it is valid – indeed, necessary – to consider selection effects. It may be that some of the “fundamental constants”, in particular, cannot be determined by theoretical reasoning, even in principle, because they really are different elsewhere."

"To put it crudely, theorists can be tempted to think along the lines “If people as clever as us haven’t explained it, that’s because it can’t be explained – it’s just an accident.” I believe there are at least two important regularities among standard model parameters that do have deeper explanations, namely the unification of couplings and the smallness of the QCD θ parameter. There may well be others."

"Ironically, conventional quantum mechanics itself involves a vast expansion of physical reality, which may be enough to avoid Einstein Insanity. The equations of quantum dynamics allow physicists to predict the future values of the wave function, given its present value. According to the Schrödinger equation, the wave function evolves in a completely predictable way. But in practice we never have access to the full wave function, either at present or in the future, so this “predictability” is unattainable. If the wave function provides the ultimate description of reality — a controversial issue! — we must conclude that “God plays a deep yet strictly rule-based game, which looks like dice to us.”"

"Einstein’s great friend and intellectual sparring partner Niels Bohr had a nuanced view of truth. Whereas according to Bohr, the opposite of a simple truth is a falsehood, the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth. In that spirit, let us introduce the concept of a deep falsehood, whose opposite is likewise a deep falsehood. It seems fitting to conclude this essay with an epigram that, paired with the one we started with, gives a nice example: “Naïveté is doing the same thing over and over, and always expecting the same result.”"

"… it is shameful that there are so few women in science... In China there are many, many women in physics. There is a misconception in America that women scientists are all dowdy spinsters. This is the fault of men. In Chinese society, a woman is valued for what she is, and men encourage her to accomplishments yet she remains eternally feminine."

"A simple calculation shows that from the classical theory follows that we should find a broadening of the beam with the maximum intensity on the place of the beam without field. However, from the quantum theory follows that we should find there no intensity at all, and deflected molecules on both sides. The beam should split up in two beams corresponding to the two orientations of the magnet. The experiment decided in favor of the quantum theory."

"In his obituary for Stern wrote: “Some of Pauli’s great theoretical contributions came from Stern’s suggestions, or rather questions; for example, the theory of magnetism of free electrons in metals.” From and Armin Telling – Pauli’s last two assistants – I have learned that Pauli has also discussed the question of extensively with Stern during his Hamburg time, before the advent of the new quantum mechanics."

""Shall we do it?" "Well, then let's go, we shall do it!" Otto Stern asking, Walther Gerlach answering."

"There is also hope that even in these days of increasing specialization there is a unity in the human experience."

"my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, from which I learnt that a knowledge of mathematics and physics was essential to the pursuit of astronomy. This increased my fondness for those subjects."

"Since my first discussions of ecological problems with Professor John Day around 1950 and since reading Konrad Lorenz's “King Solomon's Ring,” I have become increasingly interested in the study of animals for what they might teach us about man, and the study of man as an animal. I have become increasingly disenchanted with what the thinkers of the so-called Age of Enlightenment tell us about the nature of man, and with what the formal religions and doctrinaire political theorists tell us about the same subject."

"Physicists describe the two properties of physical laws—that they do not depend on when or where you use them—as symmetries of nature. By this usage physicists mean that nature treats every moment in time and every location in space identically—symmetrically—by ensuring that the same fundamental laws are in operation. Much in the same manner that they affect art and music, such symmetries are deeply satisfying; they highlight an order and coherence in the workings of nature. The elegance of rich, complex, and diverse phenomena emerging from a simple set of universal laws is at least part of what physicists mean when they invoke the term "beautiful.""

"Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules and brush the edge of acceptability in the search for solutions. Mathematicians are more like classical composers, typically working within a much tighter framework, reluctant to go to the next step until all previous ones have been established with due rigor. Each approach has its advantages as well as drawbacks; each provides a unique outlet for creative discovery. Like modern and classical music, it’s not that one approach is right and the other wrong – the methods one chooses to use are largely a matter of taste and training."

"The real question is whether all your pondering and analyses will convince you that life is worth living. That's what it all comes down to."

"Superstring theory starts off by proposing a new answer to an old question: what are the smallest, indivisible constituents of matter? For many decades, the conventional answer has been that matter is composed of particles... that can be modeled as dots that are indivisible and that have no size and no internal structure. Conventional theory claims, and experiments confirm, that these particles combine in various ways to produce protons, neutrons, and a wide variety of atoms and molecules... Superstring theory tells a different story. ...it does claim that these particles are not dots. Instead... every particle is composed of a tiny filament of energy, some hundred billion billion times smaller than a single atomic nucleus, which is shaped like a string. And just as a violin string can vibrate in different patterns, each of which produces a different musical tone, the filaments of superstring theory can also vibrate in different patterns. But these vibrations... produce different particle properties. ...All species of particles are unified in superstring theory since each arises from a different vibrational pattern executed by the same underlying entity."

"Well, a big question is how did the universe begin. And we, cannot answer that question. Some people think that the big bang is an explanation of how the universe began, its not. The big bang is a theory of how the universe evolved from a split second after whatever brought it into existence. And the reason why we’ve been unable to look right back at time zero, to figure out how it really began; is that conflict between Einstein’s ideas of gravity and the laws of quantum physics. So, string theory may be able to — it hasn’t yet; we’re working on it today — feverishly. It may be able to answer the question, how did the universe begin. And I don’t know how it’ll affect your everyday life, but to me, if we really had a sense of how the universe really began, I think that would, really, alert us to our place in the cosmos in a deep way."

"... the have to be curled up into this so-called Calabi-Yau shape, or ... it's a that is as close as you can be to being flat without literally being a flat shape ... In six dimensions you can have something that is known as ..."

"... I knew a guy, Brian Greene. I helped him to get a summer job at IBM because people told me he was brilliant, and he was. And when I heard that he had gotten a professorship at Columbia, it was described to me like this. It was a joint professorship between the physics and the math department, because the math department thought what he was doing was physics, and the physics department thought that what he was doing was math."

"The Fabric of the Cosmos covers a wider field than The Elegant Universe and paints it with a broader brush. There is not much overlap between the two books. ...Neither is a prerequisite for reading the other. The new book is easier, and should preferably be read first. Readers who get stuck halfway through The Elegant Universe may find the new book more digestible."

"Greene takes it for granted, and here the great majority of physicists agree with him, that the division of physics into separate theories for large and small objects is unacceptable. ...Greene believes that there is an urgent need to find a theory of quantum gravity that applies to large and small objects alike. ...As a conservative, I do not agree that a division of physics into separate theories for large and small is unacceptable. ...The essence of any theory of quantum gravity is that there exists a particle called the graviton... I looked at various possible ways of detecting gravitons and did not find a single one that worked. Because of the extreme weakness of the gravitational interaction, any putative detector of gravitons has to be extremely massive. If the detector has normal density, most of it is too far from the source of gravitons to be effective, and if it is compressed to a high density around the source it collapses into a black hole. There seems to be a conspiracy of nature to prevent the detector from working."

"He introduced a whole new set of physicists to join the pantheon that includes Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, James Chadwick, Roger Penrose, and Stephen Hawking. Among these new names Edward Witten stands out, together with Eugenio Calabi, Theodor Kaluza, Andrew Strominger, Stein Stømme, Cumrun Vafa, Gabriele Veneziano, and Shing-Tung Yau, about as international a group of names as you could find anywhere."

"Paris somehow lends itself to conceptual new ideas. I don't know why it is. There is a certain magic to that city."

"But mainly I learned, in approaching the measurement of new phenomena, not just to consider using existing apparatus but to allow the mind to wander freely and invent new ways of doing the job."

"At any one time there is a natural tendency among physicists to believe that we already know the essential ingredients of a comprehensive theory. But each time a new frontier of observation is broached we inevitably discover new phenomena which force us to modify substantially our previous conceptions. I believe this process to be unending, that the delights and challenges of unexpected discovery will continue always."

"Increased knowledge clearly implies increased responsibility."

"… one can still say that quantum mechanics is the key to understanding magnetism. When one enters the first room with this key there are unexpected rooms beyond, but it is always the master key that unlocks each door."

"Broadly speaking, the object of industry is to set up economic ways and means of satisfying human wants and in so doing to reduce everything possible to routines requiring a minimum amount of human effort."

"Progress in modifying our concept of control has been and will be comparatively slow. In the first place, it requires the application of certain modern physical concepts; and in the second place it requires the application of statistical methods which up to the present time have been for the most part left undisturbed in the journal in which they appeared."

"Postulate 1. All chance systems of causes are not alike in the sense that they enable us to predict the future in terms of the past."

"In other words, the fact that the criterion we happen to use has a fine ancestry of highbrow statistical theorems does not justify its use. Such justification must come from empirical evidence that it works."

"Based upon evidence such as already presented, it appears feasible to set up criteria by which to determine when assignable causes of variation in quality have been eliminated so that the product may then be considered to be controlled within limits. This state of control appears to be, in general, a kind of limit to which we may expect to go economically in finding and removing causes of variability without changing a major portion of the manufacturing process as, for example, would be involved in the substitution of new materials or designs."

"The definition of random in terms of a physical operation is notoriously without effect on the mathematical operations of statistical theory because so far as these mathematical operations are concerned random is purely and simply an undefined term. The formal and abstract mathematical theory has an independent and sometimes lonely existence of its own. But when an undefined mathematical term such as random is given a definite operational meaning in physical terms, it takes on empirical and practical significance. Every mathematical theorem involving this mathematically undefined concept can then be given the following predictive form: If you do so and so, then such and such will happen."

"Rule 1. Original data should be presented in a way that will preserve the evidence in the original data for all the predictions assumed to be useful."

"Rule 2. Any summary of a distribution of numbers in terms of symmetric functions should not give an objective degree of belief in any one of the inferences or predictions to be made therefrom that would cause human action significantly different from what this action would be if the original distributions had been taken as evidence."

"Every sentence in order to have definite scientific meaning must be practically or at least theoretically verifiable as either true or false upon the basis of experimental measurements either practically or theoretically obtainable by carrying out a definite and previously specified operation in the future. The meaning of such a sentence is the method of its verification."

"Both pure and applied science have gradually pushed further and further the requirements for accuracy and precision. However, applied science, particularly in the mass production of interchangeable parts, is even more exacting than pure science in certain matters of accuracy and precision."

"To have a good memory the first thing you have to do is to trust your memory."

"Eppie's memory is like sticky flypaper."

"Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment."

"Since the origin of the "penetrating rays" was still uncertain, Dr. Russell Otis and myself in the summer of 1923 went to the top of Pike's Peak for the sake of making absorption experiments upon these radiation at the highest altitude to which we could carry large quantities of absorbing materials. For if the rays were not of cosmic origin they did not need to be more penetrating than are the gamma rays from radioactive materials, while if they were of cosmic origin the sounding balloon experiments of Bowen and myself had shown that they must be very much harder (more penetrating) than anybody had thus far assumed. What was needed was absorption experiments to determine just what sort of rays they actually were."

"Cosmic rays"

"In 1832 the English astronomer Airy, in making a report to the British Association on the state of astronomical science throughout the world, remarked that he was unable to say anything about America astronomy because, so far as he knew, no public observatory existed in the United States. It was in the 1840's that the Cincinnati Observatory, the Naval Observatory in Washington, and the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were founded—the three pioneer institutions in a development that has continued with increasing acceleration ever since."

"The California Institute of Technology (CalTech) rose to prominence when Robert A. Millikan was called to Pasadena in 1921 as new university president. Millikan was known for his far-reaching ambitions both as a physicist and as a science manager. He put CalTech on the map as a top university by inviting the world's most renowned scientists for guest lectures and by hiring internationally distinguished scientists to new chairs. With theoretical physicist Paul Epstein, a pupil of Sommerfeld's, Millikan brought modern atomic physics to CalTech in the early 1920s, and with Kármán, he pursued the same strategy a few years later in order to lure the best available aerodynamicist from Europe to Pasadena."

"While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."

"It appears, from all that precedes, reasonably certain that if there be any relative motion between the earth and the luminiferous ether, it must be small; quite small enough entirely to refute Fresnel's explanation of aberration."

"Before entering into these details, however, it may be well to reply to the very natural question: What would be the use of such extreme refinement in the science of measurement? Very briefly and in general terms the answer would be that in this direction the greater part of all future discovery must lie. The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. Nevertheless, it has been found that there are apparent exceptions to most of these laws, and this is particularly true when the observations are pushed to a limit, i.e., whenever the circumstances of experiment are such that extreme cases can be examined. Such examination almost surely leads, not to the overthrow of the law, but to the discovery of other facts and laws whose action produces the apparent exceptions.As instances of such discoveries, which are in most cases due to the increasing order of accuracy made possible by improvements in measuring instruments, may be mentioned: first, the departure of actual gases from the simple laws of the so-called perfect gas, one of the practical results being the liquefaction of air and all known gases; second, the discovery of the velocity of light by astronomical means, depending on the accuracy of telescopes and of astronomical clocks; third, the determination of distances of stars and the orbits of double stars, which depend on measurements of the order of accuracy of one-tenth of a second—an angle which may be represented as that which a pin's head subtends at a distance of a mile. But perhaps the most striking of such instances are the discovery of a new planet by observations of the small irregularities noticed by Leverier in the motions of the planet Uranus, and the more recent brilliant discovery by Lord Rayleigh of a new element in the atmosphere through the minute but unexplained anomalies found in weighing a given volume of nitrogen. Many instances might be cited, but these will suffice to justify the statement that "our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." It follows that every means which facilitates accuracy in measurement is a possible factor in a future discovery, and this will, I trust, be a sufficient excuse for bringing to your notice the various methods and results which form the subject matter of these lectures."

"Now, the velocity of wave propagation can be seen, without the aid of any mathematical analysis, to depend on the elasticity of the medium and its density; for we can see that if a medium is highly elastic the disturbance would be propagated at a great speed."

"Relativity was born of an epistemological shock; it was born of the "failure" of the Michelson experiment. ...Is so little required to "shake" the universe of spatiality? Can a single experiment... annihilate... two or three centuries of rational thought? Yes, a single decimal sufficed, as our poet Henri de Regnier would say, to "make all nature sing." ...The Michelson experiment, at first so particular in character, will form the basis of the most far-reaching generalization."

"It is... striking that the Michelson laboratory was, properly speaking, cosmic. There, the most artificial physics imaginable was referred to the space of the world. The decimal which they wished to reveal by means of the interferometer, the decimal which is of the order of three-fourths of the wavelength of a vibration of light, was related to the orbital speed of the earth, a speed of the order of eighteen miles per second. The precision of such a question... this attempt to experience the immobility of space in its cosmic significance, ought to set the metaphysicians thinking who study the place of man in the world; if only these metaphysicians would give their attention to the lengthy discursive processes which lead science to build new intuitions."

"It has been reported that when Michelson was asked towards the end of his life, why he had devoted such a large fraction of his time, to the measurement of the velocity of light, he replied "it was so much fun"."

"The people who do make big discoveries are the ones who somehow manage to free themselves from conventional ways of thinking and to see the subject from a new perspective."

"Remember that no piece of honestly conducted research is ever wasted, even if it seems so at the time. Put it away in a drawer, and ten, twenty or thirty years down the road, it will come back and help you in ways you never anticipated."

"There are very few things that can be proved rigorously in condensed matter physics."

"Innovation is the key to the future, but basic research is the key to future innovation."

"Creativity is the basis of all innovation, and although it is doubtful that it can be taught, creativity should be nurtured in those who have it."

"Young people should be given good support and freedom in their research. They are the greatest source of scientific creativity because they are not as committed to existing scientific orthodoxy, and they have the energy and enthusiasm to push new ideas."

"We should willingly take risks in supporting new projects. The tendency is to play it safe when funding is low, but we need to remember that the greatest risks have the greatest payoffs."

"Excessive bureaucracy is distracting, time-consuming, and destructive to creativity."

"It is clear to me that under the right conditions, future technologies will be created that we cannot even imagine."

"Then I went to the Cavendish and there I took Rutherford’s course in nuclear physics. He was a very dramatic lecturer and full of anecdotes. He made it come alive. So this was very impressive--also very phenomenological, everything he did; very simple derivations. I think that’s very important for the first learning and this is perhaps something students now miss. They get the theory of nuclear physics thrown at them; sometimes before they ever know there is a phenomenon they have the complete theory of it. The phenomena are not sufficiently emphasized, I think, in teaching today."

"The philosophy of science is concerned with how you decide if a scientific finding is correct or true. You have to establish criteria to determine if the finding or theory is valid. Validity is a fundamental problem in the philosophy of science, but the fundamental problem in the philosophy of scientific administration is the question of value. Two scientific activities are equally valid if they achieve results that are true. Now, how do you decide which activity is more valuable? The question of value is the basic question that the scientific administrator asks so that decisions can be made about funding priorities."

"As for the Internet, I tend to have profound doubts about the value of this communication advance to science. I wonder if, in an era of the Internet, we can have somebody like Eugene Wigner. Eugene Wigner's genius manifested itself in his ability to concentrate for a long time on a single idea. If you are constantly beset by outside ideas, can you really get to the true heart of the matter? It's a very different way of doing science."

"A closed universe, one that explodes, expands, falls back on itself and explodes again, repeating the process over and over eternally, that would be a pointless universe. … But it seems to me that the data we have in hand right now clearly show that there is not nearly enough matter in the universe, not enough by a factor of three, for the universe to be able to fall back on itself ever again. My argument, is that the best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole."

"The Bible talks of purposeful creation. What we have, however, is an amazing amount of order; and when we see order, in our experience it normally reflects purpose."

"Well, if we read the Bible as a whole we would expect order in the world. Purpose would imply order, and what we actually find is order."

"Astronomy leads us to an unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly-improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan."

"I was born in Munich, Germany, in 1933. I spent the first six years of my life comfortably, as an adored child in a closely-knit middle-class family. Even when my family was rounded up for deportation to Poland it didn’t occur to me that anything could happen to us. All I remember is scrambling up and down three tiers of narrow beds attached to the walls of a very large room, and then taking a long train trip. After some days of back and forth on the train, we were returned to Munich. All the grown-ups were happy and relieved, but I began to realize that there were bad things that my parents couldn’t completely control, something to do with being Jewish. I learned that everything would be fine if we could only get to “America”."

"It was taken for granted that I would go to college, studying science, presumably chemistry, the only science we knew much about. “College” meant City College of New York, a municipally-supported institution then beginning its second century of moving the children of New York’s immigrant poor into the American middle class. I discovered physics in my freshman year and switched my “major” from chemical engineering to physics. Graduation, marriage and two years in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, saw me applying to Columbia University in the Fall of 1956."

"After a painful but largely successful struggle with courses and qualifying exams, I began my thesis work under Professor Townes. I was given the task of building a maser amplifier in a radio-astronomy experiment of my choosing; the equipment-building went better than the observations. In 1961, with my PhD thesis complete, I went in search of a temporary job at Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey. Their unique facilities made it an ideal place to finish the observations I had begun during my thesis work. “Why not take a permanent job? You can always quit,” was the advice of Rudi Kompfner, then Director of the Radio Research Laboratory. I took his advice, and remained a Bell Labs employee for the next thirty seven years. Since the large horn antenna I had planned to use for radio-astronomy was still engaged in the ECHO satellite project for which it was originally constructed, I looked for something interesting to do with a smaller fixed antenna. The project I hit upon was a search for line emission from the then still undetected interstellar OH molecule. While the first detection of this molecule was made by another group, I learned quite a bit from the experience."

"Millimeter-wave spectral studies have proven to be a particularly fruitful area for radio astronomy, and are the subject of active and growing interest, involving a large number of scientists around the world. The most personally satisfying portion of this work for me was using molecular spectra to explore the isotopic composition of interstellar atoms — thereby tracing the nuclear processes that produced them. Most notably our 1973 discovery of DCN, the first deuterated molecular species found in interstellar space, enabled me to trace the distribution of deuterium in the galaxy. This work provided us with evidence for the cosmological origin of this unique element, which had earned the nickname “Arno’s white whale”. Of all the nuclear species found in nature, deuterium is the only one whose origin stems exclusively from the explosive origin of the Universe. Because deuterium’s cosmic abundance serves as the single most sensitive parameter in the prediction of cosmic background radiation, these measurements provided strong support for the “Big Bang” interpretation of our earlier discovery."

"In retrospect, the research organization which emerged from the decade following the Bell System’s breakup deployed a far richer set of capabilities than its predecessor. In particular, our work featured a growing software component, even as we strove to improve our hardware capabilities in areas such as light-wave and electronics. The marketplace upheaval brought forth by increased competition helped speed the pace of technological revolution, and forced change upon the research and development institutions of all industrialized nations, Bell Labs included. While change is rarely comfortable, I am happy to say that we not only survived but also grew more capable in the process — seeding much of the information revolution which now pervades the world in which we live. Except for two or three papers on interstellar isotopes, my tenure as Bell Labs’ Vice-President of Research brought my personal research in astrophysics to an end. In its place, I pursued my interest in the principles which underlie the creation and effective use of technology in our society, and eventually found time to write a book on the subject Ideas and Information, published by W.W. Norton in 1989. In essence, the book depicts computers as a wonderful tool for human beings but a dreadful role model for what we humans know as intelligence. In other words, “If you don’t want to be replaced by a machine, don’t try to act like one!”"

"Part of the strength of science is that it has tended to attract individuals who love knowledge and the creation of it. Just as important to the integrity of science have been the unwritten rules of the game. These provide recognition and approbation for work which is imaginative and accurate, and apathy or criticism for the trivial or inaccurate... Thus, it is the communication process which is at the core of the vitality and integrity of science..."

"But this same process of the old teaching the young can also cause errors and false conclusions to accumulate with the passage of time. One should therefore study ancient writings, not so much in the hope of finding lost wisdom as in the hope of locating the origin of errors that have been, and still are, accepted truths."

"In order to arrive to a more realistic view of society, it must be recognized that there are individual differences that cannot be eradicated by the most rigid curriculum, and that various individuals will choose different educational curricula if allowed to do so."

"Each community has a curious and distorted image of itself which is always flattering."

"If we are to control our own future, it will be necessary, not only to obtain the cooperation of people, but to prepare comprehensive plans for that future."

"A good plan will therefore include alternative actions, the choice between them being left open until the passage of time indicates which is feasible and which is not."

"Most of us are unaware of our deep-seated faith in numbers."

"I shall here present the view that numbers, even whole numbers, are words, parts of speech, and that mathematics is their grammar. Numbers were therefore invented by people in the same sense that language, both written and spoken, was invented. Grammar is also an invention. Words and numbers have no existence separate from the people who use them. Knowledge of mathematics is transmitted from one generation to another, and it changes in the same slow way that language changes. Continuity is provided by the process of oral or written transmission."

"Hunting is doing business with animals."

"Never measure anything but frequency!"

"To do successful research, you don't need to know everything, you just need to know one thing that isn't known."

"Anything worth doing is worth doing twice, the first time quick and dirty and the second time the best way you can."

"Dead is when the chemists take over the subject."

"Anything will lase if you hit it hard enough."

"A diatomic molecule is a molecule with one atom too many."

"Is the earth affected by its cosmological setting in the universe? It is to be presumed that the solar system was molded at its birth by galactic conditions which in turn reflected the primordial chaos of the primitive galaxy. However, we are not concerned here with questions of this type, interesting though they are, but rather with a problem of even grander proportions: Is there an effect upon the earth, here and now, of the distribution of matter in the universe? As the universe expands, as distant matter moves away from us, are there effects upon the earth of this changing distribution of matter?"

"A for which the entrance area, covered with a very large number of randomly distributed pinholes, is 50 per cent open is shown to be a very effective way of forming images of a complex of s. A simple statistical trick is used to reduce the multitudinous overlapping images to a single image. Less than forty detected photons are needed to form an image of a single star."

"In Heisenberg's , the transferred to the particle by the scattered photon makse the particle's momentum uncertain. It is shown that momentum is also transferred when the lack of a scattered photon is used to discover that the particle is absent from the field of view of the microscope (i.e., located outside the light beam). This apparent paradox, a transfer of momentum and/or energy to a missing particle by a light beam (without the scattering of a photon), is discused and "resolved" using quantum measurement theory."

"I have long believed that an experimentalist should not be unduly inhibited by theoretical untidyness. If he insists in having every last theoretical T crossed before he starts his research the chances are that he will never do a significant experiment. And the more significant and fundamental the experiment the more theoretical uncertainty may be tolerated. By contrast, the more important and difficult the experiment the more that experimental care is warranted. There is no point in attempting a half-hearted experiment with an inadequate apparatus."

"We completely ignore the human value of the information. A selection of 100 letters is given a certain information value, and we do not investigate whether it makes sense in English, and, if so, whether the meaning of the sentence is of any practical importance. According to our definition, a set of 100 letters selected at random (according to the rules of Table 1.1), a sentence of 100 letters from a newspaper, a piece of Shakespeare or a theorem of Einstein are given exactly the same informational value."

"With Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the fundamental role of experimental errors became a basic feature of physics."

"Both the uncertainty principle and the negentropy principle of information make Laplace's scheme [of exact determinism] completely unrealistic. The problem is an artificial one; it belongs to imaginative poetry, not to experimental science."

"The laws of classical mechanics represent a mathematical idealization and should not be assumed to correspond to the real laws of nature. … We now have to realize that errors are inevitable (..) a discovery that makes strict determinism impossible."

"Concepts like these can seem remote, until you explain with analogies taken from everyday life. But unfortunately some ideas do not lend themselves to familiar analogies."

"We are trying to understand the implications of quantum mechanics. The subject is very old, but we are still learning."

"It's kind of interesting to show that the strange features of quantum mechanics are actually observed. We still don't totally understand what it means."

"Why is it so?"

"Whatever work you undertake to do in your lifetime, it is very important that first you have a passion for it — you know, get excited about it — and second, that you have fun with it. That's important. Otherwise, you see, your work becomes nothing but an idle chore. Then, you hate the life you live."

"It is important that we subscribe to the requirements of nature."

"My view is this: We teach nothing. We do not teach physics nor do we teach students. (I take physics merely as an example.) What is the same thing: No one is taught anything! Here lies the folly of this business. We try to teach somebody nothing. This is a sorry endeavour for no one can be taught a thing. What we do, if we are successful, is to stir interest in the matter at hand, awaken enthusiasm for it, arouse a curiosity, kindle a feeling, fire up the imagination. To my own teachers who handled me in this way, I owe a great and lasting debt."

"If I want a word, I make it. I don't like combustion. It's too quiet. I have some stuff in a state of combustication."

"Kids are my favorites … their spirit and curiosity has not yet been dulled by schools."

"We are approaching a darkness in the land. Boys and girls are emerging from every level of school with certificates and degrees, but they can't read, write or calculate. We don't have academic honesty or intellectual rigor. Schools have abandoned integrity and rigor."

"My first TV series on demonstrations in physics — titled Why Is It So? were now seen and heard over the land. The mail was massive. The academics were a special triumph for me. They charged me with being superficial and trivial. If I had done what they wanted my programs would be as dull as their classes! I knew my purpose well and clear: to show how Nature behaves without cluttering its beauty with abtruse mathematics. Why cloud the charm of a Chladni plate with a Bessel function?"

"The first thing Bohr said to me was that it would only then be profitable to work with him if I understood that he was a dilettante. The only way I knew to react to this unexpected statement was with a polite smile of disbelief. But evidently Bohr was serious. He explained how he had to approach every new question from a starting point of total ignorance. It is perhaps better to say that Bohr's strength lay in his formidable intuition and insight rather than erudition."

"Progress leads to confusion leads to progress and on and on without respite. Every one of the many major advances … created sooner or later, more often sooner, new problems. These confusions, never twice the same, are not to be deplored. Rather, those who participate experience them as a privilege."

"A number of current theoretical explorations will turn out to be passing fancies..."

"To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery. Not only Planck but also other physicists were initially at a loss as to what the proper context of the new postulate really was."

"Today we live in the midst of upheaval and crisis. We do not know where we are going, nor even where we ought to be going. Awareness is spreading that our future cannot be a straight extension of the past or the present … The century now approaching its end has been one of indiscriminate violence, it has been perhaps the most murderous one in Western history of which we have record. Yet I would think that what will strike people most when, hundreds of years from now, they will look back on our days is that this was the age when the exploration of space began, the microchip was invented, revolutions in transport and communication virtually annihilated time and distance, transforming the world into a "global village," and relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and the structure of the atom were discovered, in brief that this has been the century of science and technology."

"Of course, relative citation frequencies are no measure of relative importance. Who has not aspired to write a paper so fundamental that very soon it is known to everyone and cited by no one?"

"A new man appears abruptly, the ‘suddenly famous Doctor Einstein.’ He carries the message of a new order in the universe. He is a new Moses come down from the mountain to bring the law and a new Joshua controlling the motion of heavenly bodies..."

"I made a discovery, perhaps known to others but new to me: I need not put myself center stage but can rather place myself at the side, like a Greek chorus. As the curtain rises, I can walk to the center and can speak as follows: I wish to tell you of happenings in the twentieth century, as I witnessed them and reflected upon them. You will see me return to center stage, but only occasionally. Once that imagery had gotten hold of me, I went back to Ida and said yes, I shall try."

"Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes — even in a scientific text."

"I lived altogether in nine different places while in hiding, because whenever something happened, either someone betrayed the place or something happened to someone who knew where I was, I had to move. The rule of the game was never assume that anybody, however honorable, would be able to stand up under torture. If Mr. X, who knew where I was, was caught for some reason, I should move."

"One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do. I couldn't see people, or go for a walk in the forest. All I had was my head and my books, and I thought a lot. I learned, because there was no interruption. I had access to myself, to my thinking. I wouldn't say that I particularly matured. The thinking was physics thinking. I was just short of twenty-two then. I was in hiding for two years and two months, something like that. In all that time I went out very, very little, just once in a great while, after dark. Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane."

"One of the absolute rules I learned in the war was, don't know anything you don't need to know, because if you ever get caught they will get it out of you."

"I knew all the time I was going to get through the war. It was completely irrational, a silly idea, but I was not going to lie down and get myself killed. I was going to get out of it."

"I was lucky because the same week that I went to prison the Americans crossed the Rhine and cut off the northern part of Holland, so there was no longer any possibility of being shipped out to a concentration camp. The rail lines were cut. So I was in prison in Amsterdam during the very last days of the war. We were sent to the men's prison and the girls were sent to a women's prison in a different place."

"On the day we were caught, Lion and I had been talking about writing a memorandum on the fate of the Jewish war children living in hiding or among Dutch families … we were the representatives of the Zionist youth organization. … Lion who had been taking notes of the discussion, put these papers in his jacket pocket when he took a break from lunch. When the Germans caught us they discovered his notes. If those papers had been in my pocket I would have never lived to be seventy. I have led a strange life, a set of complete coincidences."

"For several months I was incapable of feeling anything, completely inaccessible to my feelings — I did not laugh, I did not cry. The second thing was this amazing trauma, where I forgot the names of everyone I knew. That was very strange. I knew who everyone was: this was a friend from high school, this was my cousin, but I had to relearn every name. It was quite striking, that very strong reaction that I had. They have a name for it, I think: posttraumatic stress syndrome. I don't sit here conquering great resistance to talk. It is not my way. I don't suffer the reliving of these memories with tremendous pain. It's very odd, but it's finished for me. That, of course, is never quite true. It isn't finished. I am like all of my generation; we are marked people. But I don't suffer; I can talk to you about it. Most of my family was killed. All of my father's and mother's sisters and brothers and their children, my sister and my old grandfather, they're all gone. Four out of five Jews in Holland never came back after the war — 80 percent."

"One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think."

"The rule of the game was never assume that anybody, however honorable, would be able to stand up under torture. If Mr. X, who knew where I was, was caught for some reason, I should move."

"To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery."

"Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane"

"I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation, until I came to the point when I could not write another word, not even the next letter."

"My area of research is something that in all fairness has no practical usability whatsoever and the thing is I'm often asked to apologize for that. It is interesting to me that people ask 'what's the point of doing that if it's not useful?' But they never ask that, or do they very rarely ask that about art or literature or music. Those things are not gonna produce a better toaster."

"There is a maxim about the universe which I always tell my students: That which is not explicitly forbidden is guaranteed to occur."

"Now, since the time of Newton there had been a debate about whether light was a wave---that is, a traveling disturbance in some background medium---or a particle, which travels regardless of the presence of a background medium. The observation of Maxwell that electromagnetic waves must exist and that their speed was identical to that of light ended the debate: light was an electromagnetic wave."

"If you have nothing in quantum mechanics, you will always have something."

"Science simply forces us to revise what is sensible to accommodate the universe, rather than vice versa."

"The other thing people don't realise about science which differentiates it from religion is that, the most exciting thing about being a scientist is not knowing and being wrong. Because that means there is a lot left to learn."

"It is a shame when nonsense can substitute for fact with impunity."

"We only see shadows of reality. We shouldn't expect those shadows to behave sensibly."

"... we're here because of an environmental accident if there is a multiverse and if the laws of physics are different in the different regions ..."

"The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded, and the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics. You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded because the elements—the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution—weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get... into your body is if these stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today."

"Theorists always know the answer. They're just sometimes right."

"Science is empirical: knowing the answer is nothing. Testing your knowledge means everything."

"The Universe must be flat. Why? Well, there is two reasons. There's the one I normally say, which is: it's the only mathematically beautiful universe. Which is true, but there's another reason I don't usually... talk about but I'll talk about here. It turns out that in a flat universe the total energy of the universe is precisely zero because gravity can have negative energy. So the negative energy of gravity balances out the positive energy of matter. What's so beautiful about a universe with total energy zero? Well, only such a universe can begin from nothing, and that is remarkable because the laws of physics allow a universe to begin from nothing. You don't need a Deity. You have nothing: zero total energy, and quantum fluctuations can produce a universe. So, if the Universe isn't flat we're worried, because then you've got energy at... the very beginning of Time."

"What's going to happen in the far future? Remember a hundred years ago we thought we lived into static eternal Universe. What will the future bring? The amazing thing is, for civilizations that live in a far future, what will they see? Well, the Universe is accelerating. That means all the distant galaxies are getting carried away from us, and eventually they'll move away from us faster than the speed of light. It's allowed in General relativity. They will disappear. The longer we wait, the less we will see. In a hundred billion years any observers evolving on stars around [us]... and there will be stars just like our Sun in 100 billion years. Any observers and civilizations... evolving around those stars will see nothing except for our Galaxy, which is exactly the picture they had in 1915. All evidence of the Hubble expansion will disappear. Why? Because we won't see other galaxies moving apart from us. So they will have no evidence, in fact, of Big Bang. They won't see the Hubble expansion. They won't even know about dark energy, and I won't go into that. They won't know about the cosmic microwave background - it will disappear too. It will redshift away, and it turns out for fancy reasons: there is a plasma in our Galaxy and when the Universe is 50 times its present age the microwave background won't able to propagate in our Galaxy. All evidence of the Big Bang will have disappeared, and those scientists will discover quantum mechanics, discover relativity, discover evolution, discover all the basic principles of science that we understand today, use the best observations they can do with the best telescopes they will build and they will derive a picture of the Universe which is completely wrong. They will derive a picture of the Universe as being one Galaxy surrounded by empty space that's static and eternal. Falsifiable science will produce the wrong answer. In fact, I want to end with the good news. We live in a very special time, the only time we can observationally verify that we live in a very special time."

"Richard Feynman used to go up to people all the time and he'd say, "You won't believe what happened to me today. You won't believe what happened to me." And people would say "What?" And he'd say, "Absolutely nothing". Because we humans believe that everything that happens to us is special, and significant. And that—and... Carl Sagan wrote beautifully about that in Demon-Haunted World—that is much of the source of religion. OK? Everything that happens is unusual, and I expect that the likelihood that Richard and I ever would've met—if you think about all the variables, the probability that we were in the same place at the same time, ate breakfast at the same... Whatever. It's zero. Every event that happens has small probability... but it happens, and then when it happens; if it's weird, if you dream one million nights and it's nonsense, but one night you dream that your friend is gonna break his leg and the next day he breaks his arm. You think, "ah." ...So the [real] thing that physics tell us about the universe is it's big, rare events happen all the time—including life—and that doesn't mean it's special."

"But what we've discovered is that, in fact... the total energy of the universe could be zero, which is a first clue that maybe it could come from nothing. ...In physics, ...once you include gravity, there's positive energy and negative energy, and our universe appears as if its total energy could be precisely zero, which is the first hint that maybe it could come from nothing. That, and the great discovery... that namely empty space, you take a region of space, get rid of all the particles and all the radiation ...so there's nothing there. That empty space weighs something, and we don't understand why."

"The energy of every galaxy—all the galaxies are moving away from us at, Hubble discovered that in 1929... If you measure their speed and then you work our the attraction the two add up to precisely zero. An amazing discovery that confirms this notion that, not only is the universe flat and mathematically beautiful, but begins to give us an inkling that maybe, maybe, maybe we could come from nothing."

"[O]ne of the great things about science is it forces us to refine our idea of what's common sense. It forces us to have our beliefs conform to the evidence of reality rather than the other way around. The universe may not be like we'd like it to be, but it doesn't really care."

"Now some people say, "Well, if there's virtual particles there it's really not nothing," but there are no real particles. You try and measure things there, there's nothing, but those virtual particles can give space energy and in fact we've discovered to our great surprise—it won the Nobel prize two years ago—that empty space has energy, and if you put energy in empty space, then it's really strange because it's not like the normal energy... it's not gravitationally attractive, it's actually repulsive, and we've discovered the expansion of the universe is not slowing down like any sensible universe should do. It's actually speeding up... because it's dominated by the energy of empty space."

"[W]hen you apply quantum mechanics to gravity, then even space itself can pop into existence from nothing. Space and time can spontaneously pop into existence... Whole universes can pop into existence and most of them will disappear in a time scale so short you wouldn't know about it. The ones that can survive for a long time have zero total energy..."

"[Y]ou... may say, "Well look, we've got no space, no time, no particles, no radiation. That's a pretty good approximation of nothing, but there's still the laws. Who created the laws? And... what we've discovered... in the last ten years or so, and... this is speculative, but it's based on everything we know of in particle physics... It's quite reasonable to suspect that even the laws themselves came into existence when our universe came into existence... There could be many different universes and in each one of them the laws of physics are different. They spontaneously arise when the universe arises."

"[W]hy presumes purpose... But what if there isn't purpose? Whenever we say why we really mean how."

"[W]e can weigh systems of galaxies. The largest bound objects in the universe are called clusters of galaxies. They're maybe ten million light years across. ...We weigh them using gravity because Einstein told us that mass curves space, and we can... use those large clusters as lenses—if there's a light source behind a cluster the light from it can come around and be lensed... and we've weighed these systems and we've found that there's only 30% of the mass needed to make a flat universe... Theorists like me knew that the universe was flat, because it's the only mathematically beautiful universe... but here these observers kept coming up with only 30% of the stuff needed... But then, what we've discovered... is that the universe actually is flat and the rest of the 70% of the energy of the flat universe comes from the energy of nothing."

"There's a loophole if you weigh galaxies and clusters because you're weighing the total amount of energy around galaxies. What if there's energy where galaxies aren't? What is where galaxies aren't? Nothing."

"You only have one life. Whatever crops up, crops up."

"The pretention that some of us are better than others, I don't think is a very good thing. And who is contributing what to our progress in science is not so obvious and many who don't get that Nobel Prize are better than people than some of us that do get the Nobel Prize. … I think we should not be interested in prizes, we should be interested in learning about nature."

"The problem of transmitting scientific knowledge is a very difficult business."

"When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen. So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion — because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do."

"It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission. It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission. So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight. Once you are assigned to a flight, the whole crew is assigned at the same time, and then that crew trains together for a whole year to prepare for that flight."

"It's easy to sleep floating around — it's very comfortable. But you have to be careful that you don't float into somebody or something!"

"The view of Earth is spectacular. The shuttle is pretty close to Earth. It only flies between 200 and 350 miles above Earth. So it's really pretty close. So we don't see the whole planet, like the astronauts who went to the moon did. So we can see much more detail. We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form. It's just a lot of fun and very interesting to look out the window."

"When you're on Earth, if you go to the top of a mountain, the stars look much brighter than they do at sea level. And because the space shuttle is above Earth's atmosphere, it's like being on a very, very high mountain. So they look brighter, but not bigger."

"There might be very primitive life in our solar system — single-cell animals, that sort of thing. We may know the answer to that in five or ten years. There is very likely to be life in other solar systems, in planets around other stars. But we won't know about that for a long time."

"What can we sell them? Not our soul."

"Good physics can be done if we have a good shop. … Given a good shop and good measurement equipment a sound physicist can do wonderful work."

"One of the most fertile and original men I have ever known. … He was a rare combination, almost unique, of a theoretical physicist and a thoroughly practical engineer."

"Only by doing the best we can with the very best that an era offers, do we find the way to do better in the future."

"Effective science teaching calls for active contact with research and that teachers need to mingle with other scientists and to know what is going on in the field."

"The national research effort, upon which so much depends, will remain healthy only so long as there is sound core of disinterested search for new knowledge and an adequate number of men and women trained for carrying on such research and for teaching young scientists."

"It may also be pertinent to ask whether a greater effort in the less expensive basic stages of research may not lead to reductions of effort in the far costlier stages of development and prototype construction."

"...the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air."

"Most of us have grown so blase about computer developments and capabilities — even some that are spectacular — that it is difficult to believe or imagine there was a time when we suffered the noisy, painstakingly slow, electromechanical devices that chomped away on punched cards."

"The experimenter dealing with nature faces an outside and often hard world. Natures' curriculum cannot be changed."

"Experimental science is a craft and an art, and part of the art is knowing when to end a fruitless experiment. There is a danger of becoming obsessed with a fruitless experiment even if it goes nowhere."

"It is always a good plan for a speculative experimenter to have two experiments going, or at least one going and one being built."

"Common elements of creativity are originality and imagination. Creativity is intertwined with the freedom to design, to invent and to dream. In engineering and science a creative idea is useful only if it meets three conditions: the constraint of the natural laws, the constraint of cost, and the constraint of technical feasibility."

"Imagination and obsession are the keys to getting a good idea. To help your imagination keep your eyes and ears open. Avoid the "not invented here prejudice"."

"For every good idea, expect to have five, ten, twenty wrong or useless ideas. You cannot avoid the bad ideas if you keep your imagination free. There is no spam filter for bad ideas."

"You may turn a bad idea into a good idea — don't kill the bad idea prematurely. A bad idea can evolve into a good idea."

"I always look for colleagues who are smart, and who know a lot in many fields. The obvious advantage is that he or she may be able to solve the problem that has produced trouble in your work. Also smart and knowledgeable colleagues can save you time, and are interesting and inspiring!"

"The best colleagues are those who will think about your ideas, who will talk with you and offer insight, constructive criticism. No one needs to be crushed for having a new idea."

"Ever since before quantum phenomena became definitely recognized many attempts were made to picture their mechanism."

"We have more nuclear warheads than the Russians, and I consider this to be the most important measure of relative strength. In addition, as Dr. Kissinger stressed many years ago, at the present level of strategic armaments superiority in numbers or megatons has no meaning."

"You should look at all the experimental information at hand, not only the most relevant, and be prepared to make conjectures if that helps."

"If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan, who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia."

"Together with Peierls, he developed a theory of the deuteron in 1934 which he extended in 1949. He resolved some contradictions in the nuclear mass scale in 1935. He studied the theory of nuclear reactions in 1935-1938, predicting many reaction cross sections. In connection with this work, he developed Bohr's theory of the compound nucleus in a more quantitative fashion. This work and also the existing knowledge on nuclear theory and experimental results, was summarized in three articles in the Reviews of Modern Physics which for many years served as a textbook for nuclear physicists."

"Things that people learn purely out of curiosity can have a revolutionary effect on human affairs."

"The trouble is that you won't get the scientists to agree on a course of action. It is almost instinctive in science to accept contrary views, because disagreeing gives you guidance to experimental tests of ideas — your own and those offered by others…."

"If history has a lesson, it is that the "winner take all" attitude deprives one of the pleasures of being the heir to the best of different traditions, even while avoiding their intolerance against each other."

"Space tells matter how to move Matter tells space how to curve"

"Of all heroes, Spinoza was Einstein's greatest. No one expressed more strongly than he a belief in the harmony, the beauty, and most of all the ultimate comprehensibility of nature."

"Is the very mechanism for the universe to come into being meaningless or unworkable or both unless the universe is guaranteed to produce life, consciousness and observership somewhere and for some little time in its history-to-be? The quantum principle shows that there is a sense in which what the observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past—even in a past so remote that life did not then exist, and shows even more, that 'observership' is a prerequisite for any useful version of 'reality'."

"It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe."

"Of all obstacles to a thoroughly penetrating account of existence, none looms up more dismayingly than “time.” Explain time? Not without explaining existence. Explain existence? Not without explaining time. To uncover the deep and hidden connection between time and existence, to close on itself our quartet of questions, is a task for the future."

"We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."

"There are many modes of thinking about the world around us and our place in it. I like to consider all the angles from which we might gain perspective on our amazing universe and the nature of existence."

"We will first understand how simple the universe is when we realize how strange it is."

"The best way to learn something is to have to teach it."

"What we think of as smooth simple space is really a wiggly business."

"For all our everyday experience, the geometry of space is smooth and flat. But as we examine it more closely, it must show oscillations. And still more closely, it must show foam, a foam-like structure. And that means that down at the very smallest distances, this idea of before and after really lose their meaning."

"Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve."

"Today I think we are beginning to suspect that man is not a tiny cog that doesn’t really make much difference to the running of the huge machine, but rather that there is a much more intimate tie between man and the universe than we heretofore suspected…The physical world is in some deep sense tied to the human being."

"We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago. We are in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past and if we have one explanation for what's happening in the distant past why should we need more?"

"The question is—what is the question?"

"Therefore we can afford many mistakes in the search. The main thing is to make them as fast as possible."

"I had the good fortune of having my first and only heart attack last January ... I call it good fortune because it taught me that there's a limited amount of time left and I better concentrate on one thing: How come existence? How come the quantum? Maybe those questions sound too philosophical, but maybe philosophy is too important to be left to the philosophers."

"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."

"If I had to confess, under torture, right now, what I think the simple idea is, I would say it's that we ourselves generate the world; the world is self-generated. But it may well be absolutely wrong."

"Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once."

"The first time I met Wheeler was in 1961, I was an undergraduate... with a somewhat unorthodox academic record. ...The hope was that ...I would be admitted as a graduate student... At the time I was working as a plumber... I was completely enthralled. John was enthusiastically describing his vision of how space and time would become a wild, jittery, foamy world of s when viewed through a tremendously powerful microscope. He told me that the most profound and exciting problem of physics was to unify Einstein's two great theories—General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. He explained that only at the Planck distance would elementary particles reveal their true nature, and it would be all about geometry—. To a young aspiring physicist, the stuffy businessman exterior had morphed into an idealistic visionary. I wanted more than anything to follow this man into battle."

"Some people think Wheeler's gotten crazy in his later years, but he's always been crazy."

"The late, great astrophysicist, philosopher and black hole evangelist John Archibald Wheeler, of Princeton, used to say that the past and the future are fiction, that they only exist in the artifacts and the imaginations of the present."

"We must expect that these German scientists, once they get here, will continually try to defend the actions of Germany before and during the war. Their background and education wiil have supplied them with the necessary arguments. The rocket specialists have at times tried to convince us that they worked on rockets only for the purpose of scientific research. The German atomic scientists, who failed in their attempt to make a bomb, planned to deny that they wanted to make one."

"I did all the problems a little different from the rest of the class."

"... I don't like the history of physics, I have always been against the way in which the historians wrote about it in earlier days. Nowadays it is better, someone like Martin Klein, that is real, he brings something new. But the earlier historians always described physics as if it had been done by three and four people and they forgot that these famous people could only do their work because of the many others who also made contributions. ..."

"In my study hangs a fine old horse shoe, which I found in an abandoned Western ghost town. I don't believe in superstitions, but it is supposed to work even for a nonbeliever2. It hasn't so far."

"In short, we knew very little about the German uranium project, and what little we knew we almost invariably interpreted in their favor. In the long run, this was probably all to the good, since it accelerated our own work enormously. But in those days, before the invasion of Europe, we would have given a great deal to know more."

"If only we could get hold of a German atomic physicist, we felt, we could soon find out what the rest of them were up to. To us physicists the problem seemed very simple. Even those of us who were not working on the atom bomb project knew pretty well what was going on over here. No amount of military security could have prevented us from knowing, difficult as it was for the military to understand this. Active scientists engaged in the same general field of research inevitably form a kind of clan; they work closely together and know all about each other's specialities and whereabouts. You can't take a group of key scientists from their accustomed haunts and have them disappear in some remote place in New Mexico, together with their families, without their colleagues who are left behind wondering about it and deriving the right conclusions. The same thing, we knew, would be true of the Germans."

"Secrecy, it was impressed upon us at the outset, was imperative, despite the fact that our code name, ALSOS, seemed a give-away, being the Greek translation for Groves. Since General Groves was in complete charge of all Army activities relating to the atom bomb project, the inference did not take too much imagination. To make it even more obvious, the Mission's vehicles had license plates bearing the Greek letter Alpha."

"Goudsmit stumbled to fame in 1925. For more than a decade, Niels Bohr and others had been trying to develop a quantum theory of the atom, mostly by studying atomic spectra. These consist of the energies (specific to each element) of the quanta of light, or photons, that an atom’s electrons can absorb or emit. Physicists had been struggling to make sense of anomalies that appeared in spectra when atoms were immersed in a magnetic field: some spectral levels mysteriously split into two or more. Goudsmit and his friend George Uhlenbeck, both graduate students at Leiden University in the Netherlands, had an idea. They proposed that the splitting could be explained if the electron had an intrinsic ‘spin’ that could assume one of two directions: clockwise or anticlockwise. Other physicists had discarded this idea, seeing it as marred by conceptual difficulties. ... Soon, researchers including Paul Dirac explained away the conceptual difficulties. Quantum spin was born."

"In his 1930 book, Dirac took for granted that measurements could be made, but was very vague about what was actually involved."

"Neither Dirac nor von Neumann discussed his measurements in physical terms."

"At the first of the 1960's Rochester Coherence Conferences, I suggested that a license be required for use of the word photon, and offered to give such license to properly qualified people."

"I liked quantum mechanics very much. The subject was hard to understand but easy to apply to a large number of interesting problems."

"In fact, there really is not a new law of nature. It was all in the theory to begin with but nobody worked it out."

"A rare theorist turned experimentalist."

"A gifted experimentalist, and theoretician, in the best Newtonian tradition... His contributions to quantum measurements, and elucidative teachings on quantum mechanics, have not yet received the attention they deserve."

"If a demarcation criterion exists (we must not, I think, seek a sharp or decisive one), it may lie just in that part of science which Sir Karl ignores."

"Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers."

"I suggest that scientific knowledge, though logically more articulate and far more complex, is of this sort. The books and teachers from whom it is acquired present concrete examples together with a multitude of theoretical generalizations. Both are essential carriers of knowledge, and it is therefore Pickwickian to seek a methodological criterion that supposes the scientist can specify in advance whether each imaginable instance fits or would falsify his theory."

"To my complete surprise, that exposure to out-of-date scientific theory and practice radically undermined some of my basic conceptions about the nature of science and the reasons for its special success. Those conceptions were ones I had previously drawn partly from scientific training itself and partly from a long-standing avocational interest in the philosophy of science. Somehow, whatever their pedagogic utility and their abstract plausibility, those notions did not at all fit the enterprise that historical study displayed. Yet they were and are fundamental to many discussions of science, and their failures of verisimilitude therefore seemed thoroughly worth pursuing. The result was a drastic shift in my career plans, a shift from physics to history of science and then, gradually, from relatively straightforward historical problems back to the more philosophical concerns that had initially led me to history."

"Somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of what I have since called “paradigms.” These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners."

"History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed."

"Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion."

"Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments."

""Normal science" means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice."

"Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice. That commitment and the apparent consensus it produces are prerequisites for normal science, i.e., for the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition."

"Ever since prehistoric antiquity one field of study after another has crossed the divide between what the historian might call its prehistory as a science and its history proper. These transitions to maturity have seldom been so sudden or so unequivocal as my necessarily schematic discussion may have implied. But neither have they been historically gradual, coextensive, that is to say, with the entire development of the fields within which they occurred."

"Few people who are not actually practitioners of a mature science realize how much mop-up work of this sort a paradigm leaves to be done or quite how fascinating such work can prove in the execution."

"These three classes of problems—determination of significant fact, matching of facts with theory, and articulation of theory—exhaust, I think, the literature of normal science, both empirical and theoretical. They do not, of course, quite exhaust the entire literature of science. There are also extraordinary problems, and it may well be their resolution that makes the scientific enterprise as a whole so particularly worthwhile. But extraordinary problems are not to be had for the asking. They emerge only on special occasions prepared by the advance of normal research."

"The scientific enterprise as a whole does from time to time prove useful, open up new territory, display order, and test long-accepted belief. Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is almost never doing any one of these things. Once engaged, his motivation is of a rather different sort. What then challenges him is the conviction that, if only he is skillful enough, he will succeed in solving a puzzle that no one before has solved or solved so well."

"Scientists work from models acquired through education and through subsequent exposure to the literature often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms"

"Normal science, the puzzle-solving activity we have just examined, is a highly cumulative enterprise, eminently successful in its aim, the steady extension of the scope and precision of scientific knowledge. In all these respects it fits with great precision the most usual image of scientific work. Yet one standard product of the scientific enterprise is missing. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none."

"We must now ask how changes of this sort can come about, considering first discoveries, or novelties of fact, and then inventions, or novelties of theory. That distinction between discovery and invention or between fact and theory will, however, immediately prove to be exceedingly artificial."

"In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation."

"In the development of any science, the first received paradigm is usually felt to account quite successfully for most of the observations and experiments easily accessible to that science’s practitioners. Further development, therefore, ordinarily calls for the construction of elaborate equipment, the development of an esoteric vocabulary and skills, and a refinement of concepts that increasingly lessens their resemblance to their usual common-sense prototypes. That professionalization leads, on the one hand, to an immense restriction of the scientist’s vision and to a considerable resistance to paradigm change. The science has become increasingly rigid. On the other hand, within those areas to which the paradigm directs the attention of the group, normal science leads to a detail of information and to a precision of the observation-theory match that could be achieved in no other way."

"Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data. History of science indicates that, particularly in the early developmental stages of a new paradigm, it is not even very difficult to invent such alternates. But that invention of alternates is just what scientists seldom undertake except during the pre-paradigm stage of their science’s development and at very special occasions during its subsequent evolution. So long as the tools a paradigm supplies continue to prove capable of solving the problems it defines, science moves fastest and penetrates most deeply through confident employment of those tools. The reason is clear. As in manufacture so in science—retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it. The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for retooling has arrived."

"Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense... that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way."

"The subject of a gestalt demonstration knows that his perception has shifted because he can make it shift back and forth repeatedly while he holds the same book or piece of paper in his hands. Aware that nothing in his environment has changed, he directs his attention increasingly not to the figure (duck or rabbit) but to the lines of the paper he is looking at. Ultimately he may even learn to see those lines without seeing either of the figures, and he may then say (what he could not legitimately have said earlier) that it is these lines that he really sees but that he sees them alternately as a duck and as a rabbit. ...As in all similar psychological experiments, the effectiveness of the demonstration depends upon its being analyzable in this way. Unless there were an external standard with respect to which a switch of vision could be demonstrated, no conclusion about alternate perceptual possibilities could be drawn."

"These examples point to the third and most fundamental aspect of the incommensurability of competing paradigms. In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved, matrix of space. Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may occasionally seem intuitively obvious to another."

"We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth"

"A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but also because it is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there.” Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of ‘truth’ for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am impressed with the implausability of the view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton’s mechanics improves on Aristotle’s and that Einstein’s improves on Newton’s as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein’s general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle’s than either of them is to Newton’s."

"I rapidly discovered that Aristotle had known almost no mechanics at all. ... How could his characteristic talents have deserted him so systematically when he turned to the study of motion and mechanics? Equally, if his talents had so deserted him, why had his writings in physics been taken so seriously for so many centuries after his death? ... I was sitting at my desk with the text of Aristotle's Physics open in front of me... Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I'd never dreamed possible. Now I could understand why he had said what he'd said, and what his authority had been. Statements that had previously seemed egregious mistakes, now seemed at worst near misses within a powerful and generally successful tradition. That sort of experience -- the pieces suddenly sorting themselves out and coming together in a new way -- is the first general characteristic of revolutionary change that I shall be singling out after further consideration of examples. Though scientific revolutions leave much piecemeal mopping up to do, the central change cannot be experienced piecemenal, one step at a time. Instead, it involves some relatively sudden and unstructured transformation in which some part of the flux of experience sorts itself out differently and displays patterns that were not visible before."

"By now it may be clear that the position I'm developing is a sort of post-Darwinian Kantianism."

"Kuhn’s treatment of philosophical ideas is neither systematic nor rigorous. He rarely engaged in the stock-in-trade of modern philosophers, the careful and precise analysis of the details of other philosophers’ views, and when he did so the results were not encouraging."

"Thomas Kuhn was undoubtedly the strongest influence on the philosophy of science in the last third of the twentieth century. Yet today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is unclear what his legacy really is. In the philosophy of science there is no characteristically Kuhnian school. This could be because we are all Kuhnians now. But it might also be because Kuhn's thought, although revolutionary in its time, has since been superseded. In a sense both may be true."

"Partly because he was an outsider to philosophy he was unable to appreciate that philosophy of science had gone beyond Kuhn in distancing itself from positivism. And thus when he rejected aspects of contemporary philosophy of science—notably referentialism and a realist conception of truth—he was unintentionally aligning himself more closely to positivism than to its opponents."

"To introduce my story, I take the reader back to 1962, when the academic world saw the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolution, by Thomas Kuhn. … Most certainly, it upset my own Logical Empiricist assumptions. It had that effect for two reasons. The first was his claim, vividly documented, that past scientific revolutions were not the unambiguous expression of sheerly logical and experimental factors, rationally played out according to a well-defined methodology. Rather, they were the expression of a variety of nonlogical factors as well: social, psychological, metaphysical, technological, aesthetic, and personal. … The second reason for the ensuing controversy was his claim, also well-documented, that the unit of scientific understanding is not the sentence, or set of sentences, but rather the so-called "paradigm", or family of paradigms."

"In fact, Kuhn is decidedly conservative in his methodological impulses. If science is politics, then he is a staunch Tory, not an anything-goes radical. In fact, Kuhn was not attacking scientific standards. Rather, he was attacking a false and confabulatory theory about the nature of scientific standards, a worthy and nontrivial philosophical theory called Logical Empiricism, a theory that tried to capture all such standards in narrowly logical terms. If one already accepts that orthodox but confabulatory theory, as most philosophers did, then one is doomed to see an attack on it as an attack on scientific standards in general. But it needn't be so. Once we have seen that a scientific theory is much more than a set of sentences, then we can appreciate that its evaluation must encompass much more than mere logical relations among sentences. Once we are freed from the grip of the orthodox philosophical approach, we can pursue the question of theory evaluation with a fresh eye."

"Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), is the godfather of all the subsequent discussions, and it should be noted that Kuhn's book is perhaps the all-time champion in the category of Enthusiastically Misunderstood Classic. It's a wonderful book, in spite of all the misuse to which it's been put."

"Kuhn’s book has been misread and misused in many quarters; Kuhn’s excellent points are not as radical as many like to believe."

"How do scientists think? The short answer: very much like you or me. If that statement doesn’t raise any eyebrows today, it’s because of a college professor named Thomas Kuhn who died in 1996."

"A lot of people have put Genealogy of Morals on their lists because Nietzsche was the first person they read who pointed out that morals might have an instrumental and particularistic motivation. I’m not sure Kuhn is completely correct in his vivisection of how science works, but it was only after reading this book that I began to recognize the instrumental, cognitive, and sociological dimensions of scientists."

"A few years ago I happened to meet Kuhn at a scientific meeting and complained to him about the nonsense that had been attached to his name. He reacted angrily. In a voice loud enough to be heard by everyone in the hall, he shouted, "One thing you have to understand. I am not a Kuhnian." Kuhn never said that science is a political power struggle. If some of his followers claim that he denied the objective validity of science, it is only because he overemphasized the role of ideas and underemphasized the role of experimental facts in science."

"Thomas Kuhn is the Thomas Hobbes of science, assuring us that unless there is an Absolute (conceptual) Sovereign, known as The Paradigm, all is chaos, and the life of cognitive ideas is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

"Without doubt, Kuhn's work was the single most influential force in creating the intersection of history, philosophy and sociology of science that became identified as 'science studies'. The irony and tragedy is that, in spite of official honours and genuine attempts at reconciliation by both Kuhn and others, he himself was never truly at home in any of these disciplines, nor in their intersection. The majority of historians and philosophers of science never permitted Kuhn to feel genuinely comfortable in their professional associations. The sociologists tried, but Kuhn himself was not comfortable in their company. He died professionally homeless."

"I did learn from Kuhn that he was very dissatisfied with the way in which his earlier book, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was being transformed into an anti-science post-modern diatribe by many academics. He taught me that there is nothing post-modern whatever about his theory of scientific change. I never forgot the lesson."

"So who cares? We should care. Kuhn's work supports the idea that science progresses from-what-we-know to what-we-know-next. This is in contrast with the Whig interpretation of science, which is the inevitable march from darkness to light, from confusion to clarity, from error to truth. Of course, there is nothing wrong with teaching physics by recounting its past successes, but that is not in fact how the dynamic of knowledge works."

"Kuhn cannot take seriously that “there is some one full, objective, true account of nature.” Does this mean that he does not take truth seriously? Not at all. [...] Kuhn did reject a simple “correspondence theory” which says true statements correspond to facts about the world.[...] In the wave of skepticism that swept American scholarship at the end of the twentieth century, many influential intellectuals took Kuhn as an ally in their denials of truth as a virtue. I mean the thinkers of the sort that cannot write down or utter the word true except by literally or figuratively putting quotation marks around it—to indicate how they shudder at the very thought of so harmful a notion. Many reflective scientists, who admire much of what Kuhn says about the sciences, believe he encouraged deniers. It is true that Structure gave enormous impetus to sociological studies of science. Some of that work, with its emphasis on the idea that facts are “socially constructed” and apparent participation in the denial of “truth,” is exactly what conservative scientists protest against. Kuhn made plain that he himself detested that development of his work..."

"Notice that there is no sociology in the book. Scientific communities and their practices are, however, at its core, entering with paradigms, as we saw, at page 10 and continuing to the final page of the book. There had been sociology of scientific knowledge before Kuhn, but after Structure it burgeoned, leading to what is now called science studies. This is a self-generating field (with, of course, its own journals and societies) that includes some work in the history and the philosophy of sciences and technology, but whose emphasis is on sociological approaches of various kinds, some observational, some theoretical. Much, and perhaps most, of the really original thinking about the sciences after Kuhn has had a sociological bent. Kuhn was hostile to these developments. In the opinion of many younger workers, that is regrettable. Let us put it down to dissatisfaction with growing pains of the field, rather than venturing into tedious metaphors about fathers and sons. One of Kuhn’s marvelous legacies is science studies as we know it today."

"Well, he wasn't a relativist. There's a long and complicated story of the rise of a desire for scientific relativism. Part of it may well be simply sort of rage against reason, the fear of the sciences and a kind of total dislike of the arrogance of a great many scientists who say we're finding out the truth about everything—and here [with Kuhn] there was a way to undermine that arrogance."

"Kuhn had the genius to find the words and sketch the concepts that made important old philosophical problems relevant to the public and newly discussable by philosophers. He had the strength of mind and commitment to lead the discussion. He could speak the truly incommensurable languages of physics, philosophy, and history, all necessary to frame and advance his epistemological quest. He wrote, as one of his admirers, Margaret Masterman, put it, in a "quasi-poetic style," sometimes veiled, sometimes with "rhetorical exaggeration," but always after careful and even painful thought. Or, to switch metaphors, he drew the portrait of science in the manner of the Impressionists. At a distance, where most viewers stand, the portrait appears illuminating, persuasive, and inspiring; close in, where historians and philosophers stare, it looks sketchy, puzzling, and richly challenging."

"Kuhn's recognition that science might cease—leaving us with what Charles Sanders Peirce had defined as the "truth" about nature—made it even more imperative for Kuhn than for Popper to challenge science's authority, to deny that science can ever arrive at absolute truth. "The one thing I think you shouldn't say is that now we've found out what the world is really like," Kuhn said. "Because that's not what I think the game is about.""

"In Structure, the “third and most important aspect of […] incommensurability” is world change (p. 150) There have been several reactions to this claim: a. Dismissal because of idealism b. Defusing of world change by a metaphorical or psychological reading c. “Neo-Kantian” reading"

"World change, reaction a: dismissalIsrael Scheffler in Science and Subjectivity, 1967, p. 19: “I cannot, myself, believe that this bleak picture, representing an extravagant idealism, is true.” The full argument contains four premises and one conclusion (this is for the philosophers): P1: Incommensurability encompasses world change P2: World change (in revolutions) implies idealism. P3: Idealism is bullshit. P4: Bullshit can be dismissed. Conclusion: Incommensurability can be dismissed. Ad P2: Yes, perhaps, but what sort of idealism? Ad P3: The high-school version of idealism is certainly very questionable: “What reality is depends on how you think of it” – period Was this Kuhn’s view?"

"World change, reaction b: metaphorical/psychological[...] The metaphorical/psychological reading of world change does not capture Kuhn’s intentions."

"World change, reaction c: “Neo-Kantian”From 1979 onward, Kuhn described his position as Kantian with “temporally mutable categories” (or in Peter Lipson’s words: Kuhn’s position is “Kant on wheels”) Note first that this cannot be entirely correct because"

"Kuhn as does Popper rejects the idea that science grows by accumulation of eternal truths.. But while according to Popper science is ‘revolution in permanence’, and criticism the heart of the scientific enterprise, according to Kuhn revolution is exceptional and, indeed, extra-scientific, and criticism is, in ‘normal’ times, anathema... The clash between Popper and Kuhn is not about a mere technical point in epistemology. It concerns our central intellectual values, and has implications not only for theoretical physics but also for the underdeveloped social sciences and even for moral and political philosophy. If even in science there is no other way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters, then this must be even more so in the social sciences: truth lies in power. Thus Kuhn’s position would vindicate, no doubt, unintentionally, the basic political credo of contemporary religious maniacs (‘student revolutionaries’)."

"What, then, is the hallmark of science? Do we have to capitulate and agree that a scientific revolution is just an irrational change in commitment, that it is a religious conversion? Tom Kuhn, a distinguished American philosopher of science, arrived at this conclusion after discovering the naivety of Popper’s falsificationism. But if Kuhn is right, then there is no explicit demarcation between science and pseudoscience, no distinction between scientific progress and intellectual decay, there is no objective standard of honesty."

"What truth is not, according to Kuhn, is an accurate representation of the world as it is in itself. Scientific theories represent a world, but one partially constituted by the cognitive activities of the scientists themselves. This is not a commonsensical view, but it has a distinguished philosophical pedigree, associated most strongly with Kant. The Kantian view is that the truths we can know are truths about a ‘phenomenal’ world that is the joint product of the ‘things in themselves’ and the organising, conceptual activity of the human mind. Kuhn, however, is Kant on wheels. Where Kant held that the human contribution to the phenomenal world is invariant, Kuhn’s view is that it changes fundamentally across a scientific revolution. This is what he means by his notorious statement that, after a scientific revolution, ‘the world changes’. This is neither the trivial claim that scientists’ beliefs about the world change, nor the crazy claim that scientists can change the things in themselves simply by changing their beliefs. It is the claim that the phenomenal world changes because the human contribution to it changes."

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions contains some nice observations on the nature of what Kuhn calls “normal science”, which makes it out to have none of the heroic aspects that Popper insisted on. But when Kuhn goes beyond normal science to “revolutionary science” the book is a disaster. It promotes an irrationalist view of scientific revolutions that is both false and pernicious. The Copernican Revolution is a lovely book, much needed at the time. Planck and the Black Body Discontinuity is a mixed bag: some good historiography and some poor analysis."

"Kuhn's description of how scientific revolutions happen does not apply to any biological revolution. To be very frank, I cannot understand how this book could have been such a success. The general thesis was not new, and when he did assert specific claims he was almost always wrong! Kuhn's book mainly appealed to historians and social scientists. It was they who built it up into a big thing. It was vague, and vagueness always appeals to historians and social scientists."

"Much of what Kuhn says about great theoretical shifts, and the inertial role of long-established scientific paradigms and their cultural entrenchment in resisting recalcitrant evidence until it becomes overwhelming, is entirely reasonable, but it is also entirely compatible with the conception of science as seeking, and sometimes finding, objective truth about the world. What has made him a relativist hero is the addition of provocative remarks to the effect that Newton and Einstein, or Ptolemy and Galileo, live in "different worlds," that the paradigms of different scientific periods are "incommensurable," and that it is a mistake to think of the progress of science over time as bringing us closer to the truth about how the world really is."

"This brutal summary of the revolutionary process does not do justice to the complexity and subtlety of Kuhn's thinking. To appreciate these, you have to read his book. But it does perhaps indicate why Structure… came as such a bombshell to the philosophers and historians who had pieced together the Whig interpretation of scientific progress."

"When Thomas Kuhn talked about paradigm shifts within science, he defined a paradigm as a disciplinary matrix, which included not just the dominant theoretical framework within a given science (say, quantum mechanics in modern fundamental physics), but also the vocabulary and methods accepted within the community, the range of questions deemed interesting, as well as the textbooks and other training tools for the next generation of scientists. In a very real sense, then, physics, biology, analytical philosophy, continental philosophy, and so forth are indeed “traditions,” and the best (if not the only) way to learn them is not just by reading books at home, but by engaging in personal training over a number of years. That’s one reason why lone individuals who style themselves as revolutionary geniuses and who are convinced to have discovered proof that, for instance, general relativity is flawed are (much) more likely to be cranks than anything else. And that is also why, again in part, pseudoscience has a very different character from the genuine article."

"Kuhn’s (and Feyerabend’s) account of the historical development of science threatens inductivist and hypothetico-deductivist methodologies in a straightforward and dramatic way. When we look at what past scientists do, their work does not seem to fit the methods described by either inductivists or hypothetico-deductivists. Scientists engaged in normal science are pursuing neither confirmations nor refutations of their theory. They are engaged in an activity that Kuhn calls articulating the paradigm, which as we have seen involves many things other than theory testing. That is an important negative conclusion, and the method of arriving at it should appeal to the naturalist. The argument is essentially an empirical one. The history of science refutes (or at least shows the inadequacy of) the most popular methodologies of science. But Kuhn’s and Feyerabend’s description of scientific revolutions also presents two problems for the naturalist. First, since both claim that there is never a compelling reason to change from one paradigm to another, their accounts of science threaten to make scientific change look irrational. If that story is right, it should shake the naturalists’ conviction that science is to be admired as much as they think. Secondly, even if we could retell the story of scientific progress to remove some of the arbitrariness that Kuhn and Feyerabend claim exists; even if we could explain why scientists have changed paradigms and thereby methods from one period to the next, then we shall still have to confront another issue. If the methods of science have changed through history, that means there is no such thing as the scientific method, and so obviously no way to make use of the methods of science in philosophy."

"Up until the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, the history, philosophy, and sociology of science maintained an internalist approach to scientific knowledge claims. Science was seen as somehow above any social, political, or cultural influences, and therefore, the examinations of scientific knowledge focused on areas such as 'discoveries,' 'famous men,' and 'the scientific revolution in the West.' When Kuhn opened the door to the possibility that external factors were involved in the development of scientific paradigms, science studies assumed a more critical tone."

"Whatever Kuhn’s intentions, I believe that his effect on general culture, though not on the practices of real scientists, has been unfortunate, because it has served to “demythologize” science, to “debunk” it, to prove that it is not what ordinary people have supposed it to be. Kuhn paved the way for the even more radical skeptical view of Paul Feyerabend, who argued that as far as giving us truths about the world, science is no better than witchcraft."

"Finally, by the early 1960s, Thomas Kuhn’s picture of “normal science” portrayed scientific activity not as an open-minded philosophical quest but as puzzle-solving—the extension and application of existing paradigms. To the shock and indignation of some, Kuhn argued that being a scientist involved obedience to “dogma” and a narrowing of perception. Science remained, of course, the most reliable knowledge we had, but whatever moral authority might follow from regarding science as uniquely free of prejudice was—for those persuaded by Kuhn—no longer available."

"To put the mater simply, I think that Kuhn might have vastly overemphasized the role of scientific revolutions. I also don’t believe that an evolutionary view can be compatible with Kuhnian discontinuities."

"Not long after publication of my first article on the subject, I was given a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions written by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. This book deals with the process by which scientific paradigms are produced and replaced. I warmly endorse this book because I have lived through several of the stages described in the book."

"I’m one of the few physicists I know who likes Thomas Kuhn. He was partly a historian of science, partly a sociologist. He got the basic idea right of what happens when the scientific paradigm shifts. A radical change of perspective suddenly occurs. Wholly new ideas, concepts, abstractions and pictures become relevant. Relativity was a big paradigm shift. Quantum mechanics was a big paradigm shift. So we keep on inventing new realisms. They never completely replace the old ideas, but they do largely replace them with concepts that work better, that describe nature better, that are often very unfamiliar, that make people question what is meant by “reality.” Then the next thing comes along and turns that on its head. And we are always surprised that the old ways of thinking, the wiring that we have or the mathematical wiring that we may have created, simply fail us."

"Although Kuhn's emphasis on revolutionary change was an antidote to the simplistic models of the logical empiricists, a finer-grained theory of revolutionary change than Kuhn presented need not succumb to irrationalism. To develop such a theory, however, we need tools different from both the formal ones of the logical empiricists and the vague historical ones of Kuhn."

"[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions] was hugely influential, especially on the liberal arts, giving them ammunition to suggest that science was no better way of knowing the truth than any other way of investigating. It made a huge case of scientists gathering around one truth, and then there’s a tipping point and everyone moves away from that truth to gather around another truth. Hence the title of the book. And this left people with the sense that science is just whatever is in fashion. Kuhn used, as his best example of this, Copernicus. That’s half his book ... almost half of that book describes the Copernican Revolution as an example of the way science works. But that’s not how science works. It’s just not. It’s how things happened until 1600."

"In his celebrated book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn went a step further and argued that in scientific revolutions the standards (or “paradigms”) by which scientists judge theories change, so that the new theories simply cannot be judged by the prerevolutionary standards. There is much in Kuhn’s book that fits my own experience in science. But in the last chapter Kuhn tentatively attacked the view that science makes progress toward objective truths: “We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.” Kuhn’s book lately seems to have become read (or at least quoted) as a manifesto for a general attack on the presumed objectivity of science."

"The changes in the way we judge our theories have bothered philosophers and historians of science. Thomas Kuhn’s early book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, emphasized this process of change in our scientific standards. I think Kuhn went overboard in concluding that there was a complete incommensurability between present and past standards, but it is correct that there is a qualitative change in the kind of scientific theory we want to develop that has taken place at various times in the history of science. But Kuhn then proceeded to the fallacy—much clearer in what he has written recently—that in science we are not in fact moving toward objective truth. I call this a fallacy because it seems to me a simple non sequitur. I do not see why the fact that we are discovering not only the laws of nature in detail, but what kinds of laws are worth discovering, should mean that we are not making objective progress."

"By the way, in this respect my friend Thomas Kuhn has a lot to answer for. He distances himself from the postmoderns and the social constructivists, but he is endlessly quoted by them. He distances himself in saying that there is a place for evidence and reason in the scientific process—good to hear—but he attacks the idea that we are moving toward objective truth. As far as I can tell from one of his recent articles, his reason for rejecting the idea that science moves toward objective truth is that he and other philosophers have not succeeded in defining truth—and he cannot say what truth would be. This seems a bit like saying that because farmers cannot define cows or the difference between cows and, say, buffaloes, one should doubt the objective existence of cows. I would argue that it’s not the job of farmers to define cows; that’s the job of zoologists. Likewise, it’s not the job of physicists or other scientists to define truth; that’s the job of philosophers. If they haven’t done that job, too bad for them. But just as the farmer generally knows cows when he sees them, we scientists usually know truth when we see it."

"Now, that really was a paradigm shift. For Kuhn it seems to have been the paradigm of paradigm shifts, which set a pattern into which he tried to shoehorn every other scientific revolution. It really does fit Kuhn's description of paradigm shifts: it is extraordinarily difficult for a modern scientist to get into the frame of mind of Aristotelian physics, and Kuhn's statement that all previous views of reality have proved false, though not true of Newtonian mechanics or Maxwellian electrodynamics, certainly does apply to Aristotelian physics. Revolutions in science seem to fit Kuhn's description only to the extent that they mark a shift in understanding some aspect of nature from pre-science to modern science. The birth of Newtonian physics was a mega-paradigm shift, but nothing that has happened in our understanding of motion since then—not the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian mechanics, or from classical to quantum physics—fits Kuhn's description of a paradigm shift."

"Kuhn rejected our old metaphysics—consciousness consists of an inner representation of an outer reality—as incoherent, impossible, and fundamentally inhuman. That's why he begins SSR by invoking history not as a discipline that can be applied to science, but as a necessary part of scientific understanding. … The problems that dominated Kuhn's life after his great moment of insight arose not because Kuhn wasn't brilliant enough. Rather, they arose and persist because while we increasingly understand that the old metaphysical paradigm has failed, for several generations now we have not found our new paradigm."

"The Road since Structure is a collection of essays by Kuhn along with a lengthy interview with him conducted in 1995 by Aristide Baltas, Kostas Gavroglu, and Vassiliki Kindi. The essays form part of Kuhn’s thirty-year effort to clarify the contrast between paradigm shifts and normal science, with a focus on philosophical issues. For example, Kuhn alarmed many scientists with his claim that, while science makes progress, this progress is not towards truth but rather involves never-ending change through paradigm shifts. But the scientists have not realized that Kuhn’s claim is based on a philosopher’s definition of “truth,” which is not achieved (if ever) until there is exact knowledge of the ultimate constituents of matter on the quantum-gravity scale. Scientists use a less demanding definition for the word “truth,” in which measured parameters can be subject to nonzero error bars."

"Thomas Kuhn believed that a science has to become a "paradigm", with a shared technical language that excludes outsiders, before it can get any real work done. In the formative stages of a science, according to Kuhn, the adherents go to great pains to make their work comprehensible to outside academics. But (according to Kuhn) a science can only make real progress as a technical discipline once it abandons the requirement of outside accessibility, and scientists working in the paradigm assume familiarity with large cores of technical material in their communications. This sounds cynical, relative to what is usually said about public understanding of science, but I can definitely see a core of truth here."

"Quantum theory was split up into dialects. Different people describe the same experiences in remarkably different languages. This is confusing even to physicists."

"Resolution of conflict, easing of stress must come from the penetration into many groups of wide and common interests which, by a process of dilution, will weaken other groups often artificially maintained. It is of considerable importance, then, to look for large groups of individuals bound together not by temporal ties of tradition or political artificiality, but by tested ties of common interest so world-wide, indeed so universal, as to be recognized by any individual."

"In our time of ever-increasing specialization, there is a tendency to concern ourselves with relatively narrow scientific problems. The broad foundations of our present-day scientific knowledge and its historical development tend to be forgotten too often. This is an unfortunate trend, not only because our horizon becomes rather limited and our perspective somewhat distorted, but also because there are many valuable lessons to be learned in looking back over the years during which the basic concepts and the fundamental laws of a particular scientific discipline were first formulated."

"We hardly know the limit of intelligence of individuals who can fruitfully contribute to science in one way or another if they are given the proper training – including graduate training – as assistants, as supervised or semi-independent researchers, as team members. Individuals with any of a very broad spectrum of intellectual attributes can contribute to science."

"It's a fantastically specialized universe, but how in the world did it happen?"

"I feel that very rarely have I done any work in my life. I have a good time. I'm exploring. I'm playing a game, solving puzzles, and having fun, and for some reason people have been willing to pay me for it. Officially, I was supposed to retire years ago, but retire from what? Why stop having a good time?"

"Getting up any cliff is like a physics problem -- you just got to hold on, try everything, and stick with it."

"We need to go back to the discovery, to posing a question, to having a hypothesis and having kids know that they can discover the answers and can peel away a layer."

"I am interested in the electronic, optical, magnetic, and transport properties of novel semiconductor systems. Of special interest are the behavior of magnetic polarons in semimagnetic and dilute magnetic semiconductors, and the optical response properties of semiconductor quantum-wells and superlattices. My interests also include quantum dots, mesoscopic systems, and the role of antiferromagnetic fluctuations in correlated 2D electron systems."

"Never let academics falter; you have to be successful to have authority to champion change"

"You must develop one all-important ability — being able to enlist the help of other people. You have to reach a state where others want to help you. This includes giving credit...which will come back to you a hundredfold. Your reputation stems from what people say when you’re not present."

"It is the great glory of the quest for human knowledge that, while making some small contribution to that quest, we can also continue to learn and to take pleasure in learning."

"While it is becoming increasingly obvious that the fundamental architecture of a system has a profound Influence on the quality of its human factors, the vast majority of human factors studies concern the surface of hardware (keyboards, screens) or the very surface of the software (command names, menu formats)."

"Technology policy - whether we should have one and what form such a policy should take - was a core issue of the 1992 presidential campaign, and in February 1993 the Clinton administration confirmed that fostering new technologies will be a critical part of its agenda for redirecting the American economy."

"While political and cultural factors are important as explanations for differences in national technology policy and industrial practices, emergent trends in science, engineering and management are leading to new paradigms for high-technology innovation in both Japan and the United States."

"An exploration of the challenges Korea faces in transforming its economy from a government-directed, low-cost producer to an innovative world economic power based on its own scientific and technological development."

"The progress of science still depends on "a few people of vision"."

"Shortly after taking office in 1993, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore called for a shift in American technology policy toward an expansion of public investments in partnerships with private industry."

"Scientists are used to debating with one another about the finer points of new research. But increasingly, they find themselves battling their televisions and computer screens, which transmit ever-more-heated rhetoric from politicians, pundits, and other public figures who misinterpret, misrepresent, and malign scientific results."

"Science has been the absolute bedrock of technological and economic progress in the United States."

"I believe that there are very few scientists who deliberately falsify their work, cheat on their colleagues, or steal from their students. On the other hand, I am afraid that a great many scientists deceive themselves from time to time in their treatment of data, gloss over problems involving systematic errors, or understate the contributions of others. These are the 'honest mistakes' of science. The scientific equivalent of the 'little white lie' of social discourse. The scientific community has no way to protect itself from sloppy or deceptive literature except to learn whose work is suspect as unreliable."

"Teachers of science in schools and colleges must be masters of the tools for ensuring integrity in science and must instill them in their students."

"We must understand that the fact of error, demonstrated in subsequent work, does not suggest that ethical lapses are responsible. It is more likely that the source of error is, as the advertisement says, a reflection of the fact that "its dangerous to trifle with Mother Nature"."

"I distinguish two kinds of "applied" research: problem-solving research — government or commercially initiated, centrally managed and institutionally coupled to a plan for application of the results, useful science — investigator-initiated, competitively evaluated and widely communicated. Then we have basic science — useful also, also investigator-initiated, competitively evaluated and widely communicated."

"God loves the noise as much as the signal."

"Whenever I came to him (Fritz Sauter) with a pure physics idea, he would invariably say, with slight sarcasm: "But Mr. Kroemer, you ought to be able to formulate this mathematically! " If I came to him with a math formulation, I would get, in a similar tone: "But Mr. Kroemer, that is just math, what is the physics?" After a few encounters of this kind, you got the idea: You had to be able to go back and forth with ease. Yet, in the last analysis, concepts took priority over formalism, the latter was simply an (indispensable) means to an end."

"The principal applications of any sufficiently new and innovative technology always have been—and will continue to be—applications created by that technology."

"Ultimately, progress in applications is not deterministic, but opportunistic, exploiting for new applications whatever new science and technology happen to be coming along."

"Whenever I teach my semiconductor device physics course, one of the central messages I try to get across early is the importance of energy band diagrams. I often put this in the form of "Kroemer's Lemma of Proven Ignorance":"

":: If, in discussing a semiconductor problem, you cannot draw an Energy Band Diagram, this shows that you don't know what you are talking about,"

": with the corollary"

":: If you can draw one, but don't, then your audience won't know what you are talking about."

"It is very possible that a proper understanding of string theory will make the space-time continuum melt away.... String theory is a miracle through and through."

"Vibrating strings in 10 dimensions is just a weird fact... An explanation of that weird fact would tell you why there are 10 dimensions in the first place."

"I don't think that any physicist would have been clever enough to have invented string theory on purpose... Luckily, it was invented by accident."

"String theory is extremely attractive because gravity is forced upon us. All known consistent string theories include gravity, so while gravity is impossible in quantum field theory as we have known it, it is obligatory in string theory."

"Most people who haven't been trained in physics probably think of what physicists do as a question of incredibly complicated calculations, but that's not really the essence of it. The essence of it is that physics is about concepts, wanting to understand the concepts, the principles by which the world works."

"Quantum mechanics... developed through some rather messy, complicated processes stimulated by experiment. While it's a very rich and wonderful theory, it doesn't quite have the conceptual foundation of general relativity. Our problem in physics is that everything is based on these two different theories and when we put them together we get nonsense."

"In Newton's day the problem was to write something which was correct - he never had the problem of writing nonsense, but by the twentieth century we have a rich conceptual framework with relativity and quantum mechanics and so on. In this framework it's difficult to do things which are even internally coherent, much less correct. Actually, that's fortunate in the sense that it's one of the main tools we have in trying to make progress in physics. Physics has progressed to a domain where experiment is a little difficult... Nevertheless, the fact that we have a rich logical structure which constrains us a lot in terms of what is consistent, is one of the main reasons we are still able to make advances."

"String theory at its finest is, or should be, a new branch of geometry. ...I, myself, believe rather strongly that the proper setting for string theory will prove to be a suitable elaboration of the geometrical ideas upon which Einstein based general relativity."

"I think one has to regard it as a long term process. One has to remember that String theory, if you choose to date it from the Veneziano model, is already eighteen years old... that quantum electrodynamic theory towards which Planck was heading [in 1900], took fifty years to emerge."

"I would expect that a proper elucidation of what string theory really is all about would involve a revolution in our concepts of the basic laws of physics - similar in scope to any that occurred in the past."

"It's been said that string theory is part of the physics of the twenty-first century that fell by chance into the twentieth century. That's a remark that was made by a leading physicist about fifteen years ago. ...String theory was invented essentially by accident in a long series of events, starting with the Veneziano model... No one invented it on purpose, it was invented in a lucky accident. ...By rights, string theory shouldn't have been invented until our knowledge of some of the areas that are prerequisite... had developed to the point that it was possible for us to have the right concept of what it is all about."

"It was clear that if I didn't spend the rest of my life concentrating on string theory, I would simply be missing my life's calling."

"Even though it is, properly speaking, a postprediction, in the sense that the experiment was made before the theory, the fact that gravity is a consequence of string theory, to me, is one of the greatest theoretical insights ever."

"Good wrong ideas are extremely scarce... and good wrong ideas that even remotely rival the majesty of string theory have never been seen."

"Generally speaking, all the really great ideas of physics are really spin-offs of string theory... Some of them were discovered first, but I consider that a mere accident of the development on planet earth. On planet earth, they were discovered in this order [general relativity, quantum field theory, superstrings, and supersymmetry]... But I don't believe, if there are many civilizations in the universe, that those four ideas were discovered in that order in each civilization."

"If supersymmetry plays the role in physics that we suspect it does, then it is very likely to be discovered by the next generation of particle accelerators, either at Fermilab... or at CERN... Discovery of supersymmetry would be one of the real milestones in physics, made even more exciting by its close links to still more ambitious theoretical ideas. Indeed, supersymmetry is one of the basic requirements of "string theory," which is the framework in which theoretical physicists have had some success in unifying gravity with the rest of the elementary particle forces. Discovery of supersymmetry would would certainly give string theory an enormous boost."

"Just around the same time that the string picture was formed, asymptotic freedom was discovered and made possible, in QCD, a more precise and successful theory of the strong interactions. Yet there has always been a striking analogy between QCD and string theory. If the hypothesis of quark confinement in QCD is true in its usual form, than a widely separated quark and antiquark are joined by a “color flux tube.” This has an obvious analogy to the notion of a meson as a string with charges at its ends, as assumed in string theory. Explaining this analogy would mean understanding quark confinement. This would be quite a nice achievement, since it is a longstanding sore point in theoretical physics that despite real experiments and computer simulations supporting the quark confinement hypothesis and despite a lot of ingenious work explaining qualitative criteria for quark confinement and why this notion is natural, there is no convincing, pencil and paper demonstration of quark confinement in QCD."

"Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle."

"It was found [in the 1970s], unexpectedly and without anyone really having a concept for it, that the rules of perturbation theory can be changed in a way that makes relativistic quantum gravity inevitable rather than impossible. The change is made by replacing point particles by strings. Then Feynman graphs are replaced by Riemann surfaces, which are smooth - unlike the graphs, which have singularities at interaction vertices. The Riemann surfaces can degenerate to graphs in many different ways. In field theory, the interactions occur at the vertices of a Feynman graph. By contrast, in string theory, the interaction is encoded globally, in the topology of a Riemann surface, any small piece of which is like any other. This is reminiscent of how non-linearities are encoded globally in twistor theory."

"Replacing particles by strings is a naive-sounding step, from which many other things follow. In fact, replacing Feynman graphs by Riemann surfaces has numerous consequences: 1. It eliminates the infinities from the theory. ...2. It greatly reduces the number of possible theories. ...3. It gives the first hint that string theory will change our notions of spacetime. Just as in QCD, so also in gravity, many of the interesting questions cannot be answered in perturbation theory. In string theory, to understand the nature of the Big Bang, or the quantum fate of a black hole, or the nature of the vacuum state that determines the properties of the elementary particles, requires information beyond perturbation theory... Perturbation theory is not everything. It is just the way the [string] theory was discovered."

"We know a lot of things, but what we don't know is a lot more."

"... one thing that's worth mentioning, though, it that apart from the dream of understanding physics at a deeper level involving gravity, work in string theory has been useful in shedding lights on more conventional problems in quantum field theory and even in and as well with applications to mathematics. Apart from its intrinsic interest, those successes are one of the things that tend to give us confidence that we're on the right track. Because, speaking personally, I find it implausible that a completely wrong new physics theory would give rise to useful insights about so many different areas."

"The past decade has seen a remarkable renaissance in the interaction between mathematics and physics. This has been mainly due to the increasingly sophisticated mathematical models employed by elementary particle physicists, and the consequent need to use the appropriate mathematical machinery. In particular, because of the strongly non-linear nature of the theories involved, topological ideas and methods have played a prominent part. ... In all this large and exciting field, which involves many of the leading physicists and mathematicians in the world, Edward Witten stands out clearly as the most influential and dominating figure. Although he is clearly a physicist (as his list of publications clearly shows) his command of mathematics is rivalled by few mathematicians, and his ability to interpret physical ideas in mathematical form is quite unique. Time and again he has suprised the mathematical community by a brilliant application of physical insight leading to new and deep mathematical ideas."

"For example, Ed Witten recently derived a formula for Donaldson invariants on Kähler manifolds using a twisted version of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory in four dimensions. His argument depends on the existence of a mass gap, cluster decomposition, spontaneous symmetry breaking, asymptotic freedom, and gluino condensation."

"In the spring of 1985 Ed Witten, one of the most brilliant of young physicists at Princeton University, announced that he would give a talk. ...it was clear that this talk would be an extraordinary occasion. ...our seminar room was packed with people, some old and famous, some young, all eager with expectations. Witten spoke very fast for an hour and a half without stopping. It was a dazzling display of virtuosity. It was also, as Witten remarked quietly at the end, a new theory of the universe. ...When Witten came to the end... The listeners sat silent. ...There were no questions. Not one of us was brave enough to stand up and reveal the depths of our ignorance. ...I describe this scene because it gives a picture of what it means to explore the universe at the highest level of abstraction. Ed Witten is taking a big chance. He has moved so far into abstraction that few even of his friends know what he is talking about. ...He did not invent superstrings. ...Ed Witten's role is to build superstrings into a mathematical structure which reflects to an impressive extent the observed structure of particles and fields in the universe. After they heard him speak, many members of his audience went back to their desks and did the homework they should have done before, reading his papers and learning his language. The next time he talks, we shall understand him better. Next time, we shall perhaps be brave enough to ask questions."

"Witten's excitement arose from the fact that the theory passed several crucial tests which other theories had failed. To have found a theory of the universe which is not mathematically self-contradictory is already a considerable achievement."

"Our Witten, which art in Princeton, Hallowed be thy name. Thy Nobel come, Thy will be done, In CERN as it is in the US. Give us this day our daily string, And forgive us our theory, As we forgive those who do phenomenology. Lead us not into experiment, And deliver us from tests. For thine is the arXiv, Hep-th and math-AG, For ever and ever, Amen"

"Enter superstring theory. The concept that particles are really tiny strings dates from the 1960s, but it took on wings in 1974, when John Schwarz... and Joel Scherk... came to terms with what had been an ugly blemish in their calculations. String theory kept predicting the existence of a particle with zero mass and a spin of two. Schwarz and Scherk realized that this unwelcome particle was nothing other than the graviton, the quantum carrier of gravitational force (Although there is no quantum theory of gravity yet, it is possible to specify some of the characteristics of the quantum particle thought to convey it.) This was liberating: The calculations were saying not only that string theory might be the way to a fully unified account of all particles and forces but that one could not write a string theory without incorporating gravity. Ed Witten... recalled that this new constituted "the greatest intellectual thrill of my life.""

"In the high carrels of theoretical physics, where intelligence is taken for granted, Witten is regarded as preternaturally, almost forbiddingly, smart. ...he wears the habitual small smile of the theoretician for whom sustained mathematical thinking has something like the emotional qualities that mystics associate with meditation. He speaks in a soft, high-pitched voice, floating short, precise sentences punctuated by witty little silences—the speech pattern of a man who has learned that he thinks too fast to otherwise be understood. Though he is the son of a theoretical physicist, he came to science in a roundabout fashion."

"The Theory of Everything, if you dare be bold, Might be something more than a string orbifold. While some of your leaders have got old and sclerotic, Not to be trusted alone with things heterotic, Please heed our advice that you are not smitten— The Book is not finished, the last word is not Witten."

"A crucial observation, central to the second superstring revolution initiated by Witten and others in 1995, is that string theory actually includes ingredients with a variety of different dimensions: two-dimensional Frisbee-like constituents, three-dimensional blob-like constituents, and even more exotic possibilities to boot."

"In the mid-1990s, Witten, based on his own insights and previous work by Michael Duff... and Chris Hull and Paul Townsend... gave convincing evidence that... String theory... to most string theorists' amazement, actually requires ten space dimensions and one time dimension, for a total of eleven dimensions."

"Edward Witten is fond of declaring that string theory had already made a dramatic and experimentally confirmed prediction: "String theory had the remarkable property of predicting gravity." What Witten means by this is that both Newton and Einstein developed theories of gravity because their observations of the world clearly showed them that gravity exists, and that, therefore, it required an accurate and consistent explanation. On the contrary, a physicist studying string theory—even if he or she was completely unaware of general relativity—would be inexorably led to it by the string framework."

"Work by Strominger and Witten showed that the masses of the particles in each family depend upon... the way in which the boundaries of the various multidimensional holes in the Calabi-Yau shape intersect and overlap with one another. ...as strings vibrate through the extra curled-up dimensions, the precise arrangement of the various holes and the way in which the Calabi-Yau shape folds around them has a direct impact on the possible resonant patterns of vibration. ...as with the number of families, string theory can provide us with a framework for answering questions—such as why the electron and other particles have the masses they do—on which previous theories are completely silent. ...carrying through with such calculations requires that we know which Calabi-Yau space to take for the extra dimensions."

"In the mid-1980s Philip Candelas, Gary Horowitz, Andrew Strominger, and Edward Witten... discovered that each hole—the term used in a precisely defined mathematical sense—contained within the Calabi-Yau shape gives rise to a family of lowest-energy string vibrational patterns. ...among these preferred Calabi-Yau shapes are ones that also yield just the right number of messenger particles as well as just the right electric charges and nuclear force properties to match the particles [listed in the book] ..."

"In the spring of 1995... Drawing on the work of a number of string theorists (including Chris Hull, Paul Townsend, Ashoke Sen, Michael Duff, John Schwarz and many others), Edward Witten—who for decades has been the world's most renowned string theorist—uncovered a hidden unity that tied all five string theories together. Witten showed that rather than being distinct, the five theories are actually just five different ways of mathematically analyzing a single theory. ...The unifying master theory has tentatively been called M-theory."

"Much as Kaluza found that a universe with five spacetime dimensions provided a framework for unifying electromagnetism and gravity, and much as string theorists found that a universe with ten spacetime dimensions provided a framework for unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity, Witten found that a universe with eleven spacetime dimensions provided a framework for unifying all string theories."

"Between sessions at a physics conference, I asked a number of attendees: Who is the smartest physicist of them all? ...the name mentioned most often was Witten's. He seemed to evoke a special kind of awe, as though he belonged to a category unto himself. He is often likened to Einstein; one colleague reached even further back for a comparison, suggesting that Witten possessed the greatest mathematical mind since Newton."

"Edward Witten... dominates the world of theoretical physics. Witten is currently the "leader of the pack," the most brilliant high-energy physicist, who sets trends in the physics community the way Picasso would set trends in the art world. Hundreds of physicists follow his work religiously to get a glimmer of his path-breaking ideas."

"The boundaries of physics have been changing. Now scientists ask not only how the world works (a question the Standard Model answers) but why it works that way (a question the Standard Model cannot answer). Einstein asked "why" earlier in the century, but only in the past decade or so have the "why" questions become normal scientific research in particle physics, rather than philosophical afterthoughts. One ambitious approach to "why" is known as string theory, which is formulated in an eleven-dimensional world. Work on string theory has proceeded so far by study of the theory itself, rather than via the historical fruitful interplay of experiment and theory. As Edward Witten remarks... string theory predicts that nature should be supersymmetric. Supersymmetry is a surprising and subtle idea—the idea that the equations representing basic laws of nature don't change if certain particles in the equations are interchanged with one another."

"He never does calculations except in his mind. I will fill pages with calculations before I understand what I'm doing. But Edward will sit down only to calculate a minus sign, or a factor of two."

"The positive energy theorem was for half a century or more an open challenge to relativists. Many attempts were made to prove flat spacetime was stable, but none completely succeeded completely until a majestic tour de force of geometric reasoning of Shoen and Yau. This was followed two years later by a proof of Witten, which was as elegant as it was short. It is this proof of Witten’s that we take as a template... for the quantum theory."

"We shouldn't toss comparisons to Einstein around too frequently, but when it comes to Witten... He's head and shoulder above the rest. He's started whole groups of people on new paths. He produces elegant, breathtaking proofs which people gasp at, which leave them in awe."

"My stay was nearly over when one day Ed Witten said to me, "I just learnt a new way to find exact S-matrices in two dimensions invented by Zamolodchikov and I want to extend the ideas to supersymmetric models. You are the S-matrix expert, aren't you? Why don't we work together?" I was delighted. All my years of training in Berkeley gave me a tremendous advantage over Ed—for an entire week."

"The MacArthur Foundation chose Witten in 1982 for one of its earliest “genius” grants, and he is probably the only person that virtually everyone in the theoretical physics community would agree deserves the genius label. He has received a wide array of honors, including the most prestigious award in mathematics, the Fields Medal, in 1990. The strange situation of the most talented person in theoretical physics having received the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel Prize, but no actual Nobel Prize in physics, indicates both how unusual a figure Witten is, and also how unusual the relationship between mathematics and physics has become in recent years. When I was a graduate student at Princeton, one day I was leaving the library perhaps thirty feet or so behind Witten. The library was underneath a large plaza separating the mathematics and physics buildings, and he went up the stairs to the plaza ahead of me, disappearing from view. When I reached the plaza he was nowhere to be seen, and it is quite a bit more than thirty feet to the nearest building entrance. While presumably he was just moving a lot faster than I was, it crossed my mind at the time that a consistent explanation for everything was that Witten was an extraterrestrial being from a superior race who, since he thought no one was watching, had teleported back to his office. More seriously, Witten’s accomplishments are very much a product of the combination of a huge talent and a lot of hard work. His papers are uniformly models of clarity and of deep thinking about a problem, of a sort that very few people can match. Anyone who has taken the time to try to understand even a fraction of his work finds it a humbling experience to see just how much he has been able to achieve. He is also a refreshing change from some of the earlier generations of famous particle theorists, who could be very entertaining, but at the same time were often rather insecure and not known always to treat others well."

"After Einstein’s dramatic success with general relativity in 1915, he devoted most of the rest of his career to a fruitless attempt to unify electromagnetism and gravity using the sorts of geometric techniques that had worked in the case of general relativity. We now can see that this research program was seriously misguided, because Einstein was ignoring the lessons of quantum mechanics. To understand electromagnetism fully one must deal with quantum field theory and QED in one way or another, and Einstein steadfastly refused to do this, continuing to believe that a theory of classical fields could somehow be made to do everything. Einstein chose to ignore quantum mechanics despite its great successes, hoping that it could somehow be made to go away. If Witten had been in Einstein’s place, I doubt that he would have made this mistake, since he is someone who has always remained very involved in whatever lines of research are popular in the rest of the theoretical community. On the other hand, this example does show that genius is no protection against making the mistake of devoting decades of one’s life to an idea that has no chance of success."

"You have to get a little untrapped from too much prior knowledge."

"I see a tremendous amount of intricacy in the world and we have probably only begun to scratch at the surface of its intricacy."

"The atom can't be seen, yet its existence can be proved. And it is simple to prove that it can't ever be seen. It has to be studied by indirect evidence — and the technical difficulty has been compared to asking a man who has never seen a piano to describe a piano from the sound it would make falling downstairs in the dark."

"The ideal student would be one who was not working for grades but was working because he was interested in the work and not trying to compete with fellow students."

"... Carl Anderson told me what life was like after he got his Ph.D. under Millikan in 1930. Dirac had proposed the existence of a partner to the electron, its antiparticle, and Carl wanted to find it by converting γ-rays found in the debris of cosmic rays into what we now call electron-positron pairs. He needs to get a big magnet, and build a cloud chamber with a lead plate and camera. When he asks Millikan for money, Millikan reaches into his pocket and gives him some. Carl goes to a couple of junk shops for supplies and gets to work. When the magnet, cloud chamber, and camera are finished, Carl puts them, together with food and a sleeping bag, into his old Model T Ford, and drives up the unpaved Mount Wilson Observatory road into the San Gabriel Mountains behind Pasadena. Carl is on his way to discovering the positron."

"The curiosity remains... to grasp more clearly how the same matter, which in physics and chemistry displays orderly and reproducible and relatively simple properties, arranges itself in the most astounding fashions as soon as it is drawn into the orbit of the living organism. The closer one looks at these performances of matter in living organisms the more impressive the show becomes. The meanest living cell becomes a magic puzzle box full of elaborate and changing molecules, and far outstrips all chemical laboratories of man in the skill of organic synthesis performed with ease, expedition, and good judgment of balance."

"Any living cell carries with it the experiences of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors. You cannot expect to explain so wise an old bird in a few simple words."

"If you're too sloppy, then you never get reproducible results, and then you never can draw any conclusions; but if you are just a little sloppy, then when you see something startling, (...) you nail it down (...). So I called it the "Principle of Limited Sloppiness"."

"The progress of science is tremendously disorderly, and the motivations that lead to this progress are tremendously varied, and the reasons why scientists go into science, the personal motivations, are tremendously varied. I have said … that science is a haven for freaks, that people go into science because they are misfits, and that it is a sheltered place where they can spin their own yarn and have recognition, be tolerated and happy, and have approval for it."

"The particular thing about science is to combine that [the dreams of obtaining power] with a retreat from the world. Other people want to obtain power by going out into the world, but the scientist really wants to obtain power by retreating from the world."

"The scientist addresses an infinitesimal audience of fellow composers. His message is not devoid of universality but it's universality is disembodied and anonymous. While the artist's communication is linked forever with it's original form, that of the scientist is modified, amplified, fused with the ideas and results of others, and melts into the stream of knowledge and ideas which forms our culture. The scientist has in common with the artist only this: that he can find no better retreat from the world than his work and also no stronger link with his world than his work."

"The problem was well expressed by Max Delbrück, one of Schrödinger's contemporaries, who expressed it in this way... so to encapsulate what Delbrück was saying is that, at the level of atoms it's just known physics, but at the level of the living cell, it's some sort of magic."

"So long as you live and in whatever circumstances the kaleidoscope of life may place you, think for yourself and act in accordance with the conclusions of that thinking; avoid so far as possible drifting with the current of the mob or being too easily influenced by the outward manifestation of things. Take your own look beneath the surface and don't trust others to look for you. If you will follow this rule consistently, I am sure you will keep out of much trouble, will make the most out of your life and, what is more, will contribute most of value to the community life."

"Every new discovery in science brings with it a host of new problems, just as the invention of the automobile brought with it gas stations, roads, garages, mechanics, and a thousand other subsidiary details."

"No longer was light analogous to the discharge of a blunderbuss, but rather to the pulsating flight of birds."

"In closing, I should like to cite a line from William Blake. “To see a world in a grain of sand - - - ” and allude to a possible parallel to see worlds in an electron."

"The benefits of science are not only material ones. The truths that science teaches are of common interest the world over. The language of science is universal, and is a powerful force in bringing the peoples of the world closer together."

"Not only mesons are interesting..."

"Science knows no boundaries, and efforts to create barriers – whether to keep new ideas within or to prevent new ones from entering from the outside – have universally proved harmful to progress."

"It is possible to apply statistical methods to the calculation of nuclear processes provided that the energies involved are large in comparison with the lowest excitation energies of nuclei."

"… conferences with open attendance are very important for the stimulation of young people or other people who are new in the field. … The field of high-energy physics is, as you know, very strongly in the hands of a clique and it is hard for an outsider to enter."

"Almost all of the material phenomena which occur under terrestrial conditions are recognized as quantum mechanical consequences of the electrical attraction between electrons and nuclei and of the gravitational attraction between massive objects. We should be able, therefore, to express all the relevant magnitudes which characterize the properties of matter in terms of the following six magnitudes: M, m, e, c, G, and h; M is the mass of the proton, m and e are the mass and electrical charge of the electron, c is the light velocity, G is Newton's gravitational constant, and—most importantly—h is the quantum of action ..."

"The question of the origin of the universe is one of the most exciting topics for a scientist to deal with. It reaches far beyond its purely scientific significance, since it is related to human existence, to mythology, and to religion. Furthermore, it deals with questions are connected with the fundamental structure of matter, with elementrary particles."

"Self-confidence is an important ingredient that makes for a successful physicist."

"In 1936 Weisskopf proposed to set aside in quantum electrodynamics the divergent effects at small distances, and to consider only the charge of the particle observed at long distances. This assertion anticipated charge and mass renormalization. Later he showed that the self-energy of an electron in Dirac theory diverges only logarithmically, a result that was important for the later development of renormalization theory."

"Physics is a wrong tool to describe living systems."

"Origami helps in the study of mathematics and science in many ways. … Using origami anyone can become a scientific experimenter with no fuss."

"There is no concept in the whole field of physics which is more difficult to understand than is the concept of entropy, nor is there one which is more fundamental."

"But the very fact that matter in the cosmos is still moving, rather than at rest, is the single most surprising thing about the universe."

"But sometimes reality chooses not to conform to our preferences."

"It can't be stressed enough that the multiverse is utterly hypothetical—but that doesn't mean it isn't real."

"Even if we don't know the answer, a change of perspective can help us improve the question."

"In contrast to the arbitrarily complicated evolution of a (nonintegrable) classical system, all a quantum state ever does is move in circles."

"The mystery of the arrow of time comes down to this: Why were the conditions in the early universe set up in a particular way, in a configuration of low entropy that enabled all of the interesting and irreversible processes to come?"

"Inflation is a simple idea: imagine that the universe begins in a tiny patch of space dominated by the potential energy of some scalar field, a kind of super-dense dark energy. This causes that patch to expand at a terrifically accelerated rate, smoothing out the density and diluting away any unwanted relics. Eventually the scalar field decays into ordinary matter and radiation, reheating the universe into a conventional Big Bang state, after which things proceed as normal."

"There probably are more forces than we know about, but they’re only going to be of direct interest to physicists, I’m afraid. No tractor beams."

"All of my advice comes from remembering what I did wrong and then telling people not to do it. ... Don't wait to read the most recent research papers. ... Wonder how you could do better. ... Do your own research projects. Take the initiative. ... Ask your own questions — try to answer them. ... At some point you stop being a student and you start being a scientist. ... And it's a completely different skill set ...""

"When exactly does an observation occur? ... What were the laws of physics doing before there was anyone measuring things? And what do you mean by a measurement, anyway? Does it have to be a consciousness human being? ... Can a rock or a virus or an earthworm do an observation?"

"People don't like to read papers — they like to read titles."

"... I just want to understand the large-scale story that string gas cosmology is trying to sell us. We have nine dimensions of space — they are all very small — and in three dimensions they start unwinding and getting bigger. Is that the basic idea?"

"The broader ontology typically associated with atheism is naturalism—there is only one world, the natural world, exhibiting patterns we call the “laws of nature,” and which is discoverable by the methods of science and empirical investigation. There is no separate realm of the supernatural, spiritual, or divine; nor is there any cosmic teleology or transcendent purpose inherent in the nature of the universe or in human life. “Life” and “consciousness” do not denote essences distinct from matter; they are ways of talking about phenomena that emerge from the interplay of extraordinarily complex systems. Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived from anything outside ourselves. Naturalism is a philosophy of unity and patterns, describing all of reality as a seamless web."

"Meaning in life can’t be reduced to simplistic mottos. In some number of years I will be dead; some memory of my time here on Earth may linger, but I won’t be around to savor it."

"Poetic naturalism is a philosophy of freedom and responsibility. The raw materials of life are given to us by the natural world, and we must work to understand them and accept the consequences. The move from description to prescription, from saying what happens to passing judgment on what should happen, is a creative one, a fundamentally human act. The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. The world exists; beauty and goodness are things that we bring to it."

"What we’re seeing is a manifestation of the layered nature of our descriptions of reality. At the deepest level we currently know about, the basic notions are things like “spacetime,” “quantum fields,” “equations of motion,” and “interactions.” No causes, whether material, formal, efficient, or final. But there are levels on top of that, where the vocabulary changes."

"The momentary or Laplacian nature of physical evolution doesn’t have much relevance for the choices we face in our everyday lives. For poetic naturalism, the situation is clear. There is one way of talking about the universe that describes it as elementary particles or quantum states, in which Laplace holds sway and what happens next depends only on the state of the system right now."

"Metaphysical principles are tempting shortcuts but not reliable guides. There are good reasons why things often seem to happen for reasons—and also reasons why that’s not a bedrock principle."

"The “reasons” and “causes” why things happen, in other words, aren’t fundamental; they are emergent. We need to dig in to the actual history of the universe to see why these concepts have emerged."

"What we can’t do is demand that the universe scratch our explanatory itches. Curiosity is a virtue, and it’s good to look for answers to “Why?” questions whenever we might be able to find them, or when we think that asking such questions might help us to understand things better. But we should be at peace with the possibility that, for some questions, the answer doesn’t go any deeper than “That’s what it is.” We’re not used to that—our intuition assures us that every event can be explained in terms of some reason why. To understand why we have that impression, we need to dig more deeply into how our actual universe has evolved."

"Discoveries in physics are made when the time for making them is ripe, and not before."

"Of course, if electrons were waves there would be no difficulty. We think we understand the regular reflection of light and of x-rays--and we should understand the reflec- tion of electrons as well if electrons were only waves instead of particles. This observation though true does not seem a particularly valuable one. It is rather as if one were to see a rabbit climbing a tree, and were to say, "Well, that is rather a strange thing for a rabbit to be doing, but after all there is really nothing to get excited about. Cats climb trees --so that, if the rabbit were only a cat, we would understand its behavior perfectly." Of course, the explanation might be that what we took to be a rabbit was not a rabbit at all, but was actually a cat. Is it possible that we are mistaken about electrons? Is it possible that we have been wrong all this time in supposing that they are particles, and that actually they are waves? Well, 1 do not need to enumerate to you the many reasons we have for believing--I may say for knowing--that electrons are actually particles."

"The reminds me of the scene in Mel Brooks's ' where asks his hunch-backed servant, , how he lives with his hump, and Igor answers, "What hump?" ... The potential of overcoming the ultraviolet problem is also the deeper reason for the allure of string theory, a microscopic model for the vacuum that has failed to account for any measured thing."

"The reason we believe in relativity today is not because we had a great transition in our beliefs about what should be so. We believe in relativity because we have no choice. It's true — measured to be true."

"I like to talk about renormalization as an epistemological barrier. … Nature has been kind, and nature has been unkind. … for what it's worth, I don't tell people what kind of research to do. I have been wrong many, many times in anticipating what will happen. … I’ve learned the hard way that the art of good physics is to ask a question that’s just barely beyond where the technology can go, and then you place your bets. And if you’re right you win the bet, and if you’re wrong you lose."

"Real understanding of a thing comes from taking it apart oneself, not reading about it in a book or hearing about it in a classroom. To this day I always insist on working out a problem from the beginning without reading up on it first, a habit that sometimes gets me into trouble but just as often helps me see things my predecessors have missed."

"I realized that nature is filled with a limitless number of wonderful things which have causes and reasons like anything else but nonetheless cannot be forseen but must be discovered, for their subtlety and complexity transcends the present state of science. The questions worth asking, in other words, come not from other people but from nature, and are for the most part delicate things easily drowned out by the noise of everyday life."

"Oklahoma is laid back and rather beautiful, with rolling brown hills not unlike the ones in California. The Pershing missiles, on the other hand, were not beautiful. They were horrible weapons of war — solid-fuel rockets five feet in diameter at the base, long as a moving van, and capable of throwing a tactical nuclear warhead 500 miles. They were launched from trucks and required a team of 10 men to service and fire. The most interesting thing I learned during this time was how small a nuclear warhead was. The nose cone of a Pershing is only about 18 inches in diameter at the base. I had not been interested at all in nuclear weaponry as a student, and so I had never thought through carefully about their "efficiency". It is sobering thought that these missiles were actually deployed in continental Europe in those days and that on at least one occasion, namely the 1973 Arab-Israel war, there was an alert serious enough to leave the commanding officers trembling."

"The world is full of intelligent, well-meaning people who, for one reason or another, did not attend university but are nonetheless well-read and educated. Out there on the prairie lost opportunities of youth were the rule rather than the exception, and I slowly became disabused of the myth of the Bright Young Thing and have not believed in it since."

"I learned about X-ray diffraction, neutron scattering, raman scattering, infrared absorption spectroscopy, heat capacity, transport, time-dependent transport, magnetic resonance, electron diffraction, electron energy loss spectroscopy — all the experimental techniques that constitute the eyes and ears of modern solid state physics. As this occurred I slowly became disillusioned with the reductionist ideal of physics, for it was completely clear that the outcome of these experiments was almost always impossible to predict from first principles, yet was right and meaningful and certainly regulated by the same microscopic laws that work in atoms. Only many years later did I finally understand that this truth, which seems so natural to solid state physicists because they confront experiments so frequently, is actually quite alien to other branches of physics and is vigorously repudiated by many scientists on the grounds that things not amenable to reductionist thinking are not physics."

"Bell Labs had been a kind of holy place of solid state physics since the 1950's when it was built up by Shockley after the invention of the transistor. I had no idea at the time of the significance of this placement, but I did notice during my job talk that everybody understood what I was saying immediately — this had never happened before — and that the audience had an irresistible urge to interrupt, heckle, and argue about the subject matter loudly among themselves during the talk so as to lob hand grenades into it, just like back-benchers do in the House of Commons. Being a combative person I rather liked this and lobbed a few grenades of my own to maintain control of my seminar. I later came to understand that this heckling was a sign of respect from these people, that the ability to handle it was a test of a person's worth, and that polite silence from them was an extremely bad sign, amounting to Pauli's famous criticism that the speaker was "not even wrong.""

"My rule is simply to do for my students exactly what I hope someone else will do for my sons when the time comes: I teach them to have faith in themselves and in their own compass, to listen to nature to find truth, to love knowledge for the sake of itself, and to strive for greatness."

"It has been my experience that good theoretical physics is empowering, in that it enables thinking to take place that would otherwise not occur, and, in its highest form, facilitates experiments that would otherwise not be done."

"When a thing gets very, very small, you can't tell the difference between a solid and a liquid. (16:30 in video)"

"If you think, as a Western person, that you are not affected by religious traditions, you are sadly mistaken. (22:30 in video)"

"What we live in, unfortunately, is a time when we are infected by what I call quantum field theory idolatry. (39:30 in video)"

"Science is about measurement, dammit — it's not about ideas. (55:20 in video)"

"Newton would have been laughed out of the country if Kepler hadn't done the measurement. ... The facts speak for themselves. ... History has shown that you need a little luck — and if you don't have the luck, you're out of luck. (1:00:00 to 1:01:00 in video)"

"The beauty of physics lies in the extent to which seemingly complex and unrelated phenomena can be explained and correlated through a high level of abstraction by a set of laws which are amazing in their simplicity."

"It is electromagnetism (EM) in all its many forms that has been so basic, that haunts us and guides us."

"A patent is a legal analog of sticky fly paper: it attracts some of the lowest forms of life."

"I've reached the age where young people frequently ask for my advice. All I can really say is that electronics is a fascinating field that I continue to find fulfilling. The field is still growing rapidly, and the opportunities that are ahead are at least as great as they were when I graduated from college. My advice is to get involved and get started."

"It is a fantastic letter. Very understated. He calls it an optical maser, it’s as if a maser was made to run in the optical. No flamboyant phrase, just straightforward science."

"Every object in the Universe with a temperature above absolute zero radiates in the infrared, so this part of the spectrum contains a great deal of information."

"The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world. The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway. We often do not see what we do not expect to see."

"In the 1950s, academics forecast that as a result of new technology, by the year 2000 we could have a twenty-hour workweek. Such a development would be a beautiful example of technology at the service of the human being. ...According to the Bureau of Statistics, the goods and services produced per hour of work in the United States has indeed more than doubled since 1950. ...However, instead of reducing the workweek, the increased efficiencies and productivities have gone into increasing the salaries of workers. ...Workers... rather have used their increased efficiencies and resulting increased disposable income to purchase more material goods. ...Indeed, in a cruel irony, the workweek has actually lengthened. ...More work is required to pay for more consumption, fueled by more production, in an endless, vicious circle."

"… Dr. Lightman was an astrophysicist, a card-carrying wizard of space and time, with a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology and subsequent posts at Cornell and Harvard. In 1989, at the peak of his prowess as a physicist, he began to walk away from the world of black holes to enter the world of black ink and the uncertain, lonely life of the writer."

"I may be a minority of one in advocating that one should NOT separate science and politics—partly because I am old enough to remember the Weimar Republic before 1934..."

"The world's problems are pressing in on us all. The scale and impact of human activities now affects a great portion of the global resources important to human welfare. These activities are putting growing, often destructive pressure on the global environment, pressure that appears likely to increase as human numbers swell toward the doubling of the world's population that evidently lies ahead. These pressures can spawn or aggravate conflict that. in a world with so much destructive weaponry, generates important national security problems. Great changes are necessary to help ensure a humane future for the generations to come. Most of the world's scientific community and many people in the environmental movement are aware of the gravity of the problems. Yet despite sober warnings from these and other groups, in both the industrial and the developing world, re- medial efforts frequently appear powerless and ineffectual. The scientific community has not taken a sustained, powerful role in the public arena where this great cluster of issues is debated and where the problems must be resolved. There is much more that our community can contribute to assessment, warning, and proposals for new patterns of behavior."

"While science and technology play critical roles in sustaining modern civilization, they are not part of our culture in the sense that they are not commonly studied or well comprehended. Neither the potential nor the limitations of science are understood so that what can be achieved and what is beyond reach are not comprehended. The line between science and magic becomes blurred so that public judgments on technical issues can be erratic or badly flawed. It frequently appears that some people will believe almost anything. Thus judgments can be manipulated or warped by unscrupulous groups. Distortions or outright falsehoods can come to be accepted as fact."

"Distortion and false statements have a sturdy history in public discourse. Neither the government nor large organizations can be depended on to support their objectives honestly and with integrity. Replying in kind turns out not to be an option, not just to retain scientific integrity but for practical reasons. Critics, whether individuals or public interest groups, cannot afford to slant the truth, ever. Scientists are far more vulnerable to the consequences of their own ill-considered words than are laypeople, owing to the care and integrity that is believed to characterize the scientific approach to problems. Intentional distortions are almost always uncovered and the purveyors pilloried without mercy. It may not be forgotten for years and surfaces over and over again. So too will honest mistakes which, along with even minor exaggerations, are seized on and exploited mercilessly. Not a bad rule — one that I and some colleagues observe — is to pull back a bit in most argument. Not only should one never distort nor exaggerate, it is best, I believe, to understate."

"We are immersed in one of the most significant revolutions in man's history. The force that drives this revolution is not social dissension or political ideology, but relentless exploitations of scientific knowledge. There is no prospect that this revolution will subside; on the contrary, it will continue to transform profoundly our modes of living and dying. That many of these transformations have been immeasurably beneficial goes without saying. But, as with all revolutions, the technological revolution has released destructive forces, and our society has failed to cope with them. Thus we have become addicted to an irrational and perilous arms race, and we are unable to protect our natural environment from destruction."

"What should thoughtful people do? Are there means to brighten future prospects in the face of such human myopia and stubbornness? There are many in the scientific community whose views are bleak. One biologist, speaking to me many years ago, remarked that many of his colleagues thought of the behavior of the human race as similar to a one-celled animal's. Such an animal may extend a pseudopod in search of food; if hurt or blocked, it pulls back, but otherwise its activity continues, mindlessly, without understanding, without end. With larger perils unperceived, it can destroy itself."

"All we who can gauge the threats can do is soldier on, exploiting what tools we have, gaining as much ground as time permits: seizing issues when they are ripe, remaining patient and careful with facts, even when faced with relentless and reckless opposition, mounting sustained campaigns and avoiding simple shots across the bow, combining solid analysis with persistent outreach and public education, touching people as widely as we can, and, as Winston Churchill emphasized, never giving up. Many of us in science understand well what the costs of inattention and lack of care will be. … Yet neither we nor others have yet caught the sustained attention of our fellow humans, and, until we do, the world cannot escape from its troubles . Thus the deepest question before us all is: How will our species reach the understanding and gain the political will to alter the prospects on the horizon? No one now has the answer to that need. It is indeed a distant light."

"Innovation is everything. When you're on the forefront, you can see what the next innovation needs to be. When you're behind, you have to spend your energy catching up."

"This fact, that all charges are integral multiples of a fundamental unit, is still one of the unexplained puzzles of fundamental physics. It does not in any way contradict electromagnetic theory, but it is not predicted by it, and until we have a more fundamental theory that explains it, we shall not feel that we really understand electromagnetic phenomena thoroughly. Presumably its explanation will not come until we understand quantum theory more thoroughly than we do at present."

"The earth’s atmosphere is an imperfect window on the universe. Electromagnetic waves in the optical part of the spectrum (that is waves longer than X rays and shorter than radio waves) penetrate to the surface of the earth only in a few narrow spectral bands The widest of the transmitted bands corresponds roughly to the colors of visible light waves in the flanking ultraviolet and infrared regions of the optical spectrum are almost totally absorbed by the atmosphere. In addition atmospheric turbulence blurs the images of celestial objects even when they are viewed through the most powerful ground-based telescopes in an article promoting the construction of the Hubble Space Telescope."

"Every time we get slapped down, we can say, Thank you Mother Nature, because it means we're about to learn something important."

"We often frame our understanding of what the space telescope will do in terms of what we expect to find, and actually it would be terribly anticlimactic if in fact we find what we expect to find. … The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined."

"The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects that we can not yet imagine."

"John Bahcall, an astronomer on the Institute of Advanced Study faculty since 1970 likes to tell the story of his first faculty dinner when he found himself seated across from Kurt Gödel a man dedicated to logic and the clean certainties of mathematical abstraction Bahcall introduced himself and mentioned that he was a physicist Gödel replied“I don’t believe in natural science."

"I often liken the process of physics research to solving a jigsaw puzzle. As we put together pieces to form patches, a certain image of the overall picture emerges, but until the game is sufficiently progressed, we are not quite sure. I feel much the same way about the wealth of signs for new particles. We have patches that have been put together, but we are not quite sure how all pieces will fit together into a coherent whole. There are also certain pieces which do not seem to fit into any patches at all. For the most part, the experimental findings have not been completely unexpected, but there have been certain surprises that I, for one, had not foreseen. This is what makes particle physics exciting and tantalizing. At moments of despair and frustration, I feel as though somebody has scrambled two boxes of jigsaw puzzles for me to put together."

"Lee's involvement with gauge theories dated back to 1964. He was concerned about the fact that superconductors appear to provide a counterexample to the general theorem, which requires that spontaneous symmetry breaking is always accompanied with massless spin-zero bosons. With Klein, he wrote an article suggesting that the same might occur in relativistic theories. It was soon realized that this is indeed the case, provided the broken symmetry is a gauge symmetry, as it is in a superconductor."

"I think of physics as the liberal arts of technology. You understand the fundamental aspects of physics, and then you can learn the technology and understand how it relates to current world problems. I'm teaching the elementary physics that is most useful for someone who is trying to live in a technological world, to contribute to that world, and to make correct decisions."

"Cosmology is a science which has only a few observable facts to work with."

"Feynman was not a theorist's theorist, but a physicist's physicist and a teacher's teacher. Feynman's theoretical concepts opened up research opportunities for experimenters, and his approach to physics dignified the role played by their work."

"What is very important to me is two points: A theory should be internally consistent and it should have some contact with observation. Well, I’m told by all the experts that this theory String theory] is internally consistent, although they think up new interpretations every time I turn my back. But contact with reality? Nobody’s given me anything. I just watch. I’m somewhat unhappy that so many people are working on it. To me, as a physicist, it’s sort of sad that so many people at the same time work at something that doesn’t seem to have any contact with experiment. But that, to some extent, is due to the fact that we don’t have any great experimental puzzle to be thinking about. We have to supply the puzzles, and there aren’t that many puzzles right now."

"The trouble with theorists is, they never pay attention to the experiments!"

"There is an ancient Chinese saying "He who labours with his mind rules over he who labours with his hand". This kind of backward idea is very harmful to youngsters from developing countries. Partly because of this type of concept, many students from these countries are inclined towards theoretical studies and avoid experimental work. In reality, a theory in natural science cannot be without experimental foundations; physics, in particular, comes from experimental work."

"Everything with a quantum in it, with 'h' in it, was exciting."

"In general, the rate of evaporation (m) of a substance in a high vacuum is related to the pressure (p) of the saturated vapor by the equation m=\sqrt{\frac{M}{2\pi RT}}p. Red phosphorus and some other substances probably form exceptions to this rule."

"To me, [it's] extremely interesting that men, perfectly honest, enthusiastic over their work, can so completely fool themselves."

"Science, almost from its beginnings, has been truly international in character. National prejudices disappear completely in the scientist’s search for truth. Medicine also disregards national boundaries. And literature frequently rises to heights that make it international. The scientist is motivated primarily by curiosity and a desire for truth. His attitude is objective rather than subjective. In his work he finds great satisfaction in discovering new facts or new relationships between known facts, but even greater pleasure is derived from seeing his results incorporated into the body of scientific knowledge and from seeing them willingly used by others in the further development of science."

"History proves abundantly that pure science, undertaken without regard to applications to human needs, is usually ultimately of direct benefit to mankind. Within recent years it has become possible for purely scientific work of this character to be carried out with the support of industries, which are, of course, primarily interested in the commercial applications. The scientist who works in this way is frequently especially fortunate in that he not only derives the satisfactions which are characteristic of scientific work in general, but is able to see that many of his results are almost immediately put into a form which directly benefits mankind. Happy indeed is the scientist who not only has the pleasures which I have enumerated, but who also wins the recognition of fellow scientists and of the mankind which ultimately benefits from his endeavors. To my mind, the most important aspect of the Nobel Awards is that they bring home to the masses of the peoples of all nations, a realization of their common interests. They carry to those who have no direct contact with science the international spirit."

"Time appears in quantum mechanics as a continuous parameter which represents an abstraction of the dynamical role of the measurement apparatus. The requirement of invites the extension of this abstraction to include space and time coordinates. The implication that space-time localized measurements are a useful, if practically unrealizable idealization may be incorrect, but it is a grave error dismiss the concept on the basis of a priori notions of measurability."

"If my history lesson has done nothing else, it should have reminded you that, during any given period in the evolving history of physics, the prevailing, main line, climate of opinion was likely as not to be wrong, as seen in the light of later developments. And yet, in those earlier times, with relatively few individuals involved, change did occur, but slowly... What is fundamentally different in the present day situation in high energy physics is that large numbers of workers are involved, with corresponding pressures to conformity and resistance to any deflection in direction of the main stream, and that the time scale of one scientific generation is much too long for the rapid pace of experimental discovery. I also have a secret fear that new generations may not necessarily have the opportunity to become familiar with dissident ideas."

"Perhaps the most important contribution to science that the Royal Society has made in its three centuries of existence is its early role in publishing Newton's masterful account of his discoveries: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy—the Principia."

"Is the purpose of theoretical physics to be no more than a cataloging of all the things that can happen when particles interact with each other and separate? Or is it to be an understanding at a deeper level in which there are things that are not directly observable (as the underlying quantized fields are) but in terms of which we shall have a more fundamental understanding?"

"For two years in the late 1950s I was a postdoc at Harvard. Julian Schwinger was the leading light in theoretical physics at the time. We, the postdocs and junior faculty, audited whatever course he happened to be teaching. The material was always original. The lectures were on Wednesdays, and afterward the small group of us would have lunch with Schwinger at Chez Dreyfus in Cambridge. We would be joined by another small group from MIT that included Vikki Weisskopf. If Schwinger had any new ideas, he would try them out on Weisskopf. As it happened on this occasion, he had developed a “theory of everything.” Some of this theory survives in the work of other people. In 1962, he published a paper on “Gauge invariance and mass.”9 … In it he raised the question of whether one could have a massive vector meson in a theory that had an underlying gauge invariance. This possibility … inspired P. W. Anderson to use these ideas in condensed matter physics.10... 9 J. Schwinger, “Gauge invariance and mass,” Phys. Rev. 125, 397–398 1962 . 10 P. W. Anderson, “Plasmons, gauge invariance and mass,” Phys. Rev. 130, 439–442 1963."

"During this period I attended two sessions of the Michigan summer school at which Schwinger (1948) and Feynman (1949) described their respective reformulations of QED. Schwinger’s was deeper and more complete while Feynman’s was easier to use but at that time incomplete. One may give a feeling for the impact of Schwinger by quoting Dyson who wrote home that ”in a few months we shall have forgotten what pre-Schwinger physics was like.” Bethe at that time described this period as the most exciting in physics since the great days of 1925-30 when quantum mechanics was being discovered."

"It's true that he had a funny style. His lecture was precise. He had the voice of a radio announcer. Everything was in perfect sentences, grammatically perfect. The formulas were all clearly written on the board. The talk was so designed that he would be at the blackboard nearest the exit door at the end of the lecture. He would end the lecture and... immediately slip out the door and disappear so that his graduate students could not track him down too easily."

"He argued to me that electrons and s, which are particles, charged s we call them, were known... He said that if we're going to have a that distinguishes electrons from muons, then surely... it should not be e- and μ- that have... , it should be the e- and the μ+. So... that way... charge and the new can distinguish electrons from muons... and it followed that there had to be two kinds of s in nature. So built into the way he taught... particle physics was the fact that there are two kinds of neutrinos. ...It was acknowledged as a technical possibility by some people, but it... wouldn't be known until 1963. This was in the 1950s."

"So in 1958 when I went for my thesis exam... and Yang... was in my committee, he and Paul [C.] Martin and Julian Schwinger... I started explaining how the is different from the and Yang said, "Wait a minute... there's no way of distinguishing electron neutrinos from muon neutrinos. It makes no sense to say they are different from one another. It's a meaningless concept." ...I began to explain and Schwinger, seeing my distress and realizing that he was the cause... said, "Let me explain the situation to Mr. Yang" and he patiently explained how an experiment could be done, namely the experiment that would be done in a couple of years... to distinguish electron neutrinos from muon neutrinos, if... they were different... and Yang nodded and the exam continued and I passed the exam. ...[S]ix months later Lee and Yang published a paper explaining how electron neutrinos and muon neutrinos could be different from one another. They simply stole the idea from Julian. He was subject to many such acts of thievery. Years later I met Yang in China... and I described the incident to him... He said, "It is exactly as you said, Shelly.""

"Schwinger had... been working on and solved some radar related... electrodynamic problems, classical electrodynamic theory problems that nobody else could approach... [A]s a calculator he was amazing... phenomenal. ...You can well argue that radar... as well as new developments in bomb technology, in fuses, played a more important role than nuclear weapons [in World War II]."

"... the Big Bang theory is the accepted theory of cosmology. You never prove anything completely, but it’s the accepted theory of cosmology. And we continue on, in my group, we continue on with balloon observations, and then there’s the and now we’re getting the ready with the , who is sponsoring that. So there’s a whole sequence. What it was, was that was the opening shot and saying OK, there’s some gold to be discovered in the hills, go looking for it."

"But every day I go to work I'm making a bet that the universe is simple, symmetric, and aesthetically pleasing—a universe that we humans, with our limited perspective, will someday understand."

"Your waistline may be spreading but you can't blame it on the expansion of the universe."

"In principle, the only operations which a machine cannot perform for us are those which we cannot describe in detail, or which could not be completed in a finite number of steps."

"Common language — or, at least, the English language — has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this. To interpret the first kind of statement in the ontological sense is to assert that one’s own private thoughts and sensations are realities existing externally in Nature. We call this the ‘mind projection fallacy’, and note the trouble it causes many times in what follows. But this trouble is hardly confined to probability theory; as soon as it is pointed out, it becomes evident that much of the discourse of philosophers and Gestalt psychologists, and the attempts of physicists to explain quantum theory, are reduced to nonsense by the author falling repeatedly into the mind projection fallacy."

"The semiliterate on the next bar stool will tell you with absolute, arrogant assurance just how to solve the world's problems; while the scholar who has spent a lifetime studying their causes is not at all sure how to do this."

"It appears to be a quite general principle that, whenever there is a randomized way of doing something, then there is a nonrandomized way that delivers better performance but requires more thought."

"The way I solved the theoretical problem was to go into the shop and build something concrete."

"Yes, the universe had a beginning. Yes, the universe continues to evolve. And yes, every one of our body's atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnace within high-mass stars. We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say we have been empowered by the universe to figure itself out — and we have only just begun."

"A few years ago I got a phone call from a marketing executive who wanted to light up the Moon with the logo of her company. She wanted to know how she might proceed. After slamming down the phone, I called her back and politely explained why it was a bad idea. Other corporate executives have asked me how to put into orbit mile-wide luminous banners with catchy slogans written across them, much like the skywriting or flag-dragging airplanes you see at sports events or over the ocean from a crowded beach. I always threaten to send the light police after them."

"No matter who you are, engaging in the quest to discover where and how things began tends to induce emotional fervor—as if knowing the beginning bestows upon you some form of fellowship with, or perhaps governance over, all that comes later. So what is true for life itself is no less true for the universe: knowing where you came from is no less important than knowing where you are going."

"Cosmologists have plenty of ego — how can a person not be ego-driven when it's your job to deduce what brought the universe into existence? But without data, their explanations were just tall tales. In this modern era of cosmology, each new observation, each morsel of data wields a two-edged sword: it enables cosmology to thrive on the kind of foundation that so much of the rest of science enjoys, but it also constrains theories that people thought up when there wasn't enough data to say whether they were wrong or not. No science achieves maturity without it.Let there be cosmology."

"I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before."

"I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos."

"That makes me want to grab people on the street and say, "have you heard this?""

"People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers."

"During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore—in part because it's fun to do. But there's a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their "low contracted prejudices." And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace the cosmic perspective."

"George Bush, within a week of this [the 9/11 attacks], gave us a speech, attempting to distinguish 'we' from 'they' … and how does he do it?.... He says "Our god" — of course it’s actually the same God — but that's a detail, lets hold that minor fact aside for the moment. Allah of the muslims is the same God as the God of the Old Testament so he says … "Our God is the God who named the stars" … Here's the problem with his comment … The problem is: two-thirds of all stars that have names, have Arabic names. I don't think he knew this. That would confound the point that he was making."

"Knowing how things work is important, but I think that's an incomplete view of what science literacy is or, at least, should be. Science literacy is an outlook. It's more of a lens through which you observe what goes on around you."

"Creativity is seeing what everyone else sees, but then thinking a new thought that has never been thought before and expressing it somehow. It could be with art, a sculpture, music or even in science. The difference, however, between scientific creativity and any other kind of creativity, is that no matter how long you wait, no one else will ever compose "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony" except for Beethoven. No matter what you do, no one else will paint Van Gogh's "Starry Night." Only Van Gogh could do that because it came from his creativity.Whereas in science, you can't just make stuff up and presume that it is a proper account of nature. At the end of the day, you have to answer to nature. Since everyone has nature to answer to, your creativity is simply discovering something about the natural world that somebody else would have eventually discovered exactly the same way. They might have come through a different path, but they would have landed in the same place.Even though we name theorems and equations after the people who discover them — Newton's laws of gravity, Kepler's laws of planetary motion — somebody else would have discovered them afterward. It's that simple. Your creativity is not a boundless creativity."

"Some of the most productive times in the histories of nations have been when they were badly stressed — economically, politically, culturally or socially. It's possible to be stressed to a point that more creativity is stimulated than would otherwise be the case. I think it is true that necessity is the mother of invention."

"If you ask adults how many teachers — out of the scores in elementary, middle school, high school, college and graduate school — made a singular impression on who and what they are, it's never more than three or four teachers. Everybody else is a distant second to this set.When we finally create a cloning machine, we should clone those teachers. Maybe that's 100 years from now, but that's at the top of my list. Until that happens, the educational system has not fully understood the causes and effects of achievement and success in life. There remains a culture that equates high grades with success in school and correlates success in school with success in life. That mentality is so deep within us that it may be inextricable from our behavior."

"After your first job, is anyone asking you what your GPA was? No, they don't care. They ask you: Are you a good leader? Do people follow you? Do you have integrity? Are you innovative? Do you solve problems? Somebody's got to do that homework and redesign the educational system so that it can actually train people to be successful in life.I think the greatest teachers are not the ones that are best trained at educational tactics. I don't know a person who's ever said, "Boy, that teacher is so good! The teacher gives such good exams. That teacher gives such good homework sets!" No one has said that about a great teacher. That's not what people remember about the great teachers they've had."

"The best educators are the ones that inspire their students. That inspiration comes from a passion that teachers have for the subject they're teaching. Most commonly, that person spent their lives studying that subject, and they bring an infectious enthusiasm to the audience.I think many people have that enthusiasm, but they are prevented from being teachers because they didn't go through the teacher mill. Now you have teachers who have been through the teacher mill, yet they have no capacity to inspire anyone at all. It's the inspired student that continues to learn on their own. That's what separates the real achievers in the world from those who pedal along, finishing assignments."

"The great tragedy is that they're removing art completely, not because they're putting more science in, but because they can't afford the art teachers or because somebody thinks it's not useful. An enlightened society has all of this going on within it. It's part of what distinguishes what it is to be human from other life forms on Earth — that we have culture."

"I don't know how many people know this, but often it's mindblowing when you learn, that some infinities are bigger than others. [...] The number of counting numbers...so 1, 2, 3, up to infinity...the numbers you would use to count things, that's infinite. The number of irrational numbers...so the numbers you cannot represent as a fraction, okay, there are more of those than there are counting numbers, by far. So these are orders of infinity. Then there are more transcendental numbers than there are irrational numbers. So that's a number you'll never find as a solution to an algebraic equation. So pi is a transcendental number. e is a transcendental number. These are magic numbers that show up in mathematics. And it turns out there's an even bigger infinity of those than there is of these other two classes of numbers. And they use the Hebrew letter aleph in ranking. So it's aleph-1, aleph-2, aleph-3, aleph-4. I think there are five levels of infinity."

"Do parallel universes exist? We don't know, uhm parallel universes are losing favor to the multiverse we have some cogent theoretical expectations that our universe might be just one of many spawned from this, sort of, this hyper-dimensional medium which we'll call the multiverse there's no data to support it but we have good theoretical premise to think that it's there and we have philosophical precedent we used to think Earth was special and unique. It wasn't, we got 8 .. 9 .. 8 planet we thought the Sun was special it's one of a hundred billion suns, the galaxy's special, no there's a hundred billion galaxies we have one universe or do we? The track record said why should there only be one? be open to the possibility that you don't live in the majority [looking?] universe that's out there Would a separate universe .. when you say "different universe" slightly different laws of physics which (that's what I'm asking) oh this is the fun part because if you find, if you manage to get a portal to another universe don't be the first one to volunteer to go through because your atoms are working in this universe if a slightly different law of physics.. you could implode, explode come out with three heads who knows?"

"It has been said that every great emerging scientific truth goes to three phases: First people say: "It can't be true". Second they say: "It conflicts with the bible." Third they say: "It's true all along.""

"I took two bites, bitch!"

"You don't take a dead cat to the vet. I mean you might, but why?"

"Does it mean, if you don’t understand something, and the community of physicists don’t understand it, that means God did it? Is that how you want to play this game? Because if it is, here’s a list of things in the past that the physicists at the time didn’t understand [and now we do understand] [...]. If that’s how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on - so just be ready for that to happen, if that’s how you want to come at the problem."

"I'm optimistic. I see no longer people accepting fuzzy thinking in the world. The change is not that people aren't still saying under-informed things. The change is that if you're in power and you say something under-informed, there are people out there with a voice who will take you to task for having done so."

"There are people who say "I'll never need this math, these trig identities from 10th grade or 11th grade," or maybe you never learned them. Here's the catch: whether or not you ever again use the math that you learned in school, the act of having learned the math established a wiring in your brain that didn't exist before and it's the wiring in your brain that makes you the problem solver."

"The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it."

"Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. They beat the curiosity out of the kids. They out-number kids. They vote. They wield resources. That's why my public focus is primarily adults."

"My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer."

"Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted."

"I am trying to convince people--not only the public, but lawmakers and people in power--that investing in the frontier of science, however remote it may seem in its relevance to what you're doing today, is a way of stockpiling the seed corns of future harvests of this nation... Advancing a frontier--history has shown--has advanced a culture ever since the industrial revolution got underway."

"Words that make questions may not be questions at all."

"If you start wielding a hammer, then all your problems look like nails. And maybe they’re not. Maybe it's more subtle than that. And so your toolkit has to be able to morph into what is necessary for what it is that you confront at that moment."

"I could just tell you it's all bunk; but then you wouldn't be empowered to understand why. Other than to quote, "Oh, Doctor Tyson said..." And I never want you to quote me citing my authority as a scientist for your knowing something. If that's what you have to resort to I have failed as an educator. As an educator, it's my duty to empower you to think. So that you can go forth and think accurate thoughts about how the world is put together. Inoculating you against the [people] out there who will exploit your ignorance on anything they possibly can."

"Within one linear centimeter of your lower colon there lives and works more bacteria (about 100 billion) than all humans who have ever been born. Yet many people continue to assert that it is we who are in charge of the world."

"The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you."

"There are street artists. Street musicians. Street actors. But there are no street physicists. A little known secret is that a physicist is one of the most employable people in the marketplace - a physicist is a trained problem solver. How many times have you heard a person in a workplace say, "I wasn't trained for this!" That's an impossible reaction from a physicist, who would say, instead, "Cool. A problem I've never seen before. Let's see how I can figure out how to solve it!" Oh, and, have fun along the way."

"Life is too short for me to worry about something I have no control over that I don’t even know will happen. People ask ‘if Earth is going to be swallowed by a black hole or if there is some disturbance in the spacetime continuum should we worry about it?’. My answer is ‘no’ because you won’t know about it until it crosses your... your place in space-time. Your beats come to you when nature decides it’s the right time... be it the speed of sound, the speed of light, the speed of electrical impulses we will forever be victims of the time delay between information around us and our capacity to receive it."

"What keeps me awake at night: wondering whether human species is just too stupid to figure out the Universe. I just wonder. I lose sleep over that. Because we define ourselves as intelligent— because we made up the test to say that. And we sit alone at the top of the intelligence chart because we invented the exam, and all the other species of life on Earth are not. So who's to say that the first species (us) to be intelligent (us) has just enough intelligence to actually decode everything that's decodable in the Cosmos? [...] Think of the next closest thing to us, the bonobo chimp— 98½% identical DNA, yet you cannot teach them trigonometry, they have no concept of it. So if that's only 1½% difference in our DNA— and so imagine 1½% beyond us, rather than below us, in intelligence. [...] Their toddlers would be talking about things that would completely confound us."

"What is NASA's mission? Is it to beat the russians? Is it to inspire?"

"If you want to assert a truth, first make sure it's not just an opinion that you desperately want to be true."

"All I can say is, the universe is in a good shape, it's earth that has all the problems."

"As important as Steve Jobs was, no doubt about it — [and] you have to add him to Bill Gates, because they birthed the personal computing revolution kind of together — here's the difference: Elon Musk is trying to invent a future, not by providing the next app."

"The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."

"Ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe. What we do know, and what we can assert without further hesitation, is that the universe had a beginning. The universe continues to evolve. And yes, every one of our body’s atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago. We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun."

"This universality of physical laws drives scientific discovery like nothing else."

"To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place. By comparison, human nature—the psychologist’s domain—is infinitely more daunting. In America, local school boards vote on subjects to be taught in the classroom. In some cases, votes are cast according to the whims of cultural, political, or religious tides. Around the world, varying belief systems lead to political differences that are not always resolved peacefully. The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. In other words, after the laws of physics, everything else is opinion."

"Cosmologists have plenty of ego. How could you not when your job is to deduce what brought the universe into existence?"

"In our own solar system, for example, everything that is not the Sun adds up to less than one fifth of one percent of the Sun’s mass."

"Other unrelenting skeptics might declare that “seeing is believing”—an approach to life that works well in many endeavors, including mechanical engineering, fishing, and perhaps dating. It’s also good, apparently, for residents of Missouri. But it doesn’t make for good science. Science is not just about seeing, it’s about measuring, preferably with something that’s not your own eyes, which are inextricably conjoined with the baggage of your brain. That baggage is more often than not a satchel of preconceived ideas, post-conceived notions, and outright bias."

"Personally, I am quite comfortable with chemicals, anywhere in the universe. My favorite stars, as well as my best friends, are all made of them."

"Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered . . . ; but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [their] low contracted prejudices."

"When I pore over the data that establish the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that every day—every twenty-four-hour rotation of Earth—people kill and get killed in the name of someone else’s conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God, kill in the name of needs or wants of political dogma."

"Within a month of opening day, I received a letter from an Ivy League professor of psychology whose expertise was in things that make people feel insignificant…He wanted to administer a before-and-after questionnaire to visitors, assessing the depth of their depression after viewing the show. Passport to the Universe, he wrote, elicited the most dramatic feelings of smallness and insignificance he had ever experienced. How could that be? Every time I see the space show (and others we’ve produced), I feel alive and spirited and connected. I also feel large, knowing that the goings-on within the three-pound human brain are what enabled us to figure out our place in the universe. Allow me to suggest that it’s the professor, not I, who has misread nature. His ego was unjustifiably big to begin with, inflated by delusions of significance and fed by cultural assumptions that human beings are more important than everything else in the universe. In all fairness to the fellow, powerful forces in society leave most of us susceptible. As was I, until the day I learned in biology class that more bacteria live and work in one centimeter of my colon, than the number of people who have ever existed in the world. That kind of information makes you think twice about who–or what–is actually in charge. From that day on, I began to think of people not as the masters of space and time but as participants in a great cosmic chain of being, with a direct genetic link across species both living and extinct, extending back nearly four billion years to the earliest single-celled organisms on Earth."

"If a huge genetic gap separated us from our closest relative in the animal kingdom, we could justifiably celebrate our brilliance. We might be entitled to walk around thinking we’re distant and distinct from our fellow creatures. But no such gap exists. Instead, we are one with the rest of nature, fitting neither above nor below, but within."

"The cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge. But it’s more than about what you know. It’s also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place in the universe. And its attributes are clear: The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it is not solely the provenance of the scientist. It belongs to everyone. The cosmic perspective is humble. The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious. The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small. The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we’re told. The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place, forcing us to reassess the value of all humans to one another. The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote. But it’s a precious mote and, for the moment, it’s the only home we have. The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae, but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them. The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and a mate. The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave, an indication that perhaps flag-waving and space exploration do not mix. The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself."

"At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth. Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock."

"in Space where there ain't no gravity, helicopter dick really do be a way to travel."

"... the anatomy of a sound bite is—it's gotta be interesting. And it's gotta be tasty. It should also be a little bit fun to hear ... so that you smile. And it's gotta have enough of all that to want to tell someone else that you just learned something. ... I have a master class on thinking like a scientist and how to communicate what you know in your expertise to others."

"Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher; a community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars. (From the first Cosmos: ASO episode, Standing Up in the Milky Way.)"

"The Theory of Evolution, like the Theory of Gravity, is a scientific fact. Evolution really happened. Accepting our kinship with all life on earth is not only solid science, in my view, it's also a soaring spiritual experience. (From the second Cosmos: ASO episode, Some of the Things That Molecules Do.)"

"Halley shattered their monopoly, beating them at their own game. A game that no scientist had ever played before: Prophecy. -S01E03"

"Ibn al-Haytham was the first person ever to set down the rules of science. -S01E05"

"In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence"

"he does have that same passion to connect that is critical if you want to be a science communicator."

"The two photons are entangled and according to local realism, their polarization planes should become independent... a typical EPR situation. Already in 1948, observations... agreed with quantum mechanics, not with local realism."

"Regardless of the prophetic value of Dirac’s description [on interference] his was probably the first discussion... including a coherent beam of light. In other words, Dirac wrote the first chapter in laser optics."

"Feynman uses Dirac's notation to describe the quantum mechanics of stimulated emission... he applies that physics to... dye molecules... In this regard, Feynman could have predicted the existence of the tunable laser."

"The Dirac notation, though originally applied to the propagation of single particles, also applies to describing the propagation of ensembles of coherent, or indistinguishable, photons."

"All the indistinguishable photons illuminate the array of N slits, or grating, simultaneously. If only one photon propagates, at any given time, then that individual photon illuminates the whole array of N slits simultaneously."

"The intimate relation between interference and diffraction has its origin in the interference equation itself."

"Multiple-prism arrays were first introduced by Newton (1704) in his book Opticks. In that visionary volume Newton reported on arrays of nearly isosceles prisms in additive and compensating configurations to control the propagation path and the dispersion of light. Further, he also illustrated slight beam expansion in a single isosceles prism."

"The longer the cavity and the narrower the beam waist, the better the beam quality of the laser emission, or |\langle x | s \rangle|^2\ = \sum_{j=1}^\N\,\Psi(r_j)^2\ +2 \sum_{j=1}^\N\,\Psi(r_j)\bigg(\sum_{m=j+1}^\N\,\Psi(r_m)cos(\Omega_m-\Omega_j)\bigg)"

"Personally, I find the concept of a "final theory," or a "theory of everything," rather limiting. The fun of discovery will most likely last as long as the human race continues."

"The EPR claim of an "all values" spread in the coordinate depends on an idealized absolute and exact measurement of p with \Delta p\ = 0. Since this is physically impossible, the claim of "no physical reality" can be negated."

"The most efficient and practical interpretation of quantum mechanics is... no interpretation at all."

"As noted previously Bell's theorem is completely disconnected from the physics leading to |\psi\rangle_+, |\psi\rangle_-, |\psi\rangle^+, and |\psi\rangle^- ."

"From an interferometric perspective, there are no mysteries... and no paradoxes... in the physics of quantum entanglement."

"One of Ward's few close friends at Macquarie is... Frank Duarte... the two make an odd couple - the restrained rather distant Englishman and the intense, earnest South American."

"Ward was vocal in his denunciation of the trivia that filled up Senate agendas… suitably then, it was a close student associate of Ward’s, physics Ph. D. student Frank Duarte, who began to mobilize student opinion in favor of a change."

"The sciences revolted under the guidance of several student activists, Frank Duarte in particular... we were fortunate that Duarte somehow established close links to the Federal Government, which was now the source of all funds."

"In 1994, Duarte first reported on solid-state dye laser oscillators."

"After some algebra, a successive formula can be derived from Duarte's original equation."

"Another connection with Newton's pioneering work on spectra has been found by Duarte in modern quantum optics."

"In our most Puritan of society, gambling-like other pleasures-is either taxed, restricted to certain hours, or forbidden altogether. Yet the impulse to gamble remains an eternal aspect of the irrationality of man. It finds outlets in business, war, politics, in the formal overtures of the gambling casinos, and in the less ceremonious exchanges among individuals of differing opinions."

"Shortly after pithecanthropus erectus gained the ascendancy, he turned his attention to the higher-order abstractions."

""Breaking the bank at Monte Carlo" is a euphemism for closing a single gaming table. It was last accomplished at the Casino Ste. des Bains de Mer during the final days of 1957, with a harvest of 180 million francs."

"In general statistics can be considered as the offspring of the theory of probability, it builds on its parent and extends the area of patronymic jurisdiction."

"A proven theorem of game theory states that every game with complete information possesses a saddle point and therefore a solution."

"The essence of the phenomenon of gambling is decision making. The act of making a decision consists of selecting one course of action, or strategy, from among the set of admissible strategies."

"There are no conventional games involving conditions of uncertainty without risk."

"The French philosopher Pierre-Hyacinthe Azaïs (1766-1845) formalized the statement that good and evil fortune are exactly balanced in that they produce for each person an equivalent result."

"Generally, a betting system for which each wager depends only on present resources and present probability of success is known as a Markov betting system."

"Coin matching and finger flashing were among the first formal games to arise in the history of gambling. The class of Morra games extends back to the pre-Christian era, although not until comparatively recent times have game-theoretic solutions been derived."

"Against human opposition the machine usually emerges victorious, since individual patterns tend to be not random but a function of emotions and previous training and experience."

"While no rigorous proof of an optimal strategy has been achieved, Robbins has proposed the principal of "staying on a winner" and has shown it to be uniformly better than a strategy of random selection."

"The hope of a positive expected gain lies in detecting a wheel with sufficient bias."

"The first-known public lottery was sponsored by Augustus Caesar to raise funds for repairing the city of Rome; the first public lottery awarding money prizes, the Lotto de Firenze, was established in Florence in 1530."

"One of the oldest mythological fables tells of Mercury playing at dice with Selene and winning from her the five days of the epact (thus totaling the 365 days of the year and harmonizing the lunar and solar calendars)."

"Although the major gambling casinos do not maintain statistical records on the results of games of Craps, one event has been recorded-that wherein a young man achieved 28 consecutive "passes" at the Desert Inn Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada (June 10, 1950). Odds against such an event are 400 million to 1."

"In 1423, the Franciscan friar St. Bernardino of Siena preached a celebrated sermon against cards (Contra Alcarum Ludos) at Bologna, attributing their invention to the devil. Despite such ecclesiastic interdiction, Johannes Gutenberg printed playing cards the same year as his famous Bible (1440). The cards from Gutenberg's press were Tarot cards, from which the modern deck is derived."

"Blackjack does possess a memory (the interdependence of the cards) and a conscience (inferior play will inevitably be penalized) and is not democratic (the mental agility and retentiveness of the player are significant factors)."

"Because the fluctuations in the composition of the deck as it is dependent over successive (and dependent) trials, it is intuitively apparent that altering decisions or the magnitude of the wager or both in accordance with the fluctuations should prove advantageous to the player."

"Contract Bridge is likely the most challenging card game extant; it is certainly the the most obsessive for its ranks of zealous followers. The initial progenitor of all Bridge forms is the game of Triumph, which gained currency about A.D. 1500. In the mid seventeenth century, Triumph evolved into Whist, a partnership game for four players. The change from Whist to Bridge occurred about 1886with a publication in London of a small pamphlet, titled Biritch or Russian Whist."

"The earliest full-length account of a chariot race appears in Book xxiii of the Iliad."

"Treatment of the apparently whimsical fluctuations of the stock quotations as truly non stationary processes requires a model of such complexity that its practical value is likely to be limited. An additional complication, not encompassed by most stock market models, arises from the manifestation of the market as a nonzero sum game."

"Reflecting an amalgam of economics, monetary, and psychological factors, the stock market represents possibly the most subtly intricate game invented by man."

"A weakness of the random-walk model lies in its assumption of instantaneous adjustment, whereas the information impelling a stock market toward its "intrinsic value" gradually becomes disseminated throughout the market place."

"From a rational standpoint, it might be expected that man should be far more willing to express financial confidence in his skills rather than risking his earnings on the mindless meanderings of chance. Experience, however, has strongly indicated the reverse proposition to hold true."

"Anthropologists have often commented on the striking resemblance between the uneducated gambler and the primitive."

"The assumption that individuals act objectively in accordance with purely mathematical dictates to maximize their gain or utility cannot be sustained by empirical observation."

"Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric rain."

"We don't know what energy is, any more than we know what information is, but as a now robust scientific concept we can describe it in precise mathematical terms, and as a commodity we can measure, market, regulate and tax it."

"In order to understand information, we must define it; bit in order to define it, we must first understand it. Where to start?"

"Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, invented a way to measure 'the amount of information' in a message without defining the word 'information' itself, nor even addressing the question of the meaning of the message."

"Science has taught us that what we see and touch is not what is really there."

"Numbers instill a feeling for the lie of the land, and furnish grist for the mathematical mill that is the physicist's principal tool."

"If you don't understand something, break it apart; reduce it to its components. Since they are simpler than the whole,you have a much better chance of understanding them; and when you have succeeded in doing that, put the whole thing back together again."

"Underneath the shifting appearances of the world as perceived by our unreliable senses, is there, or is there not, a bedrock of objective reality?"

"The solution of the Monty Hall problem hinges on the concept of information, and more specifically, on the relationship between added information and probability."

"If the intensity of the material world is plotted along the horizontal axis, and the response of the human mind is on the vertical, the relation between the two is represented by the logarithmic curve. Could this rule provide a clue to the relationship between the objective measure of information, and our subjective perception of it?"

"Entropy is not about speeds or positions of particles, the way temperature and pressure and volume are, but about our lack of information."

"The smell of subjectivity clings to the mechanical definition of complexity as stubbornly as it sticks to the definition of information."

"In fact, an information theory that leaves out the issue of noise turns out to have no content."

"Time has been called God's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once. In the same spirit, noise is Nature's way of making sure that we don't find out everything that happens. Noise, in short, is the protector of information."

"The problem of defining exactly what is meant by the signal velocity, which cropped up as long ago as 1907, has not been solved."

"Both induction and deduction, reasoning from the particular and the general, and back again from the universal to the specific, form the essence to scientific thinking."

"To put it one way, a collection of Shakespeare's plays is richer than a phone book that uses the same number of letters; to put it another, the essence of information lies in the relationships among bits, not their sheer number."

"The switch from 'steam engines' to 'heat engines' signals the transition from engineering practice to theoretical science."

"An electron is real; a probability is not."

"Nowhere is the difference between either/or and both/and more clearly apparent than in the context of information."

"As with all quantum devices, a qubit is a delicate flower. If you so much as look at it, you destroy it."

"This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms of clearly understood mathematical laws; but perhaps comparisons are the best we can hope for."

"Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science. Nothing concentrates the mind as effectively, regardless of whether it pits two competing theories against each other, or theory against observation, or a compelling mathematical deduction against ordinary common sense."

"As every bookie knows instinctively, a number such as reliability - a qualitative rather than a quantitative measure - is needed to make the valuation of information practically useful."

"If quantum communication and quantum computation are to flourish, a new information theory will have to be developed."

"Archaeology of the future is what it should be called. Archaeology of the past is very interesting because it tells us what we once were. But archaeology of the future is the study of what we're going to become, what we have a chance to become...it's a missing element in our understanding of the universe which tells us what our future is like, and what our place in the universe is. If there's nobody else out there, that's also quite important to know."

"There is a narrowness of action, though not of intent, which characterizes university departments, and scientific publications and scientists in general: if it is too popular, it is somehow vulgar and wrong. You can't really speak to those people across the street. I live next to the chemists at MIT, but I never see them. I hardly know who they are, yet between physics and chemistry it is hard to know who should study what molecule. I myself am guilty. We form communities not based on the problems of science, but on quite other things. This is part of the general split between the intelligent member of the public and the scientist who speaks in narrow focus. But the great theoretical problems which I believe the world expects will somehow be solved by science, problems close to deep philosophical issues are the very problems that find the least expertise, the least degree of organization, the least institutional support in the scientific institutions of America or indeed of the world."

"After my two attempts at gently raising the issue of string theory, one afternoon I stepped into Feynman's office to ask him what he really thought."Can we talk a little about string theory?" I asked. … "Don't you think there are aspects of it that seem very promising?""Promising? What does it promise? Does it promise to tell you the mass of the proton? No. What does it promise to tell you?""Well, no one knows how to extract any quantitative predictions yet, but—""You're wrong. It does make a quantitative prediction. Do you know what that is?"I looked at him. My mind was a blank."It requires that we live in ten dimensions. Is it reasonable to have a theory that requires ten dimensions? No. Do we see those dimensions? No. So it rolls them up into tiny balls or cylinders too small to detect. So the only prediction it makes is one that has to be explained away because it doesn't fit with observation.""

"The fact that human intuition is ill suited to situations involving uncertainty was known as early as the 1930's, when researchers noted that people could neither make up a sequence of numbers that passed mathematical tests for randomness nor recognize reliably whether a given string was randomly generated."

"The outline of our lives, like the candles flame, is continuously coaxed in new directions by a variety of random events that, along with our responses to them, determine our fate."

"Random events often come like the raisins in a box of cereal - in groups, streaks, and clusters. And although Fortune is fair in potentialities, she is not fair in outcomes."

"The theory of randomness is fundamentally a codification of common sense."

"The nasty thing about the availability bias is that it insidiously distorts our view of the world by distorting our perception of past events and our environment."

"Another lottery mystery that raised many eyebrows occurred in Germany on June 21, 1995. The freak event happened in a lottery called Lotto 6/49, which means that the winning six numbers are drawn from 1 to 49. On the day in question the winning numbers were 15-25-27-30-42-48. The very same sequence had been drawn previously, on December 20, 1986. It was the first time in 3,016 drawings that a winning sequence had been repeated. What were the chances of that? Not as bad as you'd think. When you do the math, the chance of a repeat at some point over the years comes out to around 28 percent."

"Comets at the time were considered by theologians and the general public alike as a sign of divine anger, and God must have seemed pretty pissed off to create this one - it occupied more than half of the visible sky."

"The law of small numbers is not really a law. It is a sarcastic name describing the misguided attempt to apply the law of large numbers when the numbers aren't large."

"It is one of those contradictions of life that although measurement always carries uncertainty, the uncertainty in measurement is rarely discussed."

"It might seem daunting to think that effort and chance, as much as innate talent, are what counts. But I find it encouraging because, while our genetic makeup is out of our control, our degree of effort is up to us. And the effects of chance, too, can be controlled to the extent that by committing ourselves to repeated attempts, we can increase our odds of success."

"Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal."

"We afford automatic respect to superstar business moguls, politicians, and actors and to anyone flying around in a private jet, as if their accomplishments must reflect unique qualities not shared by those forced to eat commercial airline food. And we place too much confidence in the overly precise predictions of people - political pundits, financial experts, business consultants - who claim a track record demonstrating expertise."

"Historians whose profession is to study the past, are as wary as scientists of the idea that events unfold in a manner that can be predicted. In fact, in a study of history the illusion of inevitability has serious consequences that it is one of the few things that both conservative and socialist historians can agree on."

"Obviously it can be a mistake to assign brilliance in proportion to wealth. We cannot see a persons potential, only his or her results, so we often misjudge people by thinking that the results must reflect the person. The normal accident theory of life shows not that the connection between actions and rewards is random but that random influences are as important as our qualities and actions."

"Even random differences in pay lead to the backward inference of differences in skill and hence to the development of unequal influence. It's an element of personal and office dynamics that can't be ignored."

"We unfortunately seem to be unconsciously biased against those in society who come out on the bottom."

"What I have learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized."

"...we see a number of sophisticated, yet uneducated, theoreticians who are conversant in the LSZ formalism of the Heisenberg field operators, but do not know why an excited atom radiates, or are ignorant of the quantum theoretic derivation of Rayleigh's law that accounts for the blueness of the sky."

"For me personally, J. J. had long been far more than just a particularly distinguished colleague. It saddens me that we will never again laugh together at physics and physicists and life in general, and that he will not see the success of his last work. But I am happy that it has been brought to fruition."

"A small, but interesting, portion of baseball can be understood on the basis of physical principles. The flight of balls, the liveliness of balls, the structure of bats, and the character of the collisions of balls and bats are a natural province of physics and physicists."

"Much of the subtlety of baseball is derived from the fact that so much of the game is played in the region between definitely smooth flow and definitely turbulent flow, at ball velocities greater than 50 mph and smaller than 120 mph."

"The maximum Magnus force on a ball spinning at a rate of 1800 rpm is seen to be about one-third of the weight of the ball, so we cannot expect a ball spinning at that rate to curve more than one third of the distance it will fall under gravity."

"Note that the ball falls at a rather large angle at the end of its flight; the trajectories are not symmetric."

"Almost all of fluid dynamics follows from a differential equation called the Navier-Stokes equation. But this general equation has not, in practice, led to solutions of real problems of any complexity. In this sense, the curve of a baseball is not understood; the Navier-Stokes equation applied to a base ball has not been solved."

"Control pitchers hit corners with an uncertainty of about 3". One must be a fairly good shot to shoot a pistol with that accuracy."

"Balls curve as a consequence of asymmetries in the resistance of the air through which they pass."

"Every 3 feet of lead is worth about one-tenth of a second, and a rolling start is worth a good half second. Indeed, the difference between the runner having his weight mainly on his front foot and mainly on his back foot (but don't let the pitcher catch you leaning!) must be worth more than one-tenth of a second."

"We not that those players with weaker arms might be better off throwing at a lower angle to get the ball to the plate on the bounce. If the surface is Astroturf, the 90-mph player can gain as much as 0.2 seconds, or 6 feet, on the runner by throwing on the bounce. But if his team is playing on grass and his groundskeeper has kept the grass long and well watered to help his team (which relies on singles, speed, and baserunning), the ball may lose so much speed at the bounce that nothing will be gained."

"To hit a baseball with dispatch, one needs both to step into the ball and to rotate."

"The American ash from which bats are made has an unusually high strength-to-weight ratio. Ash was celebrated in medieval times as the only proper wood from which to construct the lances of knights errant; an ash lance was light enough to carry and wield and strong enough to impale the opposition."

"One of the curious features of modern physics is that in spite of its overwhelming success in explaining a vast range of physical phenomena from quark to quasar, it fails to give us a single metaphor for how the universe really works."

"Although mathematics originates in the human mind, its remarkable effectiveness in explaining the world does not extend to the mind itself. Psychology has proved unusually resistant to the mathematization that works so well in physics."

"One of the best-kept secrets of science is that physicists have lost their grip on reality."

"Quantum physics emerged from the Stone Age with an embarrassment of riches - three quantum theories, each claiming to explain the world. As it turned out, all three were right."

"Though today's quantum theory shows no sign of weakness, someday it may collapse."

"Physicists, for all their odd notions, are basically a conservative lot."

"Most everywhere, most of the time, the world dwells in an unmeasured state."

"So minuscule is the scale of quantum events compared to the actions of everyday life that it's a wonder humans ever found out about the quantum world at all."

"The pragmatist regards any theory as a mere mathematical machine for generating numbers which he then compares with experiment. A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality. The pragmatist refuses on principle to speculate about deep reality, such a concept being meaningless from his point of view. Pragmatism is an intelectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy."

"The quantum world is not made up of objects."

"The quantum world is objective but objectless."

"If a friend in Texas seals a silver coin in one envelope and a gold coin in another and mails the envelopes to Tokyo and London, the instant you open you envelope in Japan you know the contents of my envelope in England. But opening your letter causes no physical change in England (faster-than-light or otherwise) but merely involves a change in your knowledge concerning something happening far away and outside your control."

"Strictly speaking, there are no "measurements" in the world, only correlations."

"Legendary King Midas never knew the feel of silk or a human hand after everything he touched turned to gold. Humans are stuck in a similar Midas-like predicament: we can't directly experience the true texture of reality because everything we touch turns to matter."

"The entire visible universe, what Bishop Berkley called "the mighty frame of the world," rests ultimately on a strange quantum kind of being no more substantial than a promise."

"Physicists cannot explain atoms to their children, not because we are ignorant but because we know too much."

"The gist of Bell's theorem is this: no local model of reality can explain the results of a particular experiment."

"Bell himself managed to devise such a proof which rejects all models of reality possessing the property of "locality". This proof has since become known as Bells theorem. It asserts that no local model of reality can underlie the quantum facts. Bell's theorem says that reality must be non-local."

"Non-local influences do not diminish with distance. They are as potent at a million miles as at a millimeter. Non-local influences act instantaneously. The speed of their transmission is not limited by the velocity of light. A non-local interaction links up one location with another without crossing space, without decay, and without delay. A non-local interaction is, in short, unmediated, unmitigated, and immediate."

"The simplicity of Bell's proof opens it to everyone, not just physicists and mathematicians."

"A universe that displays local phenomena but upon a non-local reality is the only sort of world consistent with known facts and Bell's proof."

"Physicists continue to debate whether Bell's theorem is airtight or not. However, the real question is not whether Bell can prove beyond doubt that reality is non-local, but whether the world is in fact no-local."

"No local reality can explain the type of world we live in."

"Going to the moon is not a matter of physics but of economics."

"To say that basic science is exciting may sound like a contradiction... But I would remind you that there are two intellectual excitements that are not tame at all and that we remember all our lives. One is the thrill of following out a chain of reasoning for yourself; the other is the pleasure of watching several strongly individualistic personalities argue about their deepest convictions. That is to say, the thrill of a detective story and the pleasure of watching a play by George Bernard Shaw."

"Today we preach that science is not science unless it is quantitative. We substitute correlations for causal studies, and physical equations for organic reasoning. Measurements and equations are supposed to sharpen thinking, but, in my observation, they more often tend to make the thinking noncausal and fuzzy. They tend to become the object of scientific manipulation instead of auxiliary tests of crucial inferences. Many - perhaps most - of the great issues of science are qualitative, not quantitative, even in physics and chemistry. Equations and measurements are useful when and only when they are related to proof; but proof or disproof comes first and is in fact strongest when it is absolutely convincing without any quantitative measurement. Or to say it another way, you can catch phenomena in a logical box or in a mathematical box. The logical box is coarse but strong. The mathematical box is fine-grained but flimsy. The mathematical box is a beautiful way of wrapping up a problem, but it will not hold the phenomena unless they have been caught in a logical box to begin with."

"The man to watch, the man to put your money on, is not the man who wants to make "a survey" or a "more detailed study" but the man with the notebook, the man with the alternative hypotheses and the crucial experiments, the man who knows how to answer your Question of disproof and is already working on it."

"The chemistry of genetics is primarily the chemistry and structure of the hereditary nucleic acid chains, DNA and RNA, and of the proteins whose structure they in turn control and the mechanism of this control."

"It is a curious thing that relatively little attention has been directed toward working out methods for keeping the peace in a disarmed world. The technological The technological developments of the last twenty years have made disarmament a major concern of most nations, for it has become apparent that war is no longer an effective means for settling disputes between the great powers."

"The world has become too dangerous for anything less than utopias."

"Can Intelligence Survive? Looking at this nonclassical evolution of intelligence, one even begins to wonder whether it is such a small Law after all, even from the sun's point of view. Men create lakes and can level mountains; their atomic explosions have already shaken the whole earth's magnetic field; and they send out visible satellites and sensors that now range the solar system. Will the evolution of these powers of go on increasing? Or must it finally run down, was the sun does by the great Second Law? f we think about this problem in the light of the physical and biological regularities of behavior that we now know, it seems to me that we are led to a further rather surprising conclusion: There is no thermodynamic reason why evolution should ever stop. What evolution leads to is the larger and larger control of environment by the organisms, first by genetic natural selection; then, with the growth of societies and language, by cultural natural selection; and finally by brains. And once we pass a certain threshold of brains and intelligence we begin to know how to insulate ourselves against all sorts of environmental changes."

"If this property of complexity could somehow be transformed into visible brightness so that it would stand forth more clearly to our senses, the biological world would become a walking field of light compared to the physical world. The sun with its great eruptions would fade to a pale simplicity compared to a rose bush, an earth worm would be a beacon, a dog a city of light, and human beings would stand out like blazing suns of complexity, flashing bursts of meaning to each other through the dull night of the physical world between. We would hurt each other‘s eyes. Look at the haloed heads of your rare and complex companions. Is it not so? (p.151)"

"Planning a good society as far ahead as one can see, does not mean that our adventures have ended; they have just begun. Human nature is growing up. As we put behind us the accidents and tears of childhood squabbles and the wooden swords and shields, and begin to try on our new space pilots'" uniform, so to speak, we begin to see what we can teach ourselves and what we can really become with new self-control over new adult powers. (p.169.)"

"Jesus does not give us a discourse on the nature of the universe, he gives us a set of active verbs. And yet what better discourse on the real nature of the universe could there be? (p.178.)"

"Now, suggests John R. Platt..., we are reaching a leveling-off period. Most of the dramatic changes that have characterized the twentieth century, like those in travel, communications and weapons, cannot continue at their at the present rates for anything like these lengths of time."

"John Platt, a physicist who wrote a number of essays on science policy including "What we must do" (1969). He developed the concept of the “step to man,” an idea based on the envelope curve of technologies, a technique used in technological forecasting. A characteristic curve exists for many activities, such as transportation, communication, and explosive power. These curves depict increasing capabilities which reach a physical limit. Platt claimed that these curves and thresholds can be thought of as the “step to man,” a dramatic increase in human capabilities."

"We must reach out to our people. We must alert them. We must educate them. We must encourage them. We must inspire them. And here's a beautiful, wonderful thing: when you reach out to other people to encourage them and inspire them, you yourself will be encouraged and inspired. When you find out how many other people there are who share our concerns, our feelings, our values, our sense of responsibility, you cannot help but be encouraged. Even the hatred that you encounter from some people -- especially from people in the controlled media -- will be encouraging. For you will understand that they would not hate us so much if they did not fear us. And the reason that they fear us is that deep inside them they know that what we say is true. So let's get out there -- all of us -- and start looking for encouragement!"

"You who are reading this are at least partially awake. You are a cut above Joe and Jill Sixpack. So I say to you: think about what you are doing with your life. Think about the responsibility you have to your children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. Think about the responsibility you have to all of those who came before you and whose sacrifices made your life possible. And think about your responsibility to yourself, your responsibility to be the best person, the most righteous person, that you can be. Think about all of these things, and then let me hear from you."

"The people are being kept in line at the moment, because there are still lots of shiny new things for them to buy. But more and more Americans are beginning to look beyond their immediate material comfort and to worry about the long-term moral slide of their country. If the economy slips badly, there will be hell to pay. More and more people will listen to the dissidents. A big problem for the Jews is how to silence the dissidents now, how to stifle the people who are asking inconvenient questions and thinking dangerous thoughts, before these thoughts spread to other people. They've tried to do it with legislation, but the country isn't yet in a mood to be told what it can think. What the Jews need is a nice, big war. Then they can crack down on the dissidents. Then they can call us "subversives." Then they can call us "unpatriotic," because we will be against their war... That's why I am convinced that there will be a strong effort to involve America in another major war during the next four years. This effort will be disguised, of course. It will be cloaked in deceit, as such efforts always are. While the warmongers are scheming for war, they will tell us how much they want peace. They're good at that sort of thing. They've had a lot of practice. But they will be scheming for war, believe me, no matter what they say. And when that war comes, remember what you have read today."

"The New World Order schemers are absolutely determined to have their way. They have been able to go a long way toward their goal by using subterfuge and deceit. But ultimately the transformation of a world of independent nations into the global plantation they are aiming at will involve changes so profound and so traumatic that subterfuge and deceit will not be enough to keep the serfs under control. They will need raw police power, applied KGB style. They want to begin developing that power now. They're a pretty bold and arrogant bunch of schemers, but they understand that according to the old way of looking at things -- according to our way -- they are traitors. They understand that if the general public ever gets a real inkling of what they are up to, if they ever lose their grip on the situation, they'll all end up hanging from lampposts. What they are planning is so monstrous, so evil, that the thought of being brought to account for it frightens them. They want to use every means at their disposal to make sure their plan succeeds. And, my friends, we will resort to every means at our disposal to insure that their scheme does not succeed and that they do indeed end up hanging from lampposts."

"You know, the media and the politicians would have us believe that there's something inherently immoral about terrorism. That is, they would have us believe that it's not immoral for us to destroy a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan with cruise missiles, but it is immoral for someone like Bin Laden to blow up a government building in Washington with a truck bomb. It's okay for us to take out an air-raid shelter full of women and children in Baghdad with a smart bomb, but it's cowardly and immoral for an Iraqi or Iranian agent to pop a vial of sarin in a New York subway tunnel. Really, what should we expect? They don't have aircraft carriers and cruise missiles and stealth bombers. So should we expect them to just sit there and take their punishment when we wage war on them? I think that it is the most reasonable thing in the world for them to hit back at us in the only way they can. It actually takes more courage to be a terrorist behind enemy lines than it does to push the firing button for a cruise missile a hundred miles away from your target. And yet we certainly will see Bill Clinton and every other Jew-serving politician in our government on television denouncing as a "cowardly act" the first terrorist bomb which goes off in the United States as a result of a war against Iraq. And don't be surprised when the FBI and the CIA announce that they have studied the evidence carefully and have determined that it was Iranian terrorists who built the bomb, so that the Jews will have an excuse for expanding the war to take out Iran as well as Iraq."

"If the Jews manage to get Iran involved in the war also -- and that's what they really want to do, what they really need to do -- then I think we stand a pretty good chance of seeing some major terrorist activity in the United States. I know that if I were Osama bin Laden, I'd have been spending my time getting ready for just such a development ever since Bill Clinton blew up that pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. I'd be putting my teams into place in the United States, assembling materials, choosing targets, and waiting for the Jews to provide justification for me to begin killing Americans on a significant scale. Of course, whether Osama bin Laden is as resourceful and as capable as he's said to be remains to be seen. Personally, I have very little faith in the ability of these flea-bitten Muslims to get things done. But we'll see."

"Did you ever wonder why the Jews are such great proponents of democracy? Whether in Indonesia or Pakistan or Serbia or you name it, whenever there is some threat to universal suffrage, the Jews are ready to send the U.S. armed forces in to bomb and kill until everyone is permitted to vote. Why is that? [...] Well, let's not beat around the bush: the appeal of mass democracy lies in the fact that in essentially every country in the world today, the number of persons unable to think for themselves is substantially larger than the number able to make independent decisions. Those unable to think for themselves have their thinking done for them by the people who control the mass media. Which is to say, democracy is the preferred system because it gives the political power to those who own or control the mass media and at the same time allows them to remain behind the scenes and evade responsibility for the way in which they use that power. [...] Believe me, one day soon the Jews on both sides of the great water will institute a web-TV voting system that allows the couch potatoes and the ball game fans to vote without having to getup from their couches, just by clicking their remote controls at their TV screens to select the next President or prime minister. That will be real democracy."

"This trendy, new crowd, which likes to do everything with committees, really believes that all it takes to make anything legal and OK is a majority. I guess they call that democracy. When the majority is what it has become in the United States today, a better name is mobocracy. But really, it's much worse than mob rule. It is rule by a self-appointed elite of utterly evil and destructive people who have in their hands the tools for controlling and guiding the mob. They're pretty cocky now -- so cocky, in fact, that they're making statements of the sort I've quoted today. They're cocky because they believe that no one can take away from them their tools for controlling the mob, and that as time passes and America becomes darker and more degenerate, their grip on the mob will only become firmer. Our job is to prove them wrong. It's a big job, and we'd better get started."

"Other people tell me that whatever solution we seek to the problems our people are facing today must be a solution without violence. And my response to that is that I am a peaceful man. All my adult life I have been a scholar and a teacher, never a man of violence. But look at the behavior of our opponents! All they know is violence and coercion and murder. I do not want violence, and I am determined to avoid it as long as I can."

"People tell me, "Oh, you must not advocate doing anything illegal." My answer to them is that I have been a law-abiding man all my life. I believe in law and order. I believe that we must have a society governed strictly by laws, not by mobs or by any tyrant's whims of the moment -- or by any clever tribe of alien manipulators who have gained control of our mass media. But does anyone really believe that we have a society governed by laws today? Let us remember that we are living now in the era of O.J. Simpson and Bill Clinton. We have laws on the books, and we have police and courts which have the theoretical responsibility for enforcing those laws. And when it is Politically Correct to do so, they will."

"From my viewpoint it's the Clinton gang who are the outlaws, the violators of our Constitution and of all of our old-fashioned legal and moral principles, and anything that we do to oppose them is legal and is morally justified. Anyone who goes along with them is a traitor, in the strict, old-fashioned sense of the word, and anyone who sits on his hands now and refuses to oppose the Clinton gang is not much better."

"The only reason that a rabble of feminists and queers and Jews and Blacks and mestizos and liberals and Clinton supporters are running America into the ground today is that decent people are sitting on their hands. If the decent people in America would get off their hands and accept personal responsibility for what is being done to their world, and if they would make a commitment and begin working together, we could sweep the whole Clinton coalition into the dustbin of history. It doesn't matter that the Clinton rabble outnumber us. We will whip them in a minute. We will have the media bosses jumping into the ocean all along the East Coast and swimming toward Israel as fast as they can go. But first we must be willing to accept personal responsibility. And so my message today to every decent person who is listening is this: Don't be a shirker. Don't try to be a smart guy by continuing to cheer from the sidelines but refusing to join the team and get out on the field. Stand up and become a participant in life. Make of your life a model that people will remember and talk about long after you're gone. - Thoughts on Accepting Responsibility, 1999"

"Bill Clinton said in his Portland State University speech that anyone who doesn't want America to become darker is "un-American." Isn't that something? This jerk who used to organize anti-American demonstrations during the Vietnam war and chant, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chih Minh, the Viet Cong's gonna win," is now telling us that we're "un-American"!"

"I realize that I have a turn of mind that leads me to exaggerate and oversimplify things for the sake of better understanding, and I know there are dangers in that. But I think that tendency in me helps me get to the essence of things. I do believe it helped me get at the core of what was going on with these two social movements—civil rights and anti-Vietnam war—when for the first time in my life I had the opportunity and the desire to pay close attention to what was going on around me. What came out of it for me was the realization that I had to do something about the conclusions I was coming to. And that posed some real challenges to me. I liked physics and didn't want to give it up. Being in a university is a relatively easy life. There's status and long vacations, and the money is pretty good, actually. I had a young family to support—two sons—and my wife wasn't working and she was completely dependent on me. But I couldn’t stay quiet about this. - The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds, 2001"

"In 1918 Hitler was in a military hospital blinded from a British poison gas attack. He was just a corporal, he had no family, a limited education, no friends, no connections, no political status, nothing. He decides that he will lead Germany in redressing the grievous wrongs that had been done to it after the First World War and straightening out some of the mistakes that were being made in German society. And fifteen years later he is Chancellor of Germany and he did what he said he was going to do. A wounded war veteran with nobody to help him, and he pulled it up just through his own willpower. That is an amazing story. - The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds, 2001"

"These days, to be "patriotic" means to wave the flag and shout slogans whenever the mass media deem it appropriate. It means to cheer the government whenever the government decides to use its cruise missiles or its smart bombs to kill a bunch of people in some other country, regardless of the reason. Instead of blood-based patriotism, today we have government-based patriotism. If you wave the flag and support the government, you're a patriot. If you don't like what the government is doing and you say so, then all of the flag-waving, slogan-shouting yahoos look at you as if you were the enemy."

"The advance from drawing to painting should be gradual , and no serious attempts in colour should be made until the student has obtained proficiency in outline and in light and shade. If the artist cannot draws objects in a rather masterly way there is no point in his attempting colour."

"The term architecture is used here to describe the attributes of a system as seen by the programmer, i.e., the conceptual structure and functional behavior, as distinct from the organization of the data flow and controls, the logical design, and the physical implementation. i. Additional details concerning the architecture,"

"We tend to think that the phenomenon of engineers and scientists being at the top of a company is something that started with Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak or Gary Kildall. But this just isn’t the case. Even back in the days when IBM was the single most important computer company, it was possible for one of its engineers to escape and make an impact that disturbed even Big Blue."

"For over a decade prophets have voiced the contention that the organization of a single computer has reached its limits and that truly significant advances can be made only by interconnection of a multiplicity of computers in such a manner as to permit cooperative solution. Variously the proper direction has been pointed out as general purpose computers with a generalized interconnection of memories, or as specialized computers with geometrically related memory interconnections and controlled by one or more instruction streams. Demonstration is made of the continued validity of the single processor approach and of the weaknesses of the multiple processor approach in terms of application to real problems and their attendant irregularities ."

"The first characteristic of interest is the fraction of the computational load which is associated with data management housekeeping. This fraction has been very nearly constant for about ten years, and accounts for 40% of the executed instructions in production runs."

"Data management housekeeping is not the only problem to plague oversimplified approaches to high speed computation. The physical problems which are of practical interest tend to have rather significant complications. Examples of these complications are as follows: boundaries are likely to be irregular; interiors are likely to be inhomogeneous; computations required may be dependent on the states of the variables at each point; propagation rates of different physical effects may be quite different; the rate of convergence, or convergence at all, may be strongly dependent on sweeping through the array along different axes on succeeding passes; etc. The effect of each of these complications is very severe on any computer organization based on geometrically related processors in a paralleled processing system."

"At Sandia National Laboratories, we are currently engaged in research involving massively parallel processing. There is considerable skepticism regarding the viability of massive parallelism; the skepticism centers around Amdahl’s law, an argument put forth by Gene Amdahl in 1967 that even when the fraction of serial work in a given problem is small, say, s, the maximum speedup obtainable from even an infinite number of parallel processors is only l/s. We now have timing results for a 1024-processor system that demonstrate that the assumptions underlying Amdahl’s 1967 argument are inappropriate for the current approach to massive ensemble parallelism."

"Gene Amdahl is a physicist who got into computers because he wanted to work out something complicated. In 1950 he was asked by one of his professors to calculate whether the nuclear strong force was really enough to hold together a nucleus. For thirty days Amdahl slaved over a slide-rule and a mechanical desk calculator to provide only two more significant digits to the solution. This is the sort of experience that drove many a scientist to become a computer pioneer!"

"We are in rapid transition today to a new world which threatens to be dominated by technological advance. In that new World. (1) man will have learned so much about nature's store of energy and its release that he will have the ability to virtually destroy civilization; (2) production, communication and transportation will all be "automatic" --these operations of man's material world will have become so vast and complex that they will have to proceed with a minimum of participation by man, his muscles, brains and senses; and (3) man will conquer space."

"Well, Benny, now that we know the thing can fly, all we have to do is improve its range a bit."

"In April 1946, when I came to Hughes Aircraft to institute high-technology research and development, it was far from the place it was to become. Howard Hughes, I was informed, rarely came around. When he did show up, it was to take up one or another trivial issue. He would toss off detailed directions, for instance, on what to do next about a few old airplanes decaying out in the yard or what kind of seat covers to buy for the company-owned Chevrolets, or he would say he wanted some pictures of clouds taken from an airplane. An accountant from Hughes Tool Co. ((started by Howard's father)) had the title of general manager but was there only to sign checks. A few of Howard's flying buddies were on the payroll, using assorted fanciful titles like some in Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, but apparently did next to nothing. A lawyer was on hand to process contracts, but there were practically none. In addition to the Spruce Goose flying freighter, a mammoth eight-engine plywood seaplane that barely managed to fly even once, there was an experimental Navy reconnaissance plane under development (which, with Hughes at the controls, later crashed, almost killing him). The contracts for both planes had been canceled. Perhaps, I said to myself, this is one of those unforeseeable lucky opportunities. Why not use Hughes Aircraft as a base to create a new and needed defense electronics supplier?"

"My final word about editing. I was to appear on the cover of a business magazine, and the writer who came to interview me was intrigued with engineers, scientists, PhDs founding and running companies. It was somewhat more unusual back in those days than now, although it was not without ample precedents in the past. So the question he put to me right away starting the interview was, "Would you say, Dr. Ramo, that engineers make the best managers?" And I said, "Engineers make the best engineers." It may be that some engineers will have managerial talents, and be in the right place at the right time, just as may be true of lawyers or accountants or salesmen, or tax experts or whatever. Now, on the magazine then, here was this picture of me, and here was this quote: "Engineers make the best engineers." Well, someone, before the cover actually got out, knew that that was a mistake. Obviously that had been a misprint. So looking at the text, and seeing the question that was asked of me, he changed it to: "Engineers make the best managers." "I quote Dr. Ramo on engineers." All right."

"Whether what you manage is a business, hospital, university department, government agency or even a symphony orchestra or dancing school, we suspect you will find it advisable to try to prepare ahead for what might happen in the future."

"Obama can't announce that man-in-space is out of date because of the political consequences... Senators and congressmen from Florida, Texas and Alabama (centers of space-program jobs) would give him so much trouble he can't cancel it."

"The usual image of war today held by many experts as well as most laymen can be summed up in the phrase "orgiastic spasm of destruction," or, "spasm war." Many believe that if one single button is pressed all the buttons will be pressed, and that some 30 minutes or so later missiles will rain enough destruction to terminate the defender's existence as a nation; subsequently, some minutes or hours later, a similar rain of death and destruction will annihilate the attacking nation. Within perhaps an hour or two the war will be effectively over-both combatants having received death blows-with only one question left; "How bad will the radiation be for the rest of the world?""

"The Russians aren't dedicated world dominationists. You know, they just sort of want it on account of a sentimental way, you know, but not like 'By God, we got to have it!' It just doesn't make sense for them to really push too hard, you know, but just to push easy."

"He flips to a drawing of a spindly boy wearing oversized glasses, hugging an ABC primer, and sniffing a daisy. This is the enemy. " The first [mistake] is to assume that he is a sort of cretinoid idiot, who can't see, think, or anything. It might be a fair, if dangerous, assumption that the enemy is at least as stupid as we are.""

"The next picture is a Goliath with four arms, reading a book, lofting a 1000-pound dumbbell, aiming a pistol at a target, painting a picture. The enemy can do everything. "He's a giant, seven feet tall with four arms, each with two biceps. Each arm can, of course, be used simultaneously.""

"He ambles along the platform."Lots of times people say about systems analysis, why don't you guys do an experiment? What the hell are you sitting here figuring things? Why don't you go out and run an experiment? Well we'd love to run experiments,but there are two difficulties. One, in realistic experiments, people get shot down. That's not the major difficulty. We're willing to do it." The audience laughs. "We are. The real difficulty is we're talking weapons which aren't in existence yet.""

"Actually, even with tested missiles, results of attacks are not really mathematically predictable. The probability of extreme variations in performance, the upper and lower limits, cannot be calculated accurately. But laymen or narrow professionals persist in regarding the matter as a simple problem in engineering and physics."

"Even if military advantages were not to be had by deliberately limiting attack to counterforce targets, I suspect that most governments would still prefer to observe such limits. Almost nobody wants to go down in history as the first man to kill 100,000 people."

"The difference between megaton and kiloton is very large, in some ways larger than the difference between kiloton and ton. Megaton weapons are comparable to gross forces of nature, such as earthquakes and hurricanes."

"The final outcome of benevolent, informed, and intelligent decisions may turn out to be disastrous. But choices must be made; dies must be cast."

"In addition to the obvious dangers, there is another subtle but by no means minor disadvantage to a pure deterrence posture: the threat of mutual suicide is a very uninspiring concept, no matter how logical it may seem. If it happened to involve explicitly the annihilation of all humanity it would also be totally immoral; one doubts if it could long remain an important part of United States policy."

"Few people differentiate between having 10 million dead, 50 million dead, or 100 million dead. It all seems too horrible."

"I don't want to live in your world in which 1 percent of the children are born defective."My answer was rather brutal, I fear. "It is not my world,"

"Even though it is the ultimate in Type I Deterrence, the Doomsday Machine is an unsatisfactory basis for a weapon system. It is most improbable that either the Soviet or U.S.governments would ever authorize procuring such a machine. The project is expensive enough so it would be subject to a searching budgetary and operational scrutiny—a scrutiny which would raise questions it could never survive."

"(The emphasis is deliberate. This deterrent is more efficient since in most practical cases deterrents destroy populations—not decision makers.)"

"The Doomsday Machine is not sufficiently controllable. Even though it maximizes the probability that deterrence will work (including minimizing the probability of accidents or miscalculations), it is totally unsatisfactory. One must still examine the consequences of a failure. In this case a failure kills too many people and kills them too automatically. There is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision.And even if we give up the computer and make the Doomsday Machine reliably controllable by the decision makers, it is still not controllable enough. Neither NATO nor the United States, and possibly not even the Soviet Union, would be willing to spend billions of dollars to give a few individuals this particular kind of life and death power over the entire world."

"I have been surprised at the unanimity with which the notion of the unacceptability of a Doomsday Machine is greeted. I used to be wary of discussing the concept for fear that some colonel would get out a General Operating Requirement or Development Planning Objective for the device, but it seems that I need not have worried. Except by some scientists and engineers who have overemphasized the single objective of maximizing the effectiveness of deterrence, the device is universally rejected. It just does not look professional to senior military officers, and it looks even worse to senior civilians. The fact that more than a few scientists and engineers do seem attracted to the idea is disquieting, but as long as the development project is expensive,even these dedicated experts are unlikely to get one under way."

"The unacceptability of the Doomsday Machine raises awkward, unpleasant, and complicated questions that must be considered by both policy maker and technician. If it is not acceptable to risk the lives of the three billion inhabitants of the earth in order to protect ourselves from surprise attack, then how many people would we be willing to risk? I believe that both the United States and NATO would reluctantly be willing to envisage the possibility of one or two hundred million people (i.e., about five times more than World War II deaths) dying from the immediate effects, even if one does not include deferred long-term effects due to radiation, if an all-out thermonuclear war results from a failure of Type I Deterrence. With somewhat more controversy, similar numbers would apply to Type II Deterrence. (For example, some experts would concede the statement for an all-out Soviet nuclear attack on Europe, but not if the Soviets restricted themselves to the use of conventional weapons.) We are willing to live with the possibility partly because we think of it as a remote possibility. We do not expect either kind of deterrence to fail, and we do not expect the results to be that cataclysmic if deterrence does fail."

"However, even those who expect deterrence to work might hesitate at introducing a new weapon system that increased the reliability of deterrence, but at the cost of increasing the possible casualties by a factor of 10, that is, there would then be one or two billion hostages at risk if their expectations fail. Neither the 180 million Americans nor even the half billion people in the NATO alliance should or would be willing to design and procure a security system in which a malfunction or failure would cause the death of one or two billion people. If the choice were made explicit, the United States or NATO would seriously consider "lower quality" systems; i.e.,systems which were less deterring, but whose consequences were less catastrophic if deterrence failed. They would even consider such possibilities as a dangerous degree of partial or complete unilateral disarmament, if there were no other acceptable postures. The West might be willing to procure a military system which, if used in a totally irrational and unrealistic way, could cause such damage, but only if all of the normal or practically conceivable abnormal ways of operating the system would not do anything like the hypothesized damage. On the other hand, we would not let the Soviets cynically blackmail us into accommodation by a threat on their part to build a Doomsday Machine, even though we would not consciously build a strategic system which inevitably forced the Soviets to build a Doomsday Machine in self-defense."

"Here is another form of deterrence which, while not a Doomsday Machine, is still an"ultimate" of a sort. This could be called the Homicide Pact Machine, an attempt to make a failure of Type I Deterrence mean automatic mutual homicide. The adherents to this somewhat more practical device hope to divide the work of deterrence in a natural way: We destroy the enemy and the enemy destroys us, neither of us cheating by buying any effective Counterforce as Insurance for our respective societies. The Homicide Pact Machine is clearly more satisfactory to both humanitarians and neutrals than the Doomsday Machine and both should make the distinction."

"As far as patriots and nationalists are concerned, I believe that the Homicide Pact system has many of the same drawbacks as the Doomsday Machine, though not in so extreme a form.The major advantage of the Homicide Pact is that one is not in the bizarre situation of being killed with his own equipment; while intellectuals may not so distinguish, the policy makers and practical men prefer being killed by the other side. It is just because this view no longer strikes some people as bizarre that it is so dangerous."

"I use the words "unauthorized behavior" rather than "accident" because we must guard against many types of events— psychopathic or irrational individuals, mechanical or human failure, sabotage, irresponsible behavior, and so on."

"In any case, the thought of a catastrophe or holocaust unleashed by accidental (i.e. nonhistorical) causes might be very unsettling to any Marxists who had a passionate belief in a deterministic theory of history. Instead of saying "It is inevitable that we will take over the world in fifty years", this Marxist would have to add, "Always assuming some capitalist fool doesn't press the button.""

"We must not look too dangerous to the enemy. This does not mean that we cannot do anything that threatens him. After all, our mere possession of a Type I Deterrence capability implies that we can harm him if we desire. But it does mean, to the extent that is consistent with our other objectives, we should not make him more insecure than is necessary. We do not want to make him so unhappy and distraught that he will be tempted to end his anxieties by the use of drastic alternatives. We do not wish him to conclude, "better a fearful end than endless fear." We must not appear to be excessively aggressive, irresponsible, trigger-happy, or accident prone, today or in the future."

"We must not look too dangerous to neutrals. While this is probably less important for us than not looking too dangerous to friends and allies, it is still too important to be ignored. Here again, we must not look excessively destructive. It may be all right to promise the Soviets that if they attack us we will destroy every Soviet citizen in retaliation (though personally I think this far too destructive a proposal), but we should not threaten nonbelligerents with near annihilation because of our quarrel with the Russians. Many of the world's inhabitant perhaps two-thirds of them, do not feel it is their quarrel but feel it is their world. The more destructive we look, the less they like us and our program. To the extent that some in our midst talk and threaten potential world annihilation as a U.S. defense measure, we focus undeserved attention on ourselves as being dangerous and even irresponsible—appearing to be willing to risk uncounted hundreds of millions or billions of bystanders as to our selfish ambitions and desires. Neutrals and bystanders will inevitably suffer heavily in any thermonuclear War. But there is a difference between damage and annihilation."

"In addition to not looking too dangerous to ourselves, we must not look too dangerous to our allies. This problem has many similarities with the problem of not looking too dangerous to ourselves, with one important addition—our allies must believe that being allied to us actually increases their security. Very few of our allies feel that they could survive a general war—even one fought without the use of Doomsday Machines. Therefore, to the extent that we try to use the threat of a general war to deter the minor provocations that are almost bound to occur anyway, then no matter how credible we try to make this threat, our allies will eventually find the protection unreliable or disadvantageous to them. If credible, the threat is too dangerous to be lived with. If incredible, the lack of credibility itself will make the defense seem unreliable. Therefore, in the long run the West will need "safe-looking" limited war forces to handle minor and moderate provocations. It will most likely be necessary for the U.S. to make a major contribution to such forces and to take the lead in their creation, even though there are cases where the introduction of credible and competent-looking limited war forces will make some of our allies apprehensive—at least in the short run. They will worry because such forces make the possibility of small wars seem more real, but this seems to be another case where one cannot eat his cake and have it."

"The easiest way in which one can put unintentional strains on the enemy is to have a force which looks "trigger-happy." The one circumstance under which almost all Soviet experts agree the Russians might strike is the one in which they feel they are anticipating a strike by us. It will be difficult for them to read our intentions. They will doubtless err on the side of caution. But it is not clear which side will look cautious, particularly if there is a crisis which creates apprehension. It will add a real element of stability if our posture is such that we do not look as if we have to be "trigger-happy" in order to survive. This is an important reason for not relying solely on quick reaction as a protection and for not having forces so vulnerable that we could lose most of them from a Russian first strike. Under some circumstances our vulnerability to a Russian first strike would both tempt the Russians to initiate a war and at the same time compel them, because they might feel that we would be tempted to pre empt for our own protection. If we are sufficiently vulnerable they might find it impossible to believe that we were willing, in this crisis to rely on their good will, morality; caution, or sense of responsibility as a protection."

"Equally important to not appearing "trigger-happy" is not to appear prone to either accidents or miscalculations. Who wants to live in the 1960's and 1970's in the same world with a hostile strategic force that might inadvertently start a war? Most people are not even willing to live with a friendly strategic force that may not be reliably controlled. The worst way for a country to start a war is to do it accidentally, without any preparations. That might initiate an all- out "slugging match" in which only the most alert portion of the forces gets off in the early phase. Both sides are thus likely to be clobbered," both because the initial blow was not large enough to be decisive and because the war plans are likely to be inappropriate. To repeat: On all these questions of accident, miscalculation, unauthorized behavior, trigger-happy postures, and excessive destructiveness, we must satisfy ourselves and our allies, the neutrals, and, strangely important, our potential enemies. Since it is almost inevitable that the future will see more discussion of these questions, i will be important for us not only to have made satisfactory preparations, but also to have prepared a satisfactory story. Unless every-body concerned, both laymen and experts, develops a satisfactory image of strategic forces as contributing more to security than insecurity it is most improbable that the required budgets, alliances, and intellectual efforts will have the necessary support. To the extent that people worry about our strategic forces as themselves exacerbating or creating security problems, or confuse symptoms with the disease, we may anticipate a growing rejection of military preparedness as an essential element in the solution to our security problem and a turning to other approaches not as a complement and supplement but as an alternative. In particular, we are likely to suffer from the same movement toward "responsible" budgets pacifism, and unilateral and universal disarmament that swept through England in the 1920's and 1930's. The effect then was that England prematurely disarmed herself to such an extent that she first almost lost her voice in world affairs, and later her independence in a war that was caused as much by English weakness as by anything else."

"One guy he argued with was my pal Herman Kahn, who could have won any number of Nobel Prizes, except for peace, had he stuck with science. Instead, like Pauling, he tried to save the world, especially his country, from the effects of a nuclear war he was willing to see fought."

"In college, Herman was determined to show his professors how much brighter he was in their field of expertise, which he was, and which he did to their great annoyance. In the Army, during World War II, he was equally determined to show his brilliance, from the very start at the induction center where the two of us (we were inducted at the same place on the same day) took the Army’s equivalent of an IQ test. Wanting to prove himself, Herman had boned up on every IQ test he could get his hands on. Brimming with confidence he sat next to me, certain he would score 100%, which had never happened before.“Men”, the lieutenant told us, “nobody ever has finished this test, so don’t feel under any pressure to do so. If you give the wrong answers to any of the questions it will count doubly against you, so don’t try and guess. You’ve got 45 minutes to do the best you can. Good luck. Start!” After 20 minutes or so Herman had finished. He rested for a few minutes, checked his answers, and with a few minutes left got up, turned in his paper, and left. A couple of minutes go by and Herman comes rushing back into the room demanding his paper back. “Why do you want it back?”, asked the sergeant. “Because I made an arithmetic mistake on question seventy-four (or whatever number it was) and want to correct it”, said Herman. “Get the hell out of here!”, yelled the sergeant. Herman left. Sure enough he made only one mistake, but that was enough to make him number one in the Army."

"The author of "On Escalation" is revealed not as a detached analyst, nor even as a cynically bemused observer of human folly, but rather as an enthusiastic choreographer of the dance of death. He relishes the obscene pranks he invents and the cataclysmic phantasies he invokes."

"John Philoponus (c. 490-570) of Alexandria... refuted Aristotle's theory that the velocities of falling bodies in a given medium are proportional to their weight, making the observation that "if one lets fall simultaneously from the same height two bodies differing greatly in weight, one will find that the ratio of the times of their motion does not correspond to the ratios of their weights, but the difference in time is a very small one." …He also criticized Aristotle's antiperistasis theory of projectile motion, which states that the air displaced by the object flows back to push it from behind. Instead Philoponus concluded that "some incorporeal kinetic power is imparted by the thrower to the object thrown" and that "if an arrow or a stone is projected by force in a void, the same will happen much more easily, nothing being necessary except the thrower." This is the famous "impetus theory," which was revived in medieval Islam and again in fourteenth century Europe, giving rise to the beginning of modern dynamics."

"Newton's proof of the law of refraction is based on an erroneous notion that light travels faster in glass than in air, the same error that Descartes had made. This error stems from the fact that both of them thought that light was corpuscular in nature."

"Although many historians of the new millennium now take issue with the notion of a Scientific Revolution, it is generally agreed that Newton's work culminated the long development of European science, creating a synthesis that opened the way for the scientific culture of the modern age."

"Parmenides believed that all Being is what he called the One, and denied absolutely the possibility of change. He believed that the cosmos is full (i.e., no void), uncreated, eternal, indestructible, unchangeable, immobile sphere of being, and all sensory evidence to the contrary is illusory. One Parmenidean fragment stated, "Either a thing is or it is not," meaning that creation and destruction is impossible."

"The atomic theory was not generally accepted in the time of Democritus, largely because of its deterministic character, for it allows no chance, choice, or free will."

"Empedocles tried to address the problem of change by saying that there is not one fundamental arche but four—earth, water, air, and fire—which generate all the material substances in nature by mixing together in various ways under the influence of forces he called Love and Strife."

"Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (0. 500—428 BC) postulated another element called the aether, which was in constant rotation and carried with it the celestial bodies. He also believed that there was a directing intelligence in nature that he called Nous which gives order to what otherwise would be a chaotic universe. By Nous he meant literally "the Mind of the Cosmos"… Anaxagoras was the last of the Ionian physicists."

"The dominant concept in Aristotle's philosophy of nature is his notion of causation. ...The final cause states that each substance has an inherent purpose. Thus there must be a purpose or design in the acorn such that it always grows into an oak tree. This aspect of existence is indicated by the word entelechy; this means the purpose that guides things to develop in one way rather than another."

"Knowledge or no knowledge, the intelligence community is obliged to furnish estimates to military planners, even if they’re worthless and very possibly misleading. If you are one of those strange ducks trying to understand what this nuclear business is all about and read the “respectable” journals the CIA leaks information to, please don’t get the idea this makes you a more respectable arm chair analyst than anyone else."

"He was all in favor of fighting an all-out thermonuclear war that might devastate a fair fraction of civilization, to settle an argument with the USSR, but was dead set against using discriminate nuclear weapons that could settle arguments on the battlefield without devastating everything in sight. Genius, when applied to human problems, can manifest itself in strange ways."

"As you can well imagine, any nuclear bombing study that neglected to target Moscow would be laughed out of the room. (That is, no study at that time; 10 or 15 years later senior policy officials were debating how good an idea this might be. If you wiped out the political leadership of the Soviet Union in the process, who would you deal with in arranging for a truce and who would be left to run the country after the war?) Consequently, two of RAND’s brightest mathematicians were assigned the task of determining, with the help of computers, in great detail, precisely what would happen to the city were a bomb of so many megatons dropped on it. It was truly a daunting task and called for devising a mathematical model unimaginably complex; one that would deal with the exact population distribution, the precise location of various industries and government agencies, the vulnerability of all the important structures to the bomb’s effects, etc., etc. However, these two guys were up to the task and toiled in the vineyards for some months, finally coming up with the results. Naturally, they were horrendous. (Harold Mitchell, a medical doctor, an expert on human vulnerability to the H-bomb’s effects, told me when the study first began: “Why are they wasting their time going through all this shit? You know goddamned well that a bomb this big is going to blow the fucking city into the next county. What more do you have to know?” I had to agree with him.)"

"The next day, I called one of them and asked if I could come to his office to discuss the briefing. Fine with him, so off I went. I sat down and asked him a question: “Norm, how did you decide so exactly where the bomb would explode?” He looked at me as if I were a country bumpkin and explained how SAC calculated its bombing accuracy and he had gotten the accuracy of this particular drop straight from the horse’s mouth. Now I don’t want to bore you with how SAC arrived at planning estimates for the delivery accuracy of its nuclear bombers, except to say that it was a statistical process based on thousands of practice sorties, whose results would be mathematically analyzed to allow estimates to be made of the results of a large bombing campaign; not one bomber flying over one city and one bombardier, with the lives of perhaps millions of Muscovites at his fingertips, dropping one bomb. This I pointed out to Norm, implying that he had gone to all that fuss and bother for naught. His response was that in doing his calculations as a mathematician, he was going by the accepted ground rules. The bombing accuracy he had assumed had been provided to him by others. His was not to reason why."

"People are people, and all people have emotions and biases, rarely understood: intellectual and emotional behavior don’t necessarily have an inverse correlation. Oppenheimer, as superhuman and wise as he was in so many ways, was still a human being. Depending upon the occasion he could be as human (dramatic, overwhelming, megalomaniacal, self-serving, and even downright dishonest, as his arch-rival Edward Teller was accused of being, and was) as most of us. Like most of us, depending upon the circumstances, he could change his personality and alleged beliefs at the drop of a hat."

"The briefing was over, there were lots of questions that Teller handled with aplomb, knowing far more about the subject than most in the audience. Finally there came a question that had nothing to do with whether or not his bomb was feasible. Instead, it was whether it would destroy the world by causing uncontrollable thermonuclear reactions in the earth’s atmosphere that would cause it to burn up, plus you and me and everyone else. Teller was on his game, as he always was, and replied that he had estimated this terrible possibility and we were quite safe — by about a factor of ten. Now there aren’t too many people who rest comfortably with assurances that mankind’s fate, let alone their own, is on the safe side by a factor of ten, although there are millions of smokers, including myself, drug addicts, sex addicts, who take much greater chances than that with their lives, and they know it. Except that they know it won’t happen to them, which is why many soldiers, at least as stupid as they’re brave, get Congressional Medals of Honor."

"Naturally, the next question was: “How accurate is the nuclear data you used in your calculation?” As only Edward Teller is capable of doing, he replied, with a smirk-smile going from ear to ear: “Well, it’s possible that the data might be off by a factor of ten.” Which way, he didn’t profess to know, but I suspect that much of the audience didn’t sleep too well that night. (If you’re beginning to worry that you might not be sleeping too well from now on, I have to tell you that as it turned out, after careful nuclear measurements and detailed calculations were made, we were safe by far more than a factor of ten. It simply couldn’t happen.)"

"Teller’s irascible behavior forced him out of the mainstream but not out of the lab, thanks to Oppenheimer who didn’t think we should be without geniuses, even those whose enormous egos caused serious friction. As bright and innovative as Teller was, his overall performance during the war left a lot to be desired. He was not content to be part of a team effort (like yours truly) and preferred to work off to the side on new and different and sometime pretty far-out ideas (like yours truly). This caused considerable resentment. After all there was a war going on and most people thought future nuclear weapon concepts should be worked on sometime in the future, after we had finished our primary assignment. Edward’s behavior was like a colonel on a planning staff during a military campaign who tells his commanding general that he’d like to plan for the next war. That would be the end of the colonel, who would be demoted and shipped off to some base in the Aleutian Islands. Oppenheimer, however, realized that guys like Teller, despite their shortcomings, were necessary to have around; one never knows when a guy like that can be worth his weight in gold, which to the best of my recollection never happened with Teller. So an arrangement was worked out where Teller and a handful of like-minded theoretical physicists, willing to put up with his domineering ways, formed a small group dedicated to doing what they pleased, realizing their efforts stood precious little chance of impacting on the project. The one idea dearest to Teller’s heart was the H-bomb. He and a couple of his cronies applied themselves to devising various schemes on designing such a weapon. All of them turned out to be impractical and most of them unworkable. Which never slowed him down in the slightest for reasons we’ll never know nor will he. I’ve known Edward for a very long time and although I’ve never known him well, one thing about him became clear to me from the very beginning: he was a creature possessed. By what? Again, who knows? Many, if not most, who have read about his life and what he has done, plus those who have known him directly and observed him close at hand and at great length, would say by Satan (which has been said all over the world about me). I wouldn’t go along with that and although I have seen Teller give some of the most impassioned statements morally defending his positions, some of which I have found deeply moving and thoroughly convincing, I would not say that the God I’ve been told exists has had a tight hold on him. If Edward has been possessed by anyone it’s been himself. I’d say the same for myself, and I’ve given you some reasons why, but hardly all of them. I don’t know all of them and would be ashamed to tell you if I did."

"5. He changed the title of his book Shame: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb to Fuck You! Mr. President after the U.S. under George W. Bush dismantled its neutron bombs."

"Is the flow of time something real, or might our sense of time passing be just an illusion that hides the fact that what is real is only a vast collection of memories?"

"The five big questions in physics 1. How to unify quantum theory and gravity? 2. Does quantum mechanics really make sense? 3. Unify the different forces and particles 4. What sets the masses of the particles? 5. What are the dark matter and energy?"

"Rule I: Except during a measurement, the wave evolves smoothly and deterministically, like a wave on water. ... Rule II: During a measurement of position, the wave collapses around the position where it is seen, with a probability proportional to the square of the height of the wave, before the collapse. ... In fact the two rules seem to contradict each other."

"Since the 1960s, particle theory had been split into two groups: those following the atomism of the quark theory and those who had followed the anti-atomism of that had led from the bootstrap program to the string theory. What happened in 1984 was that it was realised that string theory could combine and satisfy the aspirations of both approaches to fundamental physics. Thus, the community of gauge theorists, driven by the failure of the proton decay experiments to search for new ideas that could unify physics, all of a sudden encountered their old friends, the string theorists, in the middle of what might be called a desert of disappointed expectations."

"The first principle of cosmology must be 'There is nothing outside the universe'. This is not to exclude religion or mysticism... But if it is knowledge that we desire... we need to seek answers to questions about the things we can see... only things that exist in the universe."

"There is no meaning to space that is independent of the relationships among real things of the world. ...Space is nothing apart from the things that exist. ...If we take out all the words we are not left with an empty sentence, we are left with nothing."

"The geometry of space changes when things in the universe change their relationships to one another."

"There are unfortunately not a few good professional physicists who still think about the world as if space and time had an absolute meaning."

"I believe that the main lesson of relativity and quantum theory is that the world is nothing but an evolving network of relationships."

"The relational picture of space and time has implications that are as radical as those of natural selection, not only for science but for our perspective on who we are and how we came to exist in this evolving universe of relations."

"We are the result of processes much more complicated than the small aspects of our lives and societies over which we have some control."

"There is no fixed, eternal frame to the universe to define what may or may not exist."

"There is nothing beyond the world except what we see, no background to it except its particular history."

"We have known since the middle of the nineteenth century that the world is not composed only of particles. ...the world is also composed of fields. ...General relativity is a theory of... the gravitational field. ...Because there are three sets of field lines, the gravitational field defines a network of relationships having to do with how the... lines link with one another. ...This is why we call relativity a relational theory."

"In the theory of electric fields it is assumed that points have meaning. ...Physicists using general relativity... cannot speak of a point, except by naming some features of the field lines that will uniquely distinguish that point. ...the network of relationships evolve with time... constantly changing."

"There is no time apart from change. There is no such thing as a clock outside the network of changing relationships. ...one can only compare how fast one thing is happening with the rate of some other process."

"Time is described only in terms of change in the network of relationships that describes space."

"It is absurd in general relativity to speak of a universe in which nothing happens."

"Neither space nor time has any existence outside the system of evolving relationships that comprises the universe. Physicists refer to this feature of general relativity as background independence."

"In quantum theory, distance is inverse to energy, because you need particles of very high energy to probe very short distances. The inverse of the Planck energy is the Planck length."

"We detect light and particles that have traveled billions of light years on their way across the universe to us. During the billions of years of travel, very small effects due to quantum gravity can be amplified to the point that we can detect them."

"Since the 1950s, the key equation of quantum gravity has been called the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. Bryce DeWitt and John Wheeler wrote it down, but in all the time since then, no one had been able to solve it. We found we could solve it exactly, and in fact we found an infinite number of exact solutions."

"I was joined by Carlo Rovelli, and we were able to make a full-fledged quantum theory of gravity... This became loop quantum gravity."

"While most people... were seeking to modify the principles of either relativity or quantum theory, we surprised ourselves (and many other people) by succeeding in putting them together without modifying their principles."

"There is a smallest unit of space. Its minimum value is given by the cube of the Planck length... If you take a volume of space and measure it to a very fine precision... It has to fall into some discrete series of numbers, just like the energy of an electron in an atom. ...we can calculate the discrete areas and volumes from the theory."

"Some of the effects predicted by the theory [of loop quantum gravity] appear to be in conflict with one of the principles of Einstein's special theory of relativity... that the speed of light is a universal constant. ...Photons of higher energy travel slightly slower than low-energy photons. ...the principle of [general] relativity is preserved but Einstein's special theory of relativity requires modification. ...A photon can have an energy-dependent speed without violating the principle of [general] relativity!"

"Jacob Bekenstein found... in 1971 that every black hole must have an entropy proportional to the area of its horizon... Stephen Hawking then refined this by showing that the constant of proportionality must be... exactly one quarter. ...entropy is supposed to correspond to a measure of information ...Loop quantum gravity... [gives] a detailed description of the microscopic structure of a black hole. ...a horizon can have, for each quantized unit of area, a finite number of states. Counting them, we get exactly Bekenstein's result..."

"Spacetime... turns out to be discrete, described by a structure called spin foam."

"In string theory one studies strings moving in a fixed classical spacetime. ...what we call a background-dependent approach. ...One of the fundamental discoveries of Einstein is that there is no fixed background. The very geometry of space and time is a dynamical system that evolves in time. The experimental observations that energy leaks from binary pulsars in the form of gravitational waves—at the rate predicted by general relativity to the... accuracy of eleven decimal places—tell us that there is no more a fixed background of spacetime geometry than there are fixed crystal spheres holding the planets up."

"String theory seems to be incompatible with a world in which a cosmological constant has a positive sign, which is what the observations indicate."

"From the beginning of physics, there have been those who imagined they would be the last generation to face the unknown. Physics has always seemed to its practitioners to be almost complete. This complacency is shattered only during revolutions, when honest people are forced to admit that they don't know the basics."

"Relativity and... quantum... remain incomplete. ...the main reason each is incomplete is the existence of the other. The mind calls for a third theory to unify all of physics, and for a simple reason. Nature is... "unified." …interconnected, in that everything interacts with everything else."

"Combine general relativity and quantum theory into a single theory that can claim to be the complete theory of nature. This is called the problem of quantum gravity."

"In both quantum theory and general relativity, we encounter predictions of physically sensible quantities becoming infinite. This is likely the way that nature punishes impudent theorists who dare to break her unity. ...If infinities are signs of missing unification, a unified theory will have none. It will be what we call a finite theory."

"Quantum theory can be described as a new kind of language to be used in a dialogue between us and the systems we study with our instruments. ...It tells us nothing about what the world would be like in our absence."

"Many of the founders of quantum mechanics, including Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, and Louis de Broglie... were realists. For them quantum theory... was not a complete theory, because it did not provide a picture of reality absent our interaction with it. On the other side were Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and many others. Rather than being appalled, they embraced this new way of doing science."

"Many of us believed in the possibility of a principled explanation for the laws of nature. We hoped to discover a short list of principles, which could be realized in a unique theory, which would retrodict the standard model and uniquely predict the physics to be discovered beyond it. The shocking implication of the results of Strominger reported in 1986 was that it was not to be, at least within the confines of string theory. ...String theory offered more, however... It offered the promise of a setting in which the different perturbative string theories are realized as expansions around solutions of a still more fundamental theory. ...That more fundamental theory would have to be background independent..."

"Unfortunately, so far... a truly background independent formulation of string theory has not been achieved... [It is] often called the search for M theory..."

"The landscape problem and the problem of background independence are closely linked. The latter is the only route the former has to experimental confirmation."

"The hypothesis underlying all approaches to the landscape is that there is a cosmological setting in which different regions or epochs of the universe can have different effective laws. This implies the existence of spacetime regions not directly observable... These regions must either be in the past of our big bang, or far enough away from us to be causally unrelated."

"The landscape problem represents a serious problem in the development of science. Its solution requires... the construction of speculative cosmological scenarios, which posit regions or epochs of our universe for which we presently have no observable evidence. Nonetheless we must insist on taking seriously only scenarios and hypotheses that make falsifiable or strongly verifiable predictions, otherwise people can just make stuff up and the distinction between science and mythology becomes porous. ...there are already candidate solutions that make real, falsifiable predictions."

"Special pleading that the standards of science should be lessened to admit explanations with no falsifiable consequences, in order to keep alive a bold speculative idea, should be strongly resisted. ...ultimately science is not interested in what might be true, it is interested only in what can be convincingly demonstrated by deductions from observational evidence."

"Having begun my life in science searching for the equation beyond time, I now believe that the deepest secret of the universe is that its essence rests in how it unfolds moment by moment in time."

"We seem to have an ingrained idea that if something is valuable, it exists outside of time."

"I... propose that time and its passage are fundamental and real and the hopes and beliefs about timeless truths and timeless realms are mythology."

"If we believe that the task of physics is the discovery of a timeless mathematical equation that captures every aspect of the universe, then we believe that the truth about the universe lies outside the universe."

"Thinking in time is not relativism but a form of relationalism... the truest description of something consists of specifying its relationships to other parts of the system it is part of."

"To be human is to be suspended between danger and opportunity. ...The challenge of life is to choose wisely, from the enormous number of possible dangers, what's worth worrying about. It is also about choosing, from all the opportunities... always in the face of incomplete knowledge of the consequences."

"One of the evident facts about the world is the stability of empty space-time. In classical general relativity we can explain this as a consequence of the positive energy theorem... the positive energy theorem must extend in some suitable form to any viable quantum theory of gravity."

"We show that some known classical results have particularly simple derivations within the Ashtekar formalism. These include Witten's positive energy theorem..."

"The positive energy theorem was for half a century or more an open challenge to relativists. Many attempts were made to prove flat spacetime was stable, but none completely succeeded completely until a majestic tour de force of geometric reasoning of Shoen and Yau. This was followed two years later by a proof of Witten, which was as elegant as it was short. It is this proof of Witten’s that we take as a template here for the quantum theory."

"The suggestion was that a positive energy proof for general relativity could be gotten by restricting supergravity to its bosonic sector, which is general relativity."

"Calculation establishes that a quantum positive energy theorem may be possible using a representation based on the Ashtekar connection. Left open is a key question of whether this use of the Ashtekar connection is necessary or whether a positive quantum energy result can be achieved for representations based on other connections, i.e., for [other] values of the Immirzi parameter."

"Our goal is to build a broad-based model of key components of the economy: households, firms, banks and government... The failure to embrace things like simulation has inhibited progress in economics."

"Rational adventure in a physical setting is becoming increasingly rarer in the world. The evolution of technology and infrastructure has altered the kind of adventures that we can have, so that people with adventurous spirits either take on risk for its own sake, or they embark on rational adventures in the mental domain."

"In a world of superintelligent humans, the account of a quest to prove a theorem may take on a universality in its drama that seems inconceivable to us now. I believe that rational adventure is fundamental to the human spirit, and that it won't go away. But it will evolve of necessity to take place in the increasingly abstract domains that characterize the boundaries and frontiers of an evolving and ever more complex and abstract world. As a result, it will evolve into forms that are difficult for us to even think about at this point in time."

"On learning more astronomy, in the phenomenon of "averted vision," I found a justification for my rationale about the roundabout path to metaphysics via physics: to see a faint star, it's necessary to look away from it; as soon as one looks at it directly, it vanishes."

"It seemed that fundamental physics was stuck. The particle physicists were smashing particles into each other with ever increasing force, trying to figure out how many quarks could dance on the head of a pin. The cosmologists were working with very few facts... on what seemed to me to be mainly religious grounds. And most of physics was still focused on pushing and pulling, on the material properties... rather than on its informational properties. ...those that relate to order and disorder."

"Speaking crudely, a living system—an organism—consists of a symbiotic relationship between a metabolism and a replicator. ...the replicator contains the blueprint of the organism, with the information needed to grow, make repairs, and reproduce. ...the metabolism provides the energy and raw materials needed to build and run the replicator."

"The basic principle of an autocatalytic network is that even though nothing can make itself, everything in the pot has at least one reaction that makes it, involving only other things in the pot. It's a symbiotic system in which everything cooperates to make the metabolism work—the whole is greater than the sum of the parts."

"The paradox that immediately bothers everyone who learns about the second law is this: If systems tend to become more disordered, why, then, do we see so much order around us? ...It seems to conflict with our "creation myth": In the beginning, there was a big bang. ...no one is saying that the second law of thermodynamics is wrong, just that there is a contrapuntal process organizing things at a higher level."

"Complex adaptive systems have the property that if you run them—by just letting the mathematical variable of "time" go forward—they'll naturally progress from chaotic, disorganized, undifferentiated, independent states to organized, highly differentiated, and highly interdependent states. Organized structures emerge spontaneously... A weak system gives rise only to simpler forms of self-organization; a strong one gives rise to more complex forms, like life."

"Even though something like Danny Hillis' "connection machine" is big, it's nothing compared with Avogadro's number of processors that nature has at her disposal."

"We don't know what organization is. ...We do know that complex adaptive systems have to be nonlinear and capable of storing information. ...We know a little bit about what distinguishes an adaptive complex system from a nonadaptive system, such as turbulent fluid flow."

"One of the factors that caused Spencer's ideas to lose popularity was social Darwinism... Social evolution is different from biological evolution: it's faster, it's Lamarckian, and it makes even heavier use of altruism and cooperation than biological evolution does. None of this was well understood at the time."

"If we choose, we can use genetic engineering to alter the character of our offspring. ...the motivation to do this will eventually become overwhelming."

"We're rapidly creating an extraordinary silicon-based petri dish for evolution of intelligence. By the year 2025... we're likely to have computers whose raw processing power exceeds that of the human brain. Also, we're likely to have more computers than people..."

"Once we can manipulate our genome, Lamarckian fashion, the rate of change will be staggering."

"I've never observed wisdom to emerge from shouting."

"You can lead a theorist to data, but you can't make him think."

"Obvious results provoke opposition. The more obvious the result, the stronger the opposition."

"It is often stated that the evidence for is overwhelming. This is not quite correct: the evidence for mass discrepancies is overwhelming. These might be attributed to either dark matter or a modification of gravity."

"My gut reaction to all these questions is negative. But it appears that one set or the other must be answered in the affirmative. Either way, we are missing something fundamental about the nature of our universe."

"I came to the subject a True Believer in dark matter, but it was MOND that nailed the predictions for the LSB galaxies that I was studying (McGaugh & de Blok, 1998), not any flavor of dark matter. So what I am supposed to conclude?"

"One should not only be truthful, but as complete as possible. It does not suffice to be truthful while leaving unpleasant or unpopular facts unsaid."

"A long standing prediction (Milgrom 1983) of MOND is that rotating galaxy curves will fall on a single mass-velocity relation with slope 4: Mb \propto Vf4. This prediction is realized in multiple independent data sets. Gas rich galaxies fall where predicted by MOND with no free parameters. There are not many predictions in extragalactic astronomy that fare so well a quarter century after their publication. … a physical understanding for why galaxy formation in the context of ΛCDM should pick out the particular phenomenology predicted a priori by MOND remains wanting."

"The current cosmological paradigm, the cold dark matter model with a cosmological constant, requires that the mass-energy of the Universe be dominated by invisible components: dark matter and dark energy. An alternative to these dark components is that the law of gravity be modified on the relevant scales. A test of these ideas is provided by the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation (BTFR), an empirical relation between the observed mass of a galaxy and its rotation velocity. Here, I report a test using gas rich galaxies for which both axes of the BTFR can be measured independently of the theories being tested and without the systematic uncertainty in stellar mass that affects the same test with star dominated spirals. The data fall precisely where predicted a priori by the modified Newtonian dynamics."

"... It was (in part) Gross’s excessive enthusiasm for string theory in the mid-80s that drove me (as an impressionable grad student at Princeton) away from theoretical physics (and into astronomy). String theory may have been a beautiful idea, but it made no predictions that could be tested experimentally in the then-foreseeable future. That’s not science. A quarter century later and the theoretical physics community has yet to wake up and realize that there is new physics right under their noses – just not the new physics they’ve been expecting (GUTs, strings, membranes, etc.). Galaxy dynamics are consistent with a single, universal force law, but this unexpected behavior has largely been ignored because it doesn’t fit with particle theorists’ dreams of super symmetric dark matter particles. That we do not understand the observed behavior makes it more interesting than the “expected” (but unobserved) new physics: who ordered this?"

"The concordance model of cosmology, ΛCDM, provides a satisfactory description of the evolution of the universe and the growth of large scale structure. Despite considerable effort, this model does not at present provide a satisfactory description of small scale structure and the dynamics of bound objects like individual galaxies. In contrast, MOND provides a unique and predictively successful description of galaxy dynamics, but is mute on the subject of cosmology. … it is far from obvious that the mass spectrum of galaxy clusters or the power spectrum of galaxies can be explained in MOND, two things that ΛCDM does well. Critical outstanding issues are the development of an acceptable relativistic parent theory for MOND, and the reality of the non-baryonic dark matter of ΛCDM. Do suitable dark matter particles exist, or are they a modern aether?"

"People have been looking for this dark matter because there is a Nobel prize, for sure, waiting for whoever discovers it."

"I have experienced time and again people dismissing the data because they think MOND is wrong, so I am very consciously drawing a red line between the theory and the data."

"Why does MOND get any predictions right? It has had many a priori predictions come true. Why does this happen?"

"... I was deeply shocked when it was not my predictions or any of my immediate colleagues' predictions that came true in my data — but Milgrom's. This was completely outside my conceptual framework."

"A long time ago when I first got interested in MOND, having come from the background where I believed in dark matter, I wrote a proposal saying, "Gee, this theory had its predictions come true, ... we should look into that" and it was rejected, you know, very harshly. And I thought "OK, the community is not willing to fund this kind of thing" — this was almost twenty years ago. And so I basically did a global substitute, replaced MOND with dark matter, resubmitted, and I got my money. ... Pavel is totally correct that scientists are focused on getting grants, because that's what you need to support your students, and your postdocs, and getting the data, and all those sort of things. And I would like to believe that that was an anecdote from the distant past, but I am aware of a colleague who had this experience very recently where this person did not even mention MOND in the proposal, but the panel came back saying "MOND is no good — you must not spend money on this." ... the panel had associated ... this person's name with having at some point written a paper about MOND and projected that onto this proposal that ... did not mention MOND. And so it really is that bad."

"Whenever I come across a case that doesn't make sense in MOND, it usually doesn't make sense in either."

"... Dark matter provides the additional gravitational pull to bring model and reality broadly into alignment. Researchers now routinely take this model – Einstein plus dark matter, often called the ‘null hypothesis’ – as their starting point and then perform detailed calculations of galactic systems to test it. ... Most recently, Stacy McGaugh at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and his team documented that the pattern of rotation in spiral galaxies seems to precisely follow the pattern of the visible matter alone, posing yet another challenge to the null hypothesis."

"There was never a conspiracy, never a tremendous fear. This is a society which is now in its third generation of severe political repression, so that children in North Korea have several hours of political education a day. Their parents did, and their grandparents did."

"The military option will remain on the table. If there is a good agreement to have, obviously it's worth waiting for and completing the negotiations."

"I don't know how long the North Korean regime can last. But we can't just wait for them to collapse, because in the meantime, they can do lasting damage to our security."

"I hope that the North Koreans understand that the conclusions that we came to are conclusions that are embedded in America's security situation."

"Our nightmare, any of us, which would change the way we lived our lives, was if we thought that any moment Al Qaeda might detonate a nuclear weapon in a city anywhere in the world, because we learned that they had gotten hold of some plutonium from the North Koreans by sale, or when the North Korean regime collapsed, somebody smuggled it out."

"We need to change because the world is changing, and we need to anticipate what is next and be there first, as the US military has always been. So, the changes in our future, I think is something that we are all completely committed to."

"We have been keeping the peace in the Asia-Pacific theater for decades now, and the essence of the rebalance is to keep that peace and stability going, of which we have been a pivotal part. You ask about India, yes it is difficult. We are two technical and military cultures that grew up on opposite sides of the fence during the Cold War."

"That is what you wake up to every morning. It is what my wife and I think of when we go visit hospitals on the weekend. And so providing our people with all the support they can, you can possibly give them. And that does not always come naturally to this place, which is thinking in budgets and thinking in the future. You always have to remember that they are in danger."

"I have avoided so far the use of the term —the analog in the of the . Certainly, deserves the credit for first exhibiting the mechanism in the context of . But as I have tried to show, it took other people to make it work. The Higgs boson is what is being looked for at . If they find it, we shall all be happy and relieved. And if not? I am reminded of a story about Einstein. He had just received a telegram with the news that the eclipse expeditions had confirmed his general relativity prediction about the Sun bending starlight. He was very pleased with himself and showed the telegram to one of his students, . She asked him what he would have done if the telegram had contained the news that the experiments disagreed with the theory. He replied, “Da könt mir halt der lieber Gott leid tun—die theorie stimmt doch. (Then I would have been sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is right).”"

"Although it is always somewhat dangerous to look for the cause of a complex sociological phenomenon in a single event, nonetheless, I believe that a cause can be made for the proposition that the present widespread interest in the quantum theory can be traced to a single paper with the nontransparent title “On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox,” which was written in 1964 by the then thirty-four-year-old Irish physicist John Bell. It was published in the obscure journal Physics, which expired after a few issues. Bell’s paper was, as it happens, published in its first issue. Bell, who has worked since 1960 at CERN, the gigantic elementary-particle physics laboratory near Geneva, has been known to claim that his paper involves only the use of “high school mathematics”; however, its six pages are dense with an extremely abstract set of arguments, which even professionals in the field must work hard at to understand. In fact, for several years after its publication, few if any professional physicists bothered to try."

"The signs on Bell’s door read “J.Bell” and “M.Bell.” I knocked and was invited in by Bell. He looked about the same as he had the last time I saw him, a couple of years ago. He has long, neatly combed red hair and a pointed beard, which give him a somewhat Shavian figura. On one wall of the office is a photograph of Bell with something that looks like a halo behind his head, and his expression in the photograph is mischievous. Theoretical physicists’ offices run the gamut from chaotic clutter to obsessive neatness; the Bells’ is somewhere in between. Bell invited me to sit down after warning me that the “visitor’s chair” tilted backward at unexpected angles. When I had mastered it, and had a chance to look around, the first thing that struck me was the absence of Mary. “Mary,” said Bell, with a note of some disbelief in his voice, “has retired.” This, it turned out, had occurred not long before my visit. “She will not look at any mathematics now. I hope she comes back,” he went on almost plaintively; “I need her. We are doing several problems together.” In recent years, the Bells have been studying new quantum mechanical effects that will become relevant for the generation of particle accelerators that will perhaps succeed the LEP. Bell began his career as a professional physicist by designing accelerators, and Mary has spent her entire career in accelerator design. A couple of years ago Bell, like the rest of the members of CERN theory division, was asked to list his physics speciality. Among the more “conventional” entries in the division such as “super strings,” “weak interactions,” “cosmology,” and the like, Bell’s read “quantum engineering.”"

"I once asked Bell whether during the years he was studying the quantum theory it ever occurred to him that the theory might simply be wrong. He thought a moment and answered, “I hesitated to think it might be wrong, but I knew that it was rotten.” Bell pronounced the word “rotten” with a good deal of relish and then added, “That is to say, one has to find some decent way of expressing whatever truth there is in it.” The attitude that even if there is not something actually wrong with the theory, there is something deeply unsettling—“rotten”—about it, was common to most of the creators of the quantum theory. Niels Bohr was reported to have remarked, “Well, I think that if a man says it is completely clear to him these days, then he has not really understood the subject.” He later added, “If you do not getschwindlig [dizzy] sometimes when you think about these things then you have not really understood it.” My teacher Philipp Frank used to tell about the time he visited Einstein in Prague in 1911. Einstein had an office at the university that over looked a park. People were milling around in the park, some engaged in vehement gesture-filled discussions. When Professor Frank asked Einstein what was going on, Einstein replied that it was the grounds of a lunatic asylum, adding, “Those are the madmen who do not occupy themselves with the quantum theory.”"

"On further reflection, I now think that in arguing his case Bell exaggerated, oversimplified the historical development of both classical electrodynamics and quantum mechanics, and as a result arrived at a definition of "understanding" that may be too rigid in that it reflects a presumption - a prejudice, if you will - as to what constitutes physical reality."

"By taking issue with Bell on this score, I am not saying that I am satisfied with my understanding of quantum mechanics. I share Feynman's belief that no one really understands quantum mechanics. But we should not exaggerate our embarrassment; it is ample as it stands. In any event, I agree with Bell that the foundations continue to merit the closest scrutiny."

"That classical theory had catastrophic implications for the constitution of matter was barely appreciated by Planck and others at the turn of the century, and played no substantial role in the development of quantum theory until Bohr's work 13 years later. The lesson that could be drawn from this, and also from the development of general relativity, is that a crisis will only become creative if it is formulated in a mathematically precise manner. This conclusion has an echo in Bell's insistence on having quantum mechanics "fully formulated in mathematical terms, with nothing left to the discretion of the theoretical physicist", but what it really calls for is a critique of the "orthodox" theory fully formulated in mathematical terms with nothing left to the discretion of the critic."

"I, for one, remain unpersuaded that a crisis of major proportions has been identified, but at the same time I am open to the possibility that such a crisis has been glimpsed, though perhaps only subliminally, by Bell and his great predecessors: Einstein, Schrodinger, de Broglie, Bohm and Wigner. This is a roster which should give us all pause. To my understanding, however, this crisis has not yet been formulated with sufficient precision to facilitate the birth of a great offspring."

"There has never been just one best way to teach quantum mechanics. My goal is neither to sow nostalgia for the philosophically engaged style of Oppenheimer and Nordheim, nor to condemn the pragmatic approach of Fermi, Bethe and Feynman. It is rather to highlight the choices that physicists must always make when stepping into the classroom. Choices of topics to discuss and problems to assign reflect deeper decisions about the ideal type of physicist one seeks to train. Should the new generation be philosophically attuned, concerned with minute details of conceptual interpretation? Or should physicists hone their ability to calculate, pushing Heisenberg’s and Schrödinger’s equations into the service of ever more elaborate problems to solve and phenomena to analyse? Competing ideals have flourished under different pedagogical conditions."

"Strangely enough, many of the philosophical issues surrounding quantum mechanics are today being used to entice potential students into physics. As quantum computing and quantum communication become a commercial reality, tomorrow’s students may find themselves routinely grappling with the same philosophical questions that challenged their forebears almost a century ago."

"I was visiting friends in Princeton one Saturday in the 1950s when our host asked his son-in-law, Bill Bennett, and me (Bruce) if we’d like to spend the evening with his friend, Albert Einstein. Two awed physics graduate students soon waited in Einstein’s living room as he came downstairs in slippers and sweatshirt. I remember tea and cookies but not how the conversation started. Einstein soon asked about our quantum mechanics course. […] Einstein persisted in exploring our thoughts about what the theory really meant. But the issues that concerned him were unfamiliar to us. Our quantum physics courses focused on the use of the theory, not its meaning. Our response to his probing disappointed Einstein, and that part of our conversation ended."

"Quantum theory is stunningly successful. Not a single one of the theory’s predictions has ever been shown wrong. One-third of our economy depends on products based on it. However, the worldview demanded by quantum theory is not only stranger than we might suppose, it’s stranger than we can suppose."

"Might a worldview suggested by quantum mechanics have relevance beyond science? Consider earlier discoveries that did have such relevance: Copernicus’s realization that Earth was not the center of the cosmos, or Darwin’s theory of evolution. The relevance of quantum mechanics is, in a sense, more immediate than Copernican or Darwinian ideas, which deal with the far away or long ago. Quantum theory is about the here and now. It even encounters the essence of our humanity, our consciousness."

"Our book originated with a wide-ranging physics course for liberal arts students that in its last weeks focused on the mysteries of quantum mechanics. When I (Bruce) first proposed the course at a department meeting, that final focus prompted a faculty member to object:Though what you are saying is correct, presenting this material to nonscientists is the intellectual equivalent of allowing children to play with loaded guns."

"When we finally got our hands on the paper, we quickly realized that Einstein had put his finger on the essence of the problem and had delineated when it has a solution, before the invention of the modern quantum theory. Moreover, Einstein wrote with great lucidity about the subject, so that it seemed as if he were speaking directly to us, a century later. There was nothing dated or quaint about the analysis. For the first time in a long while, I found myself thinking, “Wow, this man really was a genius.”"

"It was Einstein who had introduced almost all the revolutionary ideas underlying quantum theory, and who saw first what these ideas meant. His ultimate rejection of quantum theory was akin to Dr. Frankenstein’s shunning of the monster he had originally created for the betterment of mankind. Had Einstein not done so, in all likelihood he would be seen as the father of the modern theory."

"Although quantum theory involves the use of nonlocal states, such as wave packets and entangled states, there is nothing in the theory, or in the real world so far as it is accurately described by quantum theory, that corresponds to the sorts of instantaneous nonlocal influences which have often been thought to arise in the situation envisaged in the EPR paradox, or implied by the fact that quantum theory violates Bell inequalities."

"... 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."

"Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings."

"The universe is not fine-tuned to us; we are fine-tuned to our particular universe."

"The so-called mysteries of quantum mechanics are in its philosophical interpretation, not in its mathematics."

"The problem is that people think faith is something to be admired. In fact, faith means you believe in something for which you have no evidence."

"Science is not going to change its commitment to the truth. We can only hope religion changes its commitment to nonsense."

"The existence of matter and energy in the universe did not require the violation of energy conservation at the assumed creation. In fact, the data strongly support the hypothesis that no such miracle occurred. If we regard such a miracle as predicted by the creator hypothesis, then the prediction is not confirmed."

"Infinity...is used in physics simply as a shorthand for "a very big number.”"

"The God of the gaps argument for God fails when a plausible scientific account for a gap in current knowledge can be given. I do not dispute that the exact nature of the origin of the universe remains a gap in scientific knowledge. But I deny that we are bereft of any conceivable way to account for that origin scientifically."

"We have yet to encounter an observable astronomical phenomenon that requires a supernatural element to be added to a model in order to describe the event...Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God."

"[T]he most fundamental laws of physics are not restrictions on the behaviour of matter. Rather, they are restrictions on the way physicists may describe that behaviour."

"The transition of nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any agent. As Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, "The answer to the ancient question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable." [...] In short, the natural state of affairs is something rather than nothing. An empty universe requires supernatural intervention--not a full one. Only by the constant action of an agent outside the universe, such as God, could a state of nothingness be maintained. The fact that we have something is just what we would expect if there is no God."

"The ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus, propounded an hypothesis of the constitution of matter, and gave the name of atoms to the ultimate unalterable parts of which he imagined all bodies to be constructed. In the 17th century, Gassendi revived this hypothesis, and attempted to develope it, while Newton used it with marked success in his reasonings on physical phenomena; but the first who formed a body of doctrine which would embrace all known facts in the constitution of matter, was Roger Joseph Boscovich, of Italy, who published at Vienna, in 1759, a most important and ingenious work, styled Theoria Philosophiæ Naturalis ad unicam legem virium, in Natura existentium redacta. This is one of the most profound contributions ever made to science; filled with curious and important information, and is well worthy of the attentive perusal of the modern student. In more recent days, the theory of Boscovich has received further confirmation and extension in the researches of Dalton, Joule, Thomson, Faraday, Tyndall, and others."

"I have often pondered over the roles of knowledge or experience, on the one hand, and imagination or intuition, on the other, in the process of discovery. I believe that there is a certain fundamental conflict between the two, and knowledge, by advocating caution, tends to inhibit the flight of imagination. Therefore, a certain naiveté, unburdened by conventional wisdom, can sometimes be a positive asset."

"In mathematics we agree that clear thinking is very important, but fuzzy thinking is just as important."

"Another project which keeps the Bourbaki name alive is the Seminaire Nicolas Bourbaki, which is a series of seminars, about 12–20 per year, on contemporary mathematics started in 1948. It is considered an honour to be invited to give a seminary in this seminar in this series; the only Indian to figure in the seminar so far is Harish Chandra, who gave a talk in the 1957–58 series and, apparently, thus lost the chance of winning the Fields medal in 1958! (Siegel was the chairman of the Fields medal committee in the ICM 1958!)"

"If you ask most teachers of science what their main goal is, they will probably say: for my students to understand the basic concepts of physics, chemistry, biology, or whatever other field is being studied. The critical words here are ‘understand’ and ‘concept’, and both of these terms assume a fundamentally psychological approach to learning... If we see the goals of science education in terms of what students will be able to do, and how they will be able to make sense of the world, rather than in terms of our speculations about what may be going on in their brains, then we need to see scientific learning as the acquisition of cultural tools and practices, as learning to participate in very specific and often specialized forms of human activity"

"The medium of printed scientific text is first of all a visual one."

"Science does not speak of the world in the language of words alone, and in many cases it simply cannot do so. The natural language of science is a synergistic integration of words, diagrams, pictures, graphs, maps, equations, tables, charts, and other forms of visual and mathematical expression... [Science thus consists of] the languages of visual representation, the languages of mathematical symbolism, and the languages of experimental operations."

"A genre is maintained by the conventions of a community, and in most cases serves specific functions within the system of practices of particular institutions of that community."

"Multimodal presentations have an inherent critical potential to the extent that we learn how to use the images to deconstruct the viewpoint of the text, and the text to subvert the naturalness of the image."

"Ecosocial Dynamics concerns ecosocial systems and networks, i.e. those ecosystems, including all material components, for which semiotic practices are essential to characterizing the dynamics of the material processes which constitute the system through their networks of mutual interdependencies."

"The basic point-of-view is that science is a social process."

"Learning science means learning to talk science... Talking science means observing, describing, comparing, classifying, analysing, discussing, hypothesizing, theorizing, questioning, challenging, arguing, designing experiments, following procedures, judging, evaluating, deciding, concluding, generalizing, reporting ... in and through the language of science."

"In terms of language, we do know what a scientific theory or conceptual system must be: it is a thematic pattern of semantic relationships in a subject, one that is reconstructed again and again in nearly the same ways by members of a community."

"Science has often presented itself, intentionally or unintentionally as a "truer" or even the true way of talking about the world. In science classrooms, except for rare occasions, this is the way science is taught and presented. Not as a way of talking about the world, but as the way the world is."

"Scientific language that is correct and serious so far as teachers and students are concerned must follow these stylistic norms:"

"The mystique of science is an essential tool for technocratic rule. Through it we are all taught that science, as the paradigm of all expert knowledge, has an objective, superior, and special truth that only the superintelligent few can understand. Science education, like it or not, does a great job in foisting these myths on most of us."

"It is dangerous to society to have students leave school believing that science is a perfect means to absolute, objective truths, discovered by people of superhuman intelligence. Apart form the danger that scientific “findings” could be used to justify wrong social polices, an impersonal, inhuman view of science alienates many students from the subject. If we are to encourage students of all kinds to take in interest in science, and use it for their own purposes, we need to show it as it really is."

"Science teachers have a special responsibility to study the nature of science as a discipline, how it works, how it is described by sociologists, historians, and philosophers from different points of view…. Science education cannot just be about learning science: Its foundation must be learning about the nature of science as a human activity."

"[Teachers] emphasize the human side of science: real activities by real human beings, both today and in specific periods of history. Personal characteristics of scientists, with which students can identify, should be emphasized rather than making scientists seem superhuman or alien."

"The language others speak to us, from childhood, shapes the attitudes and beliefs that ground how we use all our powers of action."

"The role of discourse in society is active; it not only re-confirms and re-enacts existing social relationships and patterns of behavior, it also renegotiates social relationships and introduces new meanings and new behaviors."

"When I speak about discourse in general, I will usually mean the social activity of making meanings with language and other symbolic systems in some particular kind of situation or setting."

"Instead of talking about meaning making as something that is done by minds, I prefer to talk about it as a social practice in a community. It is a kind of doing that is done in ways that are characteristic of a community, and its occurrence is part of what binds the community together and helps to constitute it as a community."

"Many people have been taught a social habit, a discourse, for speaking about meaning, which considers only the role of the individual organism, or the individual mind, in the process of making meanings... Mentalistic discourses, by creating a separate realm and locating meanings there, are not useful for understanding the material and social aspects of meaning-making. Mentalistic discourses depend on a common sense view of the separation of mind from body, and individual from society, which has ideological functions in our society. Particular aspects of these discourses deflect attention away from the social, cultural, historical and political dimensions of the meanings we make."

"We are constantly reading and listening to, writing and speaking, this text in the context of and against the background of other texts and other discourses."

"We need a social theory that sees all social phenomena, including itself, as being partly the product of how people in a community deploy semiotic resources: how we mean, and what we mean, by every meaningful act."

"Minds are formed by our social interactions in a community and a culture."

"All meaning is intertextual. No text is complete or autonomous in itself; it needs to be read, and it is read, in relation to other texts."

"Each community, each discourse tradition, has its own canons of intertextuality, its own principles and customs regarding which texts are most relevant to the interpretation of any one text"

"We will document a single instance of a widespread and increasingly dominant political strategy in modern society: the transformation of discourses of expert knowledge into discourses of social policy."

"The biological organism and the social persona are profoundly different social constructions. The different systems of social practices, including discourse practices, through which these two notions are constituted, have their meanings, and are made use of, are radically incommensurable. The biological notion of a human organism as an identifiable individual unit of analysis depends on the specific scientific practices we use to construct the identity, the boundedness, the integrity, and the continuity across interactions of this unit. The criteria we use to do so: DNA signatures, neural micro-anatomy, organism-environment boundaries, internal physiological interdependence of subsystems, external physical probes of identification at distinct moments of physical time -- all depend on social practices and discourses profoundly different from those in terms of which we define the social person."

"Our visual discrimination is far better than our linguistic system at dealing with complex ratios and continuous variations in space, line, shape, and color."

"Meaning is a much more fundamental notion than truth, indeed more fundamental even than the notion of "reality" itself. The basic argument [of the essay] was that claims about truth or reality are meanings made by people according to patterns that they have learned, and that trying to understand how and why people make the meanings they do is more useful than fighting over the truth of their claims."

"Human communities are ecosystems. Ecosystems are biological, chemical and physical systems. The physics, chemistry and biology of complex self-organizing systems can tell us much that is useful about human communities: about the conditions necessary for the existence of human communities, about the properties human communities 'inherit' because they are special cases of more general kinds of systems, particularly ecosystems."

"A discourse, a way of speaking, is considered less scientific, or even rendered ‘unscientific’ exactly to the extent that it includes elements either of the language of feeling or of the language of action and values."

"Reports of the death of reductionism are greatly exaggerated. It is so ingrained in our thinking that if one day some magical force should make us all forget it, we would promptly have to reinvent it. The real worry is not with reductionism, which, as a paradigm and tool, is rather useful. It is necessary, but no longer sufficient. But, weighing up better ideas, it became a burden."

"We should, of course, expect that any universe which expands without limit will approach the empty de Sitter case, and that its ultimate fate is a state in which each physical unit—perhaps each nebula or intimate group of nebulae—is the only thing which exists within its own observable universe."

"The general theory of relativity considers physical space-time as a four-dimensional manifold whose line element coefficients g_{\mu \nu} satisfy the differential equationsG_{\mu \nu} = \lambda g_{\mu \nu} \qquad .\;.\;.\;.\;.\;.\; (1)in all regions free from matter and electromagnetic field, where G_{\mu \nu} is the contracted Riemann-Christoffel tensor associated with the fundamental tensor g_{\mu \nu}, and \lambda is the ."

"An "empty world," i.e., a homogeneous manifold at all points at which equations (1) are satisfied, has, according to the theory, a constant Riemann curvature, and any deviation from this fundamental solution is to be directly attributed to the influence of matter or energy."

"In considerations involving the nature of the world as a whole the irregularities caused by the aggregation of matter into stars and stellar systems may be ignored; and if we further assume that the total matter in the world has but little effect on its macroscopic properties, we may consider them as being determined by the solution of an empty world."

"The solution of (1), which represents a homogeneous manifold, may be written in the form:ds^2 = \frac{d\rho^2}{1 - \kappa^2\rho^2} - \rho^2 (d\theta^2 + sin^2 \theta \; d\phi^2) + (1 - \kappa^2 \rho^2)\; c^2 d\tau^2, \qquad (2)where \kappa = \sqrt \frac{\lambda}{3}. If we consider \rho as determining distance from the origin... and \tau as measuring the proper-time of a clock at the origin, we are led to the de Sitter spherical world..."

"is a congruence geometry, or equivalently the space comprising its elements is homogeneous and isotropic; the intrinsic relations between... elements of a configuration are unaffected by the position or orientation of the configuration. ...[M]otions of are the familiar translations and rotations... made in proving the theorems of Euclid."

"[O]nly in a homogeneous and isotropic space can the traditional concept of a rigid body be maintained."

"That the existence of these motions (the "axiom of free mobility") is a desideratum, if not... a necessity, for a geometry applicable to physical space, has been forcefully argued on a priori grounds by von Helmholtz, Whitehead, Russell and others; for only in a homogeneous and isotropic space can the traditional concept of a rigid body be maintained."

"Euclidean geometry is only one of several congruence geometries... Each of these geometries is characterized by a real number K, which for Euclidean geometry is 0, for the hyperbolic negative, and for the spherical and elliptic geometries, positive. In the case of 2-dimensional congruence spaces... K may be interpreted as the ' of the surface into the third dimension—whence it derives its name..."

"[W]e propose... to deal exclusively with properties intrinsic to the space... measured within the space itself... in terms of... inner properties."

"Measurements which may be made on the surface of the earth... is an example of a 2-dimensional congruence space of positive curvature K = \frac{1}{R^2}... [C]onsider... a "small circle" of radius r (measured on the surface!)... its perimeter L and area A... are clearly less than the corresponding measures 2\pi r and \pi r^2... in the Euclidean plane. ...for sufficiently small r (i.e., small compared with R) these quantities on the sphere are given by 1):L = 2 \pi r (1 - \frac{Kr^2}{6} + ...), A = \pi r^2 (1 - \frac{Kr^2}{12} + ...)"

"In the sum \sigma of the three angles of a triangle (whose sides are arcs of s) is greater than two right angles [180°]; it can... be shown that this "spherical excess" is given by 2)\sigma - \pi = K \deltawhere \delta is the area of the spherical triangle and the angles are measured in s (in which 180° = \pi [radians]). Further, each full line (great circle) is of finite length 2 \pi R, and any two full lines meet in two points—there are no parallels!"

"[T]he space constant K... "" may in principle at least be determined by measurement on the surface, without recourse to its embodiment in a higher dimensional space."

"These formulae [in (1) and (2) above] may be shown to be valid for a circle or a triangle in the hyperbolic plane... for which K < 0. Accordingly here the perimeter and area of a circle are greater, and the sum of the three angles of a triangle are less, than the corresponding quantities in the Euclidean plane. It can also be shown that each full line is of infinite length, that through a given point outside a given line an infinity of full lines may be drawn which do not meet the given line (the two lines bounding the family are said to be "parallel" to the given line), and that two full lines which meet do so in but one point."

"The value of the intrinsic approach is especially apparent in considering 3-dimensional congruence spaces... The intrinsic geometry of such a space of curvature K provides formulae for the surface area S and the volume V of a "small sphere" of radius r, whose leading terms are 3)S = 4 \pi r^2 (1 - \frac{Kr^2}{3} + ...), V = \frac{4}{3} \pi r^3 (1 - \frac{Kr^2}{5} + ...)."

"In all these congruence geometries, except the Euclidean, there is at hand a natural unit of length R = \frac{1}{K^\frac{1}{2}}; this length we shall, without prejudice, call the "radius of curvature" of the space."

"We have merely (!) to measure the volume V of a sphere of radius r or the sum \sigma of the angles of a triangle of measured are \delta, and from the results to compute the value of K."

"What is needed is a homely experiment which could be carried out in the basement with parts from an old sewing machine and an Ingersoll watch, with an old file of Popular Mechanics standing by for reference! This I am, alas, afraid we have not achieved, but I do believe that the following example... is adequate to expose the principles..."

"Let a thin, flat metal plate be heated... so that the temperature T is not uniform... clamp or otherwise constrain the plate to keep it from buckling... [and] remain [reasonably] flat... Make simple geometric measurements... with a short metal rule, which has a certain coefficient of expansion c... What is the geometry of the plate as revealed by the results of those measurements? ...[T]he geometry will not turn out to be Euclidean, for the rule will expand more in the hotter regions... [T]he plate will seem to have a negative curvature K... the kind of structure exhibited... in the neighborhood of a ".""

"What is the true geometry of the plate? ...Anyone examining the situation will prefer Poincaré's common-sense solution... to attribute it Euclidean geometry, and to consider the measured deviations... as due to the actions of a force (thermal stresses in the rule). ...On employing a brass rule in place of one of steel we would find that the local curvature is trebled—and an ideal rule (c = 0) would... lead to Euclidean geometry."

"In what respect... does the general theory of relativity differ...? The answer is: in its universality; the force of gravitation in the geometrical structure acts equally on all matter. There is here a close analogy between the gravitational mass M...(Sun) and the inertial mass m... (Earth) on the one hand, and the heat conduction k of the field (plate)... and the coefficient of expansion c... on the other. ...The success of the general relativity theory... is attributable to the fact that the gravitational and inertial masses of any body are... rigorously proportional for all matter."

"The field equation may... be given a geometrical foundation, at least to a first approximation, by replacing it with the requirement that the mean curvature of the space vanish at any point at which no heat is being applied to the medium—in complete analogy with... the general theory of relativity by which classical field equations are replaced by the requirement that the Ricci contracted curvature tensor vanish."

"Now it is the practice of astronomers to assume that brightness falls off inversely with the square of the "distance" of an object—as it would do in Euclidean space, if there were no absorption... We must therefore examine the relation between this astronomer's "distance" d... and the distance r which appears as an element of the geometry."

"All the light which is radiated... will, after it has traveled a distance r, lie on the surface of a sphere whose area S is given by the first of the formulae (3). And since the practical procedure... in determining d is equivalent to assuming that all this light lies on the surface of a Euclidean sphere of radius d, it follows...4 \pi d^2 = S = 4 \pi r^2 (1 - \frac{K r^2}{3} + ...);whence, to our approximation 4)d = r (1- \frac{K r^2}{6} + ...), or r = d (1 + \frac{K d^2}{6} + ...)."

"[T]he astronomical data give the number N of nebulae counted out to a given inferred "distance" d, and in order to determine the curvature... we must express N, or equivalently V, to which it is assumed proportional, in terms of d. ...from the second of formulae (3) and... (4)... to the approximation here adopted, 5)V = \frac{4}{3} \pi d^2 (1 + \frac{3}{10} K d^2 + ...);...plotting N against... d and comparing... with the formula (5), it should be possible operationally to determine the "curvature" K."

"This... is an outrageously over-simplified account of the assumptions and procedures..."

"The search for the curvature K indicates that, after making all known corrections, the number N seems to increase faster with d than the third power, which would be expected in a Euclidean space, hence K is positive. The space implied thereby is therefore bounded, of finite total volume, and of a present "radius of curvature" R = \frac{1}{K^\frac{1}{2}} which is found to be of the order of 500 million light years. Other observations, on the "red shift" of light from these distant objects, enable us to conclude with perhaps more assurance that this radius is increasing..."

"It was the work of... Friedmann, Robertson and Walker, which resulted in the general mathematical framework that is still used today when discussing relativistic cosmological models of a homogeneous and isotropic universe."

"[I]nvestigations of cosmological issues, whose only observational basis was the observations. ...involved ...mostly of mathematicians like Howard Robertson and and astronomers with strong mathematical training such as Eddington, Lemaître, George McVittie, and William McCrea. They were mainly interested in how to apply general relativity to cosmological problems, which involved not only understanding cosmic dynamics but also solving the intricate problem of interpreting cosmological solutions to the Einstein equations, in particular separating time (which determined the evolution of the universe) from space (to which simplified assumptions concerning the structure of the universe, such as homogeneity and , were to be applied)."

"Distinguished scientist, selfless servant of the national interest, courageous champion of the good and the right, warm human being, he gave richly to us and to all from his own great gifts. We are grateful for the years with him. We mourn the loss of his presence but rejoice in the legacy of his wisdom and strength."

"Weyl published a third appendix to his Raum, Zeit, Materie, and an accompanying paper], where he calculated the redshift for the ‘de Sitter cosmology’,ds^2 = -dt^2 + e^{2{\sqrt{\frac{\Lambda}{3}t}}} (dx^2+dy^2+dz^2),the explicit form of which would only be found later, independently by Lemaître and Robertson."

"The basic cause and nature of cosmic expansion, along with its recently-observed acceleration, are significant problems of the standard model; so, condisering the evidence that the acceleration is best described by pure \Lambda, there is strong motivation to search for an alternative big bang model that would respect the pioneering concept of expansion, as a direct consequence of the ‘de Sitter effect’ in the modified . It is therefore worth investigating the axiomatic basis of the Robertson-Walker (RW) line-element."

"[I]n deriving the general line-element for the background geometry of FLRW [Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker, sometimes called the Standard Model] cosmology, Robertson required four basic assumptions: i. a congruence of s, ii. , iii. homogeneity, and iv. . i. and ii. are required to satisfy of a causal coherence amongst s in the entire Universe, by which every single event in the bundle of fundamental world lines is associated with a well-defined three-dimensional set of others with which it ‘really’ occurs simultaneously. However, it seems that ii. is therefore mostly required to satisfy the concept that synchronous events in a given inertial frame should have occurred simultaneously, against which I’ve argued..."

"Note.—The second part of this paper was considerably altered by me after the departure of Mr. Rosen for Russia since we had originally interpreted our results erroneously. I wish to thank my colleague Professor Robertson for his friendly in his assistance in the clarification of the original error."

"Important contributions to what would later appear as mainstream big bang cosmology were made by Americans Howard P. Robertson and Richard Tolman... Robertson (and independently, A. G. Walker in England) deduced in 1935 the most general form of the metric for a space-time satisfying the : the postulate that the universe is spatially homogeneous in its large scale appearance. This metric became generally known as the Robertson-Walker metric. Together with Tolman, Robertson pioneered the study of thermodynamics in the theory of the expanding universe."

"Many of the theoretical investigations of cosmology in the 1920s were examinations of De Sitter's model, which is particular because it can be understood both as a static model (as De Sitter did) and as an expanding model (as became the view after 1930). It is clearly problematic to read the pre-1930 literature in light of later knowledge. 'Expanding' versions of the De Sitter universe were found by in 1922, Hermann Weyl in 1923, and Lemaître in 1925, but were not conceived as expanding in any real sense. These works, as well as later works by Howard Percy Robertson and Richard Chase Tolman in the United States, consisted in transforming De Sitter's line element in such a way that it formally became static, that is, included a term F(t) referring to the time parameter. The metric, giving the distance in space-time between two neighboring points, would then be in the form ds^2 = c^2 dt^2 - F(t)(dx^2 = dy^2 +dz^2)."

"In 1928 Robertson found a non-static line element similar to the one Lemaître had found three years earlier. Also like Lemaître, he derived a linear relationship between apparent recessional velocities and distances, and he discussed it in relation to observation data. Within the same tradition was Tolman's 1929 derivation of a 'Hubble law', that is, a relationship of the form v = kr, with v = \frac{d\lambda}{\lambda}. Robertson and Tolman generalized the De Sitter model to an arbitrary scale factor F(t), but they remained within the static paradigm and did not realize the significance of F(t). In a paper of 1929, Robertson wrote the general line element of what would later be known as the Robertson-Walker models and he even referred to Friedmann's work. And yet, although he had evidently studied Friedmann, he 'misread' him and failed to realize the significance of the expanding metric."

"Robertson and Tolman developed much of the mathematics of the expanding universe, but without concluding or predicting prior to 1930 that the universe actually expands. They were not discoverers or codiscoverers of the expanding universe (and never claimed that they were)."

"Howard Percy Robertson was a postdoctorate student at Göttingen and Munich from 1925 to 1927. While in Göttingen he completed an important paper on relativistic cosmology in which he derived a relation between the velocity of nebulae and their distances. For the radius of the observable world he calculated R = 2 \times 10^{25} m. Although he had a velocity-distance relation and referred to Slipher's s, he did not conclude that the universe was in a state of expansion."

"Robertson wrote an influential [1933] review of relativistic world models in which he specifically excluded those which have "arisen in finite time from the singular state R = 0." Although he included the Einstein-de Sitter paper in his bibliography, he did not mention it in the review. He also did not mention Lemaître's primeval-atom hypothesis."

"Howard P. Robertson showed that the uncertainty relation follows from the commutation rule."

"As Daniel Dennefink explains in his article on the story behind the writings of the Einstein-Rosen gravitational paper, the singularity that Einstein and Rosen had encountered was an apparent singularity introduced by their choice of coordinate system, similar to the singularity one encounters when attempting to find the longitude of the North Pole. In fact, in his referee report Robertson had indicated that the singularity was removed by a change to a cylindrical coordinate system."

"In June 1936, Einstein and Rosen sent the paper... "Do Gravitational Waves Exist?" to The Physical Review... [which] rejected the paper, provoking Einstein's furious reaction. Einstein told the editor he... saw no reason to address the erroneous comments of his anonymous expert [Howard Percy Robertson] and... preferred to publish the paper elsewhere. ...Leopold Infeld arrived in Princeton to replace Rosen as... assistant. Einstein explained to him his proof of the non-existence of gravity waves. ...Infeld told Robertson [then professor of theoretical physics at Princeton] about Einstein's... paper[.] Robertson... found a trivial mistake [by] Infeld [and] clarified... the mistake in Einstein's explanation... The linearized approximation [led] to plane transverse gravitational waves... introduc[ing]... coordinate singularities... not real singularities. ...Robertson ...suggested ...the so-called Einstein-Rosen metric... be transformed... to cylindrical coordinates. ...the singularity can be regarded as describing a material source. The solution describe[s]...cylindrical... rather than plane gravitational waves. ...with Robertson's help (still not knowing it was Robertson who had [refereed] The Physical Review) ...Einstein ...revis[ed the] ...paper and added a section: "Rigorous Solution for Cylindrical Waves"... The new version of the paper was re-titled "On Gravitational Waves"..."

"Traditionally, fundamental theories of nature have had a tendency to break down at short distances. This often signals the appearance of new physics that is discovered once one has experimental instruments of high enough resolution (energy) to explore the higher energy regime. Before asymptotic freedom it was expected that any quantum field theory would fail at sufficiently high energy, where the flaws of the renormalization procedure would appear. To deal with this, one would have to invoke some kind of fundamental length. In an asymptotically free theory this is not necessarily the case — the decrease of the effective coupling for large energy means that no new physics need arise at short distances. There are no infinities at all, the bare coupling is finite — indeed it vanishes. The only divergences that arise are an illusion that appears when one tries to compare, in perturbation theory, the finite effective coupling at finite distances with the vanishing effective coupling at infinitely short distances. Thus the discovery of asymptotic freedom greatly reassured one of the consistency of four-dimensional quantum field theory. One can trust renormalization theory for an asymptotically free theory, independent of the fact that perturbation theory is only an asymptotic expansion, where it gets better and better in the regime of short distances."

"Are all the (measurable) dimensionless parameters that characterize the physical universe calculable in principle or are some merely determined by historical or quantum mechanical accident and incalculable?"

"... From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics and determined to become a theoretical physicist. I had no real idea what that meant, but it seemed incredibly exciting to spend one's life attempting to find the secrets of the universe by using one's mind."

"The universe has been expanding since the big bang, thus early on it was hot and dense. To trace the history of the universe we must understand the dynamics that operates when the universe was hot and particles were very energetic. Before the standard model we could not go back further than 200,000 years after the big bang. Today, especially since QCD simplifies at high energy, we can extrapolate to very eary times, where nucleons melt and quarks and gluons are liberated to form a quark-gluon plasma."

"String theory was not invented to describe gravity; instead it originated in an attempt to describe the strong interactions, wherein mesons can be thought of as open strings with quarks at their ends. The fact that the theory automatically described closed strings as well, and that closed strings invariably produced gravitons and gravity, and that the resulting quantum theory of gravity was finite and consistent is one of the most appealing aspects of the theory."

"Why is space-time doomed? There are many reasons, among which: In string theory we can change the dimension of space-time by changing the strength of the string force. Thus, the so-called II-A string theory, which semi-classically describes closed strings moving in ten-dimensional flat space for very weak coupling is dual for strong coupling to a theory, called M-theory, that at low energies is described by eleven-dimensional supergravity. By increasing the string coupling we can grow an extra dimension. How can the spatial continuum be fundamental if the number of spatial dimensions can be so changed?"

"Remarkably, the building of the Standard Model — the theory of how particles and forces interact — was the success of the conservatives. It required no revolution at the foundational level. Normal physics, the kind that goes on experiment after experiment, produced the Standard Model."

"Physics is always a gamble; it is a game of exploration. That’s the fun of it. We never know for sure what will happen. Sometimes, we theorists can anticipate, but nature is the final judge."

"The subject matter of mathematics is the expressions themselves together with the rules for manipulating them—nothing more."

"Intellectual property is an oxymoron."

"Nelson rejected the prevailing views to the effect that nonstandard analysis operates with some fictional elements that extend the standard world of mathematical entities. In his approach, nonstandard objects inhabit the realm of the most ordinary mathematical objects. Nelson emphasized the creative syntactic contribution of the new approach in the following terms: “Really new in nonstandard analysis are not theorems but the notions, i.e., external predicates.” (Nelson 1988 ...)"

"[L]et me refer to my original work. Naturally, if a student has been hammering away ever since 1979... he must have accumulated a lot of litter, much of which, perhaps, should have long since been swept away. But the fates are not to be bribed either by pother or importunity. Out of 1,000 men who are called, one (probably the ratio is much smaller) is chosen to do glorious scientific work. The others? Their lot is failure. They may be equally or even more industrious, they may have equal or even greater brain power—the other 999 exist merely to make the illustrious one in whom they culminate, possible. After that, the world will say to each in words of poetic brevity: "The man has done his duty, the man can go." And they do, pretty quickly, to a gentler lethe, flowing between the banks of amaranth and asphodel. Gentlemen, I am one of the 999 about to be forgotten."

"[F]ew important steps in dynamical geology will be made until the methods for the accurate measurement of high temperatures and high pressures have not only been perfected but rendered easily available. On the basis of this conviction the present memoir on high temperatures has been prepared... [I]f the investigation be of any fullness, it is almost essential that the observer master the component parts of his research separately; and not until he has satisfactorily done this can he apply them conjointly."

"[T]he rooms which had been placed at my disposal by the American Museum of New York became temporarily unavailable. ...[W]e determined to rent a house in New Haven, Conn., and thither the laboratory was removed in November, 1882. ...[T]he city offered excellent library and other facilities for scientific work, such as can be met only in the immediate vicinity of a large university [Yale College]. ...The work in New Haven was not satisfactorily completed. In July, 1883, with the appointment of Prof. F. W. Clarke as chief chemist of the Geological Survey, our laboratory was officially connected with the chemical laboratory. Conformably with the further decision of the Director, by which the divers laboratories of the Geological Survey were united in one central laboratory in Washington, it was again necessary to change our basis of operations, this time... from New Haven to Washington. In the quarters assigned to us in the U. S. National Museum, temperature work on so large a scale... appeared impracticable, and it was therefore abandoned. ...In place of the dangerous and cumbersome apparatus of the former laboratory, the endeavor is made to reduce all apparatus to the smallest dimensions compatible with reasonable accuracy of measurement."

"I make... a cursory survey of certain pyro-electric properties of the alloys of . Curiously... the data... led to a striking result.. it appears that the zero resistance f(0), if the resistance at t^O be r = f(t), and the zero coefficient f^{\prime}(0)/f(0), are related to each other by a law which during the stages of low percentage alloying is independent of the ingredients of the alloy, except in so far as they modify its electrical conductivity."

"I develop a method for the direct and expeditious comparison of the thermo-couple with the air thermometer. A comparison of the data... gives me a criterion of the accuracy with which the data in the region of high temperature are known. This indirect method... is not apparently as rigorous as their direct evaluation by means of the air thermometer; but the indirect method requires much smaller quantities of substance and may be conveniently extended to much higher temperatures. Taking all liabilities to error into consideration, its inferior accuracy is only apparent."

"Looking over such famous old books as Montmort's 'Analyse des jeux de hasard' or Moivre's 'Doctrine of Chances' one regrets that so much excellent mathematics should have been wasted on games most of which are wholly obsolete. Coriolus in his '[Théorie Mathématique des Effets du] Jeu de billard' (1835) fared better, for the game is still very much alive and its dynamical terrors unsubdued."

"In even greater measure is this true of the top. The top has been everybody's toy and must, therefore, at one time or another have piqued everybody's curiosity. Lagrange, Poinsot, Jacobi, not to mention other great names, have in turn paid their tribute; yet the top may be set spinning to-day, unhampered by a completed theory to account for its evolutions."

"Among recent contributions we may refer in particular to Professor A. G. Greenhill's noteworthy papers... when one remembers that these complex curves reach only especially simple cases of motion, one may get some notion of the difficulty of the problem involved."

"Turning to Klein's little book, one is astonished in finding the most general aspects of the subject treated almost without computation and in so little space. ...It would have cost little to give the expanded form of the &sigma;-function. ...Weierstrass's original notation was in terms of Abelian functions. The tremendous development of s is out of proportion with their application to natural phenomena. Meeting them rarely one forgets them. Memory peters out like the infinite series of a &zeta;-function."

"Mathematicians will do well to observe that a reasonable acquaintance with theoretical physics at its present stage of development, to mention only such broad subjects as electricity, elastics, hydrodynamics, etc., is as much as most of us can keep permanently assimilated. It should also be remembered that the step from the formal elegance of theory to the brute arithmetic of the special case is always humiliating, and that this labor usually falls to the lot of the physicist."

"The lecture concludes with a demonstration showing that a free body in hyperbolic non Euclidean space may be so fashioned as in real time to carry out the actual motions of the top. The form of such a body and the forces to actuate it are specified. Klein lays great stress on the beauty of this generalization. ...The full geometry of this case is not carried out in these lectures, however, and Klein regrets that the development of the s has recently fallen into abeyance."

"The reviewer is aware... he has given an imperfect account of this remarkable book. That Klein's researches constitute a splendid advance in dynamics of the rotation of a rigid body there can be no question. One cannot but hope that the outline given in these Princeton lectures may soon be expanded and put in shape more easily assimilated by persons more moderately versed in the theory of elliptic functions."

"The boon of an appropriate lemma is ideal generosity, and not even a mathematician can scorn its almost mathematical elegance."

"A man may be a thoroughgoing soldier enough on land; but put him in the foot ropes of the flying jibboom in a storm, and he is apt to cut a most ludicrous figure. Shift a physicist's foothold of Cartesian differential coordinates, suspend him over an abyss of non-Euclidean space, and he will kick sturdily. Poor policy this, for a missionary!"

"The presiding officer of this [Physics] section was Prof. Carl Barus, who fills the chair of Physics in Brown University. His inaugural address was on "Long Range Temperature and Pressure Variables in Physics." He began by giving a history of the various attempts to provide suitable apparatus for high-temperature measurement. Fusion first played an important part in the manufacture of s, and later those instruments based on specific heat showed an advantage over the fusion instruments. The was referred to as the only fruitful method of absolute pyrometry. The speaker dwelt at length on high-temperature work, the first thorough-going instance of which was by Prinsep in 1829. Then the experiments down to 1887 were considered in detail, and the conclusion reached that the data furnished by the Reichsanstalt will eventually be standard. ...Turning to the applications of pyrometry, he referred to the variation of metallic ebullition with pressure. Results already attained show an effect of pressure regularly more marked as the normal boiling point is higher. Igneous fusion was considered in its relation to pressure and with regard to the solidity of the earth, and the inference was drawn that the interior solidity of the earth, now generally admitted, is due only to superincumbent pressure, withholding fusion. The question of heat conduction was next taken up, and the results deduced by various writers as to the discussed. High pressure measurement was lengthily dealt with. Passing from this subject, the of liquids was considered. ...The paper ended with a reference to isothermals and several kindred subjects."

"In the decade between 1882 and 1892 contributions to gas thermometry and the measurement of high temperatures are few and unimportant, but work was begun in those years on both sides of the Atlantic which, for the experimental skill and persistence with which the experimental difficulties and limitations were pursued and successively overcome, surpasses any effort which has been made either before or since that time. These were the investigations of Barus at the U.S. Geological Survey in Washington and of [Ludwig] Holborn and his colleagues at the Reichsanstalt in Charlottenburg. Barus (1889) recognized as no observer who preceded him had done, the superlative importance of a uniform temperature distribution about the gas thermometer bulb for purposes of high-temperature measurement, and he took the most extraordinary precautions to maintain it. A temperature of 1000&deg; C or more is not attained without very steep temperature gradients in the region immediately surrounding the zone of highest temperature. It is therefore a problem of great difficulty to introduce a bulb of from 10 to 20 cm. in its largest dimension into this hot zone without leaving some portion of it projecting out into a region 200&deg; or 300&deg; lower in temperature. Burning mixtures of gas and air for heating purposes also contributed to the irregularity and uncertainity of the temperature distribution about the bulb. Barus sought to avoid this by a method of great ingenuity, but also of great technical difficulty. He inclosed his bulb within a rapidly revolving muffle which by its motion protected every portion of the bulb from direct exposure to a particularly hot or a particularly cold portion of the adjacent furnace. This complicated furnace structure and consequently inaccessible position of the bulb made it impossible to introduce into the region about the bulb the substances whose temperature constants were to be measured and compelled him to use thermo-elements which were first calibrated by exposure in the furnace with the bulb and then used independently to measure other desired temperatures. The thermo-element has continued in general use in this intermediary rôle since that time. In the preparation and use of thermo-elements Barus also made much more extensive and elaborate studies than any one who has followed him. ...It is an unfortunate accident that history has failed to record Barus's name along with that of Le Chatelier in the development of the thermo-element for purposes of high-temperature measurement. It hardly admits of question that Barus contributed incomparably more to our knowledge of the thermo-electric properties of the different metals and their use than his distinguished French contemporary, but the 10 per cent iridium alloy which he finally selected proved to be less serviceable than the 10 per cent rhodium alloy developed by Le Chatelier... And so we find the Le Chatelier platin-rhodium thermo-element in use to-day the world over, while the magnificent pioneer work of Barus remains but little known."

"[T]he author, whose work on nuclei is well known, describes a number of investigations carried out with his fog-chamber apparatus. The apparatus having been sufficiently improved, it was used for various experiments, including the growth of persistent nuclei, the production of water nuclei by evaporation, the results obtained when X-rays are allowed to strike the fog-chamber from different distances, the effect due to radium, &c. Other problems dealt with in the book are the distribution of colloidal nuclei and of ions in media other than air-water, the simultaneous variation of the nucleation and the ionization of the atmosphere of Providence, and the variations of the colloidal nucleation of dust-free air in course of time."

"When the history of the progress of physics in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is written, the name of Carl Barus will occupy an important place."

"At Brown University Carl Barus and Alpheus Packard are undoubtedly the most eminent scientists who ever occupied faculty chairs. Professor Barus was a hero-worshipper and in his home was a genius corner from which pictured faces of great scientists looked down upon him. ...The breadth of his interest and achievements was extraordinar—recall his reading of Greek tradedies in the original, his knowledge of French and Italian literatures, and the proficiency he attained in playing the violin, flute, clarinet, oboe, cornet, trumpet and trombone, in addition to the piano and organ. The brilliancy of his intellect, the modesty of his bearing, the beauty of his personality, and the kindliness of his spirit have left most precious and inspiring memories..."

"Carl Barus loved music, and composed about fifty compositions, among them a March to Pembrok Hall... and an Ode to the Steam Shovel, inspired by the daily noise outside his laboratory and was presented by him to President Faunce."

"Supergravity theories generically contain non-compact global symmetry groups. The general rule is that the scalar fields of the theory in question parametrize a symmetric space. Thus, if the non-compact symmetry group is G, and its maximal compact subgroup is H, the scalar fields map the space-time into the symmetric space G/H, and the number of scalar fields is dim G – dim H. The first supergravity example of this type to be found, N = 4 supergravity is one of the most interesting. In this case there are two scalar fields and the symmetric space is SL(2,R)/SO(2)."

"The second superstring revolution (1994-??) has brought non-perturbative string physics within reach. The key discoveries were the recognition of amazing and surprising "dualities." They have taught us that what we viewed previously as five theories is in fact five different perturbative expansions of a single underlying theory about five different points! It is now clear that there is a unique theory, though it may allow many different vacua. ... Three different kinds of dualities, called S, T, and U have been identified.""

"As I once told a newspaper reporter, in order to be sure to be quoted: discovery of supersymmetry would be more profound than life on Mars."

"String theory is an ambitious approach to the construction of a mathematical description of the physics that governs the properties of elementary particls and their interactions as well as the structure of space and time. It incorporates (and maybe even explains) well-established principles such as quantum mechanics and relativity. In fact, many string theorists (myself included) believe that string theory constitutes the third big physics revolution of the century, following relativity and quantum mechanics. It certainly requires conceptual advances every bit as bizarre and unexpected as was the case in the prior two revolutions."

"In the early 1960s there existed a successful quantum theory of the electromagnetic force (QED), which was completed in the late 1940s, but the theories of the weak and strong nuclear forces were not yet known. In UC Berkeley, where I was a graduate student during the period 1962 – 66, the emphasis was on developing a theory of the strong nuclear force. I felt that UC Berkeley was the center of the Universe for high energy theory at the time. Geoffrey Chew (my thesis advisor) and Stanley Mandelstam were highly influential leaders. Also, Steve Weinberg and Shelly Glashow were impressive younger faculty members. David Gross was a contemporaneous Chew student with whom I shared an office."

"Among the problems of the known string theories, as a theory of hadrons, was the fact that the spectrum of open strings contains massless spin 1 particles, and the spectrum of closed strings contains a massless spin 2 particle (as well as other massless particles), but there are no massless hadrons. In 1974, Joël Scherk and I decided to take string theory seriously as it stood, rather than forcing it to conform to our preconceptions. ... Specifically, Scherk and Schwarz (1974) proposed trying to interpret string theory as a unified quantum theory of all forces including gravity. Neveu and Scherk (1972) had shown that string theory incorporates the correct gauge invariances to ensure agreement at low energies (compared to the scale given by the string tension) with Yang-Mills theory. Yoneya (1973,1974) and Scherk and Schwarz (1974) showed that it also contains gauge invariances that ensure agreement at low energies with general relativity."

"One of the facts of nature is that there is what's called parity violation, which means that the fundamental laws are not invariant under mirror reflection. For example, a neutrino always spins clockwise and not counterclockwise, so it would look wrong viewed in a mirror. When you try to write down a fundamental theory with parity violation, mathematical inconsistencies often arise when you take account of quantum effects. This is referred to as the anomaly problem. It appeared that one couldn't make a theory based on strings without encountering these anomalies, which, if that were the case, would mean strings couldn't give a realistic theory. Green and I discovered that these anomalies cancel one another in very special situations. When we released our results in 1984, the field exploded. That's when Edward Witten [a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton], probably the most influential theoretical physicist in the world, got interested. Witten and three collaborators wrote a paper early in 1985 making a particular proposal for what to do with the six extra dimensions, the ones other than the four for space and time. That proposal looked, at the time, as if it could give a theory that is quite realistic. These developments, together with the discovery of another version of superstring theory, constituted the first superstring revolution."

"While spectacularly successful at predicting the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles, the quantum laws looked askance at Einstein's formulation of gravity. This set the stage for more than a half-century of despair as physicists valiantly struggled, but repeatedly failed, to meld general relativity and quantum mechanics, the laws of the large and small, into a single all-encompassing description. Such was the case until December 1984, when John Schwarz, of the California Institute of Technology, and Michael Green, then at Queen Mary College, published a once-in-a-generation paper showing that string theory could overcome the mathematical antagonism between general relativity and quantum mechanics, clearing a path that seemed destined to reach the unified theory."

"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."

"The conformal invariance of the Yang-Mills equations in four dimensions greatly facilitates the study of the temporal asymptotic behavior of their solutions."

"The real numbers are the dependable breadwinner of the family, the complete ordered field we all rely on. The complex numbers are a slightly flashier but still respectable younger brother: not ordered, but algebraically complete. The quaternions, being noncommutative, are the eccentric cousin who is shunned at important family gatherings. But the octonions are the crazy old uncle nobody lets out of the attic: they are nonassociative."

"Besides their possible role in physics, the octonions are important because they tie together some algebraic structures that otherwise appear as isolated and inexplicable exceptions."

"The most popular approach to quantum gravity is string theory. Despite decades of hard work by many very smart people, it's far from clear that this theory is successful. It's made no predictions that have been confirmed by experiment. In fact, it's made few predictions that we have any hope of testing anytime soon! Finding certain sorts of particles at the big new particle accelerator near Geneva would count as partial confirmation, but string theory says very little about the details of what we should expect. In fact, thanks to the vast "landscape" of string theory models that researchers are uncovering, it keeps getting harder to squeeze specific predictions out of this theory."

"Quantum theory may be formulated using Hilbert spaces over any of the three associative normed division algebras: the real numbers, the complex numbers and the quaternions. Indeed, these three choices appear naturally in a number of axiomatic approaches. However, there are internal problems with real or quaternionic quantum theory. Here we argue that these problems can be resolved if we treat real, complex and quaternionic quantum theory as part of a unified structure. Dyson called this structure the "three-fold way". ... This three-fold classification sheds light on the physics of time reversal symmetry, and it already plays an important role in particle physics."

"Human civilization as we know it will end, sometime in the 21st century."

"Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously."

"The showing was succesful. ...[T]he project went on to produce ...52 television programs and 3 volumes of textbooks, plus teacher's manuals, study guides... [etc.]... designed for... college level courses... [plus] complete... videos and print materials for... high schools. The program... cost nearly $10 million."

"Physics is not a newcomer to televised education. The first televised physics lecture dates... to the 1930s. A remarkable number of today's American research physicists—particularly... from rural and poorer sections of the country—trace their interest... to the... in the 1960s. The Mechanical Universe follows in that tradition..."

"Intellectually, technically and philosophically, physics and television are two separate cultures with almost no bridges between... [I]t is... time consuming and arduous... to span the gap... [T]here is no one... [at] Caltech... capable of reading, much less writing, a television script competently. ...[T]here is no one on the production side who knows enough... physics... to plan an important sequence, much less write a script or produce a program. This situation is a symptom of the malady of science illiteracy that ' is intended to help cure...""

"Let me be more explicit about the differences between a conventional telecourse and The Mechanical Universe. In the conventional course, the production company begins by convening a panel of hired academic consultants. ...Courses ...are basically education by committee, with the crucial job of teaching mainly in the hands of scriptwriters and producers. But... college education is to give... the benefit of learning from people who have spent a lifetime mastering their subjects and... adding new knowledge... The crucial part is organizing a subject and seeing the connections... precisely what telecourses entrust to scriptwriters. ...The Mechanical Universe ...arises out of a real physics course at a real—and excellent—university. It represents a single, unified vision of what physics is about, and how it's connected to its roots in mathematics, history and society. ...[N]ew techniques for had to be invented."

"The Mechanical Universe project had its roots in a routine revision of Caltech's introductory physics courses... assigned to Goldstein and begun in 1979... the first major changes... since... taught by Richard Feynman in the early 1960s."

"[T]he full series of 52 programs was first broadcast during the academic year 1986-1987..."

"The raw material for... both the television programs and the textbooks... was a set of verbatim transcripts of the lectures delivered by Goldstein in the revised Caltech physics course. ...[T]he material would be would be presented at two levels, at least in the textbooks if not in the television programs. The upper level... for physics and engineering majors... [t]he other textbook, which corresponds to the level of the television programs... for a more general audience. Nevertheless, it... include[d] differential and integral calculus... presented as they had arisen historically... as part of... mechanics. Mastering... simple... s and s would make physics easier to understand than... the pseudocalculus... in many college physics courses. ...Liberal Arts students had little difficulty learning calculus. ...[T]his was a "major pedagogic triumph" ...A primer, written by Apostol ...was added to the ...arsenal of aids ..."

"[T]he primary audience was to be the "nontraditional student," especially "distance learners,"... [I]t was hoped that with a resourceful, dedicated local teacher... the teaching of introductory physics at any level could be enriched... [A]lso... that a large, casual, nonstudent audience would watch... for pleasure and instruction. ...[T]hat ideal target audience was the high-school physics teacher."

"[T]he earlier Feynman course had sought to makes physics exciting by relating... to contemporary... problems. The new course took the opposite tack... to recreate the historical excitement of the original discovery. ...[[Classical mechanics|[C]lassical mechanics]] ...is treated as the discovery of "our place in the universe." ...[I]ts climax is Newton's solution of the . ...[[w:Living history|[H]istorical recreations]] ...became a staple of the project."

"[A] program is devoted to Millikan's oil-drop experiment, partly as an application of Newton's second law, and... to induce... philosophical ideas about how science is... done. ...The solution ...create a ..."Millikan Museum" ...in the Norman Bridge Laboratory where he had worked. The set involved thousands of artifacts, many ...Millikan's own ...After ...shooting ...the museum was disassembled, to live on only on videotape."

"The problem of how to present detailed mathematical derivations is confronted... in the animated scenes. ...The comprimise solution... invented while designing the pilot program, is called the "algebraic ballet." ...done in detail, but rapidly and entertainingly. The viewer was not expected to absorb every detail... [b]ut every step was displayed... [A]ttention is never lost during these [rapid] mathematical passages."

"The lack of qualified high-school physics teachers in the United States is a notorious (and self-perpetuating) problem. ...[C]ombating that problem was... one of the central goals of the TMU project. ...The idea was to induce teachers to study the college-level version so ...they could use the high-school materials ...with poise and confidence."

"The high-school editions... video modules, averaging 15 minutes... are accompanied by extensive written materials for the teacher, including suggestions, background material, demonstrations, and sample questions... [T]eachers are willing to work very hard to improve their skills... given reasonable support, and... even teachers who are well qualified... find new inspiration in... TMU."

"When I was vice chair of the faculty, the chair... was Robbie Vogt... As soon as he stepped down... and I became chair of the faculty, he became chair of the PMA division, and he called me into his office... in 1979. We had been teaching from the Feynman physics books... using them as textbooks ever since Feynman had given the lectures, from '62 to '64. ...[T]hey had just gotten too hard. It was great for the teachers; I loved teaching from his books. But for the students—if you didn’t already know physics, trying to learn physics from those books... Seeing physics with fresh eyes all over again, it’s wonderful—that’s why every scientist in the world owns a set of these books... [b]ut to learn it for the first time from those books is just impossible. You basically need to know physics, in order to appreciate them."

"Robbie... asked me to create the new physics course—at least the first year of the new physics course. And I said, “Robbie, when you were chair of the faculty, you asked for complete teaching relief. Now I’m going to be chair... and you’re giving me the hardest teaching job in the whole institution. Don’t you think that’s a little unfair?" We... cut a deal... full financial support for a postdoc so I could hire somebody to help me on my research group while I was doing all this."

"I taught Physics 1... [b]ut not from the Feynman books ...We used some conventional textbook ...but I sort of redesigned the course. ...By the time I started teaching it the second time, I started to get worried, because... I would go on teaching the same course forever... [or] I would leave it and somebody else would teach it and it would become a completely different course... One way of preserving memory is to write a textbook, but I had already written States of Matter...been there, done that. I didn’t want to do that. And then it occurred to me that television was bound to play some role in the future of education. ...What I vaguely had in mind was that the lecture could be taped by a television camera at the back of the room."

"So I went to Murph... and he said, "I’ll give you a little money to look into it." ...I think $50,000—and I hired... Don Delson... head of AV... to be my assistant... We learned all kinds of things..."

"I... remember one morning at... breakfast, reading the '... story that had given $10 million a year for fifteen years to make telecommunications materials for higher education. ...[H]e created ...the Annenberg CPB Foundation ...to give out Annenberg’s money. ...I ...got in touch with Sally Beaty and ...KCET ...and we wrote a proposal. ...KCET ...was on the verge of going belly-up. And they tried to load the entire overhead of the station on our project. ...[W]e got the award—with KCET not involved. ...[N]ow we had no flagship station, but we had the money ..."

"[I]t was no longer a television camera at the back of the room. It was now a production, with programs, and all the production values... [I]t... evolved into something far beyond anything I had imagined."

"Sally told me... it cost about $75,000 to make a half-hour program. ...[T]he original grant was for $750,000. We eventually got $6 million... [P]art of the proposal... was to make a pilot program that cost hundreds of thousands... and took three years... And that was a make-or-break—either they accepted the pilot program or the project was dead. ...It became the second program in the series... "The Law of Falling Bodies." ...this absolutely beautiful pilot program ...which cost $350,000 ...everybody loved it and they said, “Go ahead.” ...And that meant ...classy computer animation and ...actors ...We did all kinds of things you just don’t do in educational television."

"[N]obody ever made a million dollars on . Five years after the series went public, we got a letter ...saying, "You’ve crossed the threshold. You now share in the revenues." ...But by then, there were no more revenues. ...I didn’t care ...That wasn’t the purpose ...Later on, we applied to the for an additional $3 million to turn out a high school version ...without calculus."

"There are 25,000 high schools in the United States... and the number of qualified high school physics teachers... in the range of 2,000 to 4,000. So most high schools do not have anybody qualified... and physics is taught in most high schools. ...Many of the so-called crossover teachers, who were teaching physics but weren’t trained ...were teachers. Home economics had fallen out of favor."

"The Higgs boson is an essential part of the analogy to the Meissner effect in superconductivity that leads us to an excellent understanding of the masses of the electroweak gauge bosons W± and Z0 as consequences of electroweak symmetry breaking."

"If there is no connection between quarks and leptons, since quarks make up the proton, then the balance of the proton and electron charge is just a remarkable coincidence. It seems impossible for any thinking person to be satisfied with coincidence as an explanation. Some principle must relate the charges of the quarks and the leptons. What is it? A fancier way of saying it, and more or less equivalent, is that for the electroweak theory to make sense up to arbitrarily high energies, the symmetries on which it is based must survive quantum corrections."

"Each second, some 1014 neutrinos made in the Sun and about a thousand neutrinos made by cosmic rays in Earth's atmosphere pass through your body."

"Neither quarks nor leptons exhibit any structure on a scale of about 10-16 cm, the currently attained resolution. We thus have no experimental reason but tradition to suspect that they are not the ultimate elementary particles. Accordingly, we idealize the quarks and leptons as pointlike particles, remembering that elementarity is subject to experimental test."

"Ideas and techniques known in quantum electrodynamics have been applied to the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity. In an approximation which corresponds to a generalization of the Hartree-Fock fields, one can write down an integral equation defining the self-energy of an electron in an electron gas with phonon and Coulomb interaction. The form of the equation implies the existence of a particular solution which does not follow from perturbation theory, and which leads to the energy gap equation and the quasi-particle picture analogous to Bogolyubov's."

"It was the great multiplicity of the hadrons that led to the formulation of the quark model. Without some organizing principle such a large collection of particles seemed unwieldy, and the possibility that they might all be elementary offended those who hold the conviction, or at least the fond wish, that nature should be simple."

"The idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking was introduced into particle physics by Nambu ... in 1960. He suggested that the low mass and low-energy interactions of s could be understood as a reflection of a spontaneously-broken chiral symmetry, would have been exact if the up and down quarks were massless. His suggestion was that light quarks condense in the vacuum, much like the s of superconductivity. When this happens, the ‘hidden’ chiral symmetry causes the pions’ masses to vanish, and fixes their low-energy s to s, s and each other."

"Yoichiro Nambu was one of the most influential theoretical physicists of the twentieth century. His deep and unexpected insights often took years for others to understand and fully appreciate. They include: spontaneous symmetry breaking, for which he was awarded half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics; the theory of quarks and gluons; and string theory."

"We have an incredibly successful theory called the Standard Model. ... It still leaves open several questions."

"In this kind of physics, everybody is always looking ... to the smart people and what is everybody else working on."

"The standard model is just too good. It's too hard to find an experimental result that disagrees with it, and too hard to come up with theoretical advances that will address some of the things it leaves unexplained."

"It has always seemed to me that the hard thing to understand is not quantum mechanics, but where classical mechanics comes from (in the sense of how it emerges from a “measurement”)."

"How did particle physics get itself into its current state where some of its most prominent practitioners question whether their colleagues have given up on science?"

"Two of the major questions left unanswered by the Standard Model of particle physics have to do with hierarchies of mass scales. The first is the problem: what determines the masses of the s and s, and why do they span such a large range, e.g. why is the top quark 3 × 105 times heavier than the electron? The second is the gauge hierarchy problem: why is the weak scale seventeen orders of magnitude smaller than the ?"

"... for almost as long as people have been anticipating ... thinking about , the prime candidate for new physics, beyond the , ... has been supersymmetry."

"There are still many open questions that need answering: Why does gravity defy the notion of space-time in short distances? Why are there humongous quantum fluctuations in shorter distances? How is a larger Universe possible? These questions relate to the hierarchy problem and fine tuning and are divided into two stages. First, one should ask: “Why is there a macroscopic Universe that is not broken in the Planck scale,” and second: “Why are there large scale structures in the large Universe and they are not broken into Planck scale black holes?”"

"The stakes are higher than the past. We aren’t asking about this or that particle, but something much more deeply structural about physical reality. … By far the best way to settle this question is to lead a charge to the highest possible energies and build a 100-TeV collider."

"The hierarchy problem is the elephant in the room. ... And it originally showed up in the context of doublet–triplet splitting problem."

"This is the best few tens of billions years in the history of the universe to do cosmology."

"Whether in physics and mathematics or in the humanities, when something really finally works, it has a certain perfection to it, a feeling of inevitability, like it was so completely obvious all along, and it couldn't be any other way."

"... like most physicists, I really enjoy talking about physics."

"... nature has very few good ideas — it recycles them in subtle and interesting ways, over and over again — and it's our job to understand how that works."

"The black hole information paradox is probably the most important issue for fundamental physics today. If we cannot understand its resolution, then we cannot understand how quantum theory and gravity work together. Yet very few people seem to understand how robust the original Hawking arguments are and what exactly it would take to resolve the problem."

"The exact description of any physical process must include the effects of quantum gravity. But our experience suggests that there is a separation of scales, so that under suitable conditions we get 'lab physics'; i.e., physics described to good accuracy by quantum fields on gently curved spacetime."

"In the fuzzball paradigm, the black hole microstates have no interior, and radiate unitarily from their surface through quanta of energy E ∼ T. But quanta with E ≫ T impinging on the fuzzball create large collective excitations of the fuzzball surface. The dynamics of such excitations must be studied as an evolution in superspace, the space of all fuzzball solution |Fi⟩."

"Superstring theory has been studied intensively since 1984, when the discovery of Green and Schwarz of anomaly cancellation convinced many physicists that it provides a consisten theory of perturbative quantum gravity, gauge interactions and chiral matter. The basic difficulties in quantizing general relativity and supergravity (non-renormalizability or at least strong coupling at the Planck scale) are visible at low order in the loop expanison, while superstring theory was shown to be well-defined and finite to all orders."

"We believe string theory has a set of solutions, some of which might describe our world. Even leaving aside the question of few vacua or many, and organizing principles, perhaps the most basic question about the landscape is whether it will turn out to be more like mathematics, or more like chemistry."

"... I am going to go out on a limb, and argue that"

"But why did I do it? I confess that I'm an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them."

"Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)"

"The results of my little experiment [Sokal affair] demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy. The editors of Social Text liked my article because they liked its conclusion: that "the content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project" [sec. 6]. They apparently felt no need to analyze the quality of the evidence, the cogency of the arguments, or even the relevance of the arguments to the purported conclusion."

"When scientific research is increasingly funded by private corporations that have a financial interest in particular outcomes of that research—is the drug effective or not?—scientific objectivity is undermined. When universities are more interested in patent royalties than in the open sharing of scientific information, the public suffers. There are hundreds of important political and economic issues surrounding science and technology. Sociology of science, at its best, has done much to clarify these issues. But sloppy sociology, like sloppy science, is useless or even counterproductive."

"They used their intelligence to control things around them, instead of letting nature and the strong-muscled have their way."

"Finally, in one fateful trillionth of a second, a nuclear compound was formed that had two very important properties: it was stable, and it could make a copy of itself. Life had come to the crust of the neutron star."

"An animal doesn’t need to develop curiosity and intelligence if it has no problems that need solving."

"After a short flurry of national and international concern over the “death of the Sun,” the human race settled down to solving the insoluble problem in the best way that they knew—they ignored it and hoped it would go away."

"No data is preferable to poor data."

"Do you realize that when I get back from this trip two years from now I am going to be getting more in royalties from children’s books than I will in salary for being a space scientist?"

"She normally did not pay very much attention to religion, but, as Leader of the Clan, she was automatically Chief Worshiper of Bright at holy times, and it wouldn’t do to let things be disrupted by an obviously deranged individual."

"His eye-stubs reached out toward the Eyes in an attempt to copulate with the stars."

"The Leader of the Combined Clans, although nominally a devout worshiper of the God Bright, was willing to compartmentalize her mind and look at the pictures without being bothered by the religious overtones."

"If the computer had been a human, its eyebrows would have raised."

"They are signaling to us with the neutron star equivalent of America Indian smoke signals!"

"You are lucky. Very few theoretical scientists ever see their mathematical equations turned into working hardware in their lifetime."

"“Inertia propulsion!” Pierre exclaimed. “On our last shift we were teaching them Newton’s law of gravity. Today they have inertia drives! Where will they be tomorrow?” “They probably will be able to control space and time and won’t have to bother with such clumsy things as black hole gravity generators and inertia drives,” Amalita replied."

"I, and many other scientists, think the warming will be small compared the natural fluctuations in the earth’s temperature, and that the warming and increased CO2 will be good for mankind."

"We know that carbon dioxide has been a much larger fraction of the earth's atmosphere than it is today, and the geological record shows that life flourished on land and in the oceans during those times. The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science."

"Shut up...The demonisation of carbon dioxide is just like the demonisation of the poor Jews under Hitler. Carbon dioxide is actually a benefit to the world, and so were the Jews."

"I like to call this the CO2 anti-defamation league, because, there is the CO2 molecule, and it has undergone decade after decade of abuse, for no reason. We’re doing our best to try and counter this myth that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant. It’s not a pollutant at all. . . . We should be telling the scientific truth, that more CO2 is actually a benefit to the earth."

"There’s a whole area of climate so-called science that is really more like a cult. It’s like Hare Krishna or something like that. They’re glassy-eyed and they chant. It will potentially harm the image of all science."

"I am trying to explain to my fellow Americans the serious damage that will be done to us, and indeed to the whole world, by cockamamie policies to ‘save the planet’ from CO2."

"Temperatures have not risen very much, and most of the temperature rise is probably completely natural, and has nothing to do with increasing CO2. Industrialization probably played a small role, but I think it's very hard to tell how much."

"...the public in general doesn't realize that from the point of view of geological history, we are in a CO2 famine.... There is no problem from CO2. The world has lots and lots of problems, but increasing CO2 is not one of the problems. So [the accord] dignifies it by getting all these yahoos who don't know a damn thing about climate saying, 'This is a problem, and we're going to solve it.' All this virtue signaling. You can read about it in the Bible: Pharisees and hypocrites and phonies."

"Happer is a former Princeton physics professor who co-founded the group in 2015. Before that, he chaired the George Marshall Institute—dissolved around the same time of the CO2 Coalition's founding—and developed a reputation as one of the nation's premier climate skeptics."

"Before he founded the CO2 Coalition, Happer chaired the George Marshall Institute and developed a reputation as one of the nation's premier climate "skeptics." The Institute received $865,000 from ExxonMobil between 1998 and 2011. (Elsewhere, ExxonMobil-funded think tanks have been found offering scientists $10,000-a-pop to undermine climate reports.) With a degree in physics from Princeton, Happer is unusually qualified to serve in this area—the various other deniers I spoke to for the story had degrees like a bachelor's in political science or a PhD in geography—but he is a professional denier all the same."

"Happer, who worked at the Energy Department under George H.W. Bush and joined the White House in September to work on “emerging technologies,” is not formally trained as a climate scientist."

"It’s important to note the person behind this attempt to chill our defense agencies from understanding and managing climate risk is Dr. Will Happer. Dr. Happer testified before Congress in December 2015 that the world has too little Carbon Dioxide and is too cold – an extreme, fringe view even for the tiny number of scientists who call themselves climate skeptics. This is a clumsy attempt to force the entire federal government to conform to a bizarre view thoroughly rejected by the vast majority of scientists."

"If gravity is a fundamental force, then it has to be explained by an expanded version of general relativity, a more complete, a more fundamental theory. Whether that is quantum gravity of something more radical that requires a paradigm shift like, for instance, our research in multiverse theory, nobody knows at the moment."

"You can vary Newton's constant and the fine-structure constant, which is responsible for the strength of electromagnetic interactions ... by six orders of magnitude, by thousands, and still get a universe that allows for life."

"There are strong reasons to expect that low energy supersymmetry is the probable outcome of experimental and theoretical progress, and that it will soon be directly experimentally confirmed. By low energy, we mean (softly) broken supersymmetry with an effective soft Lagrangian whose mass parameters are typically of order the electroweak scale but otherwise not special or constrained."

"Actually, the situation today is surprising to many because almost all the data are in, so to speak. ... The two big gaps are what particle(s) make up the dark matter, and whether there is electroweak-scale supersymmetry."

"For our next colliders the goal is to provide data for a more comprehensive theory, hopefully one that incorporates dark matter, quantum gravity, and neutrino masses and solves the hierarchy problem."

"Gravity is not an option in string theory. It is a logical consequence of it!"

"Most string theorists are very arrogant ... If there is something [beyond string theory], we will call it string theory."

"The quantum dualities, which are known as S-duality or U-duality, extend the classical T-duality and lead to a beautiful and coherent picture of stringy dualities. These exchange highly quantum situations with semiclassical backgrounds, exchange different branes, etc. As in the classical dualities, among all dual descriptions there is at most one description which is natural because it is semiclassical. All other dual descriptions are very quantum mechanical."

"Supersymmetry arises naturally in string theory. (It was originally motivated by string theory.)"

"Ultimately, we hope to find a fundamental theory that explains everything with no input parameters."

"Whenever you work on something and try to solve one problem, and you end up helping or solving many other problems, it is a sign that what you are doing is good."

"The phenomenon of genetic recombination provides a powerful tool for separating mutations and discerning their positions along a chromosome. When it comes to very closely neighboring mutations, a difficulty arises, since the closer two mutations lie to one another, the smaller the probability that recombination between them will occur. Therefore, failure to observe recombinant types among a finite number of progeny ordinarily does not justify the conclusion that the two mutations are inseparable but can only place an upper limit on the linkage distance between them. A high degree of resolution requires the examination of very may progeny. This can best be achieved if there is available a selective feature for the detection of small proportions of recombination."

"Complex as it is, much of the vast network of cellular functions has been successfully dissected, on a microscopic scale, by the use of mutants in which one element is altered at a time. A similar approach may be fruitful in tackling the complex structures and events underlying behavior, using behavioral mutations to indicate modifications of the nervous system. Drosophila offers the same advantages to such a study as it did to classical genetics, namely, large numbers and short generation time, to which now may be added an enormous store of accumulated knowledge concerning the organism. Containing about 105 neurons, the fly's nervous system is roughly halfway, on a logarithmic scale, between a single neuron and the human brain, and the fly is possessed of a rich repertoire of behavior."

"The problems that Benzer and his students are solving are problems that scientists and philosophers from the beginning of recorded history have been unable to solve and also unable to ignore."

"Key aspects of the bacteriophage work illustrate central features of Seymour's ability to design scientific investigations; these features played out again and again in his scientific career, to great success. One of these is the “simple assay.” Seymour was an enthusiast of developing and using simple assays to approach any biological question of interest. Why use a complicated, time-consuming assay if a simple one would address the question equally well? Using a simpler assay would give more time and opportunity to delve in greater depth into the specific scientific question, as well as allow more time and opportunity to address additional questions of great interest."

"The year 1950 saw tremendous advances in the laboratory study of mesons. It was the first year in which the accelerator physicists outdistanced the cosmic ray physicists in so far as their contributions to our understanding of the properties of mesons, the character of their production, and the nature of their interactions with nucleons are concerned. ... The cyclotron and synchrotron at Berkeley still led the procession, but Rochester and Columbia with their cyclotrons, Cornell and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with their synchrotrons, and Illinois with its betatron were rapidly catching up."

"Dirac's argument for electric charge quantization (ECQ) is not to be taken lightly because it is the first "topological conservation law" uncovered in Abelian gauge theory. Since Dirac's two papers on the magnetic monopole were published, other potential physical examples of "topological conservation laws" have been identified in non-Abelian gauge theories (e.g. instantons, 't Hooft-Polyakov magnetic monopoles, etc.) which have revealed the rich topological structure of QCD ... Moreover, with regard to Dirac's ECQ argument, it is likely that — within the framework of the standard model — ECQ is well explained by the chiral gauge anomaly-free constraints, which, to some extent, contain topological information ..."

"... during the last two decades, there has been introduced into physical methodology a principle of utmost philosophical importance, easily rivaling that of relativity, and, in some respects, indeed that of causality. Discovered by Pauli in 1925, it immediately elucidate a whole realm of physical facts and was accepted by physicists with wide acclaim. Called the exclusion principle—or Pauli principle, or principle of anti-symmetry—it was embodied in the axiomatics of quantum mechanics; its pecular methodological significance passed out of view."

"Philosophy shows itself to be alive when it raises, again and again, the deep concerns that plague man's reason; it dies when it presumes to have resolved them with finality. Determinism and freedom in their conjunction pose one of the eternal questions ..."

"The combination of interest in physics and in philosophy was uncommon in the United States, and physicists who deviated from the narrow path were looked down upon by their colleagues. Philosophy of physics was definitely regarded as an aberrant, evasive sort of discipline, practiced by physicists who 'could not make it' in their straight profession and, in somewhat greater numbers, by philosophers whose knowledge of physics was inadequate."

"I suspect that in general the relativity and quantum theories are two complementary aspects of a deeper theory that will involve a kind of cosmic consciousness. The cosmic consciousness or the ‘Mahat’ of India’s Samkhya Philosophy is the basis of entire Creation."

"My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular levels."

"Newton's achievements in optics alone would probably entitle him to a place on this list; however, they are considerably less important than his accomplishments in pure mathematics and mechanics. His major mathematical contribution was his invention of integral calculus, which he probably devised when he was twenty-three or twenty-four years old. That invention, the most important achievement of modern mathematics, is not merely the seed out of which much of modern mathematical theory has grown, it is also the essential tool without which most of the subsequent progress in modern science would have been impossible. Had Newton done nothing else, the invention of integral calculus by itself would have entitled him to a fairly high place on this list."

"The impact of Jesus on human history is so obvious and so enormous that few people would question his placement near the top of this list. Indeed, the more likely question is why Jesus, who is the inspiration for the most influential religion in history, has not been placed first. There is no question that Christianity, over the course of time, has had far more adherents than any other religion. However, it is not that relative influence of different religions that is being estimated in this book, but rather the relative influence of individual men. Christianity, unlike Islam, was not founded by a single person but by two people —Jesus and St. Paul— and the principal credit for its development must, therefore, be apportioned between those two figures."

"It has often been said that if Christ were to return to earth, he would be shocked at many of the things which have been done in his name, and horrified at the bloody fights between different sects of persons who call themselves his followers."

"Buddha and Confucius have had an approximately equal influence upon the World. Both lived at about the same tme, and the number of their adherents has not been too different. I have chosen to place Buddha before Confucius for two reasons: first, the advent of Communism in China seems to have greatly diminished Confucius influence; and second, the failure of Confucianism to spread widely outside of China indicates how closely the idea of Confucius were grounded in pre-existing Chinese attitudes."

"But Confucianism was not merely the official philosophy of the Chinese administration. Confucius ideals were accepted by the majority of the Chinese people, and for over two thousand years deeply influenced their life and thought."

"We have stressed that the cosmological constant (i.e. the dark energy) presents potentially the most striking failure of naturalness. One might hope to solve this problem by introducing new degrees of freedom. Supersymmetry helps to some extent."

"The only string theories we really understand well have exact supersymmetry."

"...If we fail to act to bring down our carbon emissions over the next decade, this will lock in disastrous melting of the ice sheets, sea level rise, and a rise in devastating weather extremes down the road. (2019)"

"this vision could have been built into the global trade architecture that would rise up in the early to mid-1990s. If we had continued to reduce our emissions at that pace we would have been on track for a completely de-carbonized global economy by mid-century. But we didn't do any of those things. And as the famed climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, puts it, "There's a huge procrastination penalty when it comes to emitting carbon into the atmosphere": the longer we wait, the more it builds up, the more dramatically we must change to reduce the risks of catastrophic warming."

""There's no question that climate change has increased the frequency of certain types of extreme weather events," climate scientist Michael Mann told me in an interview, "including drought, intense hurricanes, and supertyphoons, the frequency and intensity and duration of heat waves, and potentially other types of extreme weather though the details are still being debated within the scientific community.'"

"According to , “Professor Mike Mann has been a world leader in scientific efforts to understand the natural variability of the climate system and to reconstruct global temperature variations over the past two millennia. This critically important work led to the famous 'hockey-stick' temperature reconstruction. The hockey stick provides compelling evidence for the emergence of a human-caused warming signal from the background noise of natural fluctuations in climate.”"

"At the other end of the spectrum are stories that it's too late, that it's all over, that there's nothing left to do. Misinterpretations of the data lead some to declare that the Earth itself is going to die or human beings are going to die out in the near future, stories that clash with what the evidence tells us. They make people feel terrible, and they make them passive. Doomism, as climate scientist Michael Mann calls it, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if it prevents the action that can shift us away from the worst-case scenarios."

"The n-point correlation functions have proved useful not only as descriptive statistics but also as dynamic variables in the Newtonian theory of the evolution of clustering. ... The functions are generalized to mass correlation functions in position and momentum, and the BBGKY hierarchy of equations for their evolution is derived. This yields a new way to analyze the evolution of mass clustering in an expanding universe."

"A solid stores energy in the vibrations of the atoms about their equilibrium positions. In the simplest approximation, which Einstein considered, each atom vibrates with the same frequency, ν, in each of three dimensions, so a solid containing N atoms can be thought of as 3N one-dimensional simple harmonic oscillators."

"Another somewhat confusing usage is the name "the big bang" for the standard model. It is not appropriate, because it connotes a spatially isolated event, an explosion, that marked the start of everything. ... But the name has a very evident appeal and I expect that people will continue to use it."

"I have been working in cosmology for 55 years ... I'm the last man standing, so to speak, from those early days."

"I don't think there is a final theory of anything. It's theories all the way down."

"Don't pay too much attention to that Nobel Prize. They have to be capricious — they have to be. And that means that people fully deserving the award don't get it."

"I have no doubt that ESP is a non-local ability independent of space and time. What that means is that we misapprehend the nature of the spacetime we’re living in."

"Very hard for a skeptic to say that didn’t happen if the president is saying these guys in California found the airplane. We did many things like that."

"The CIA came to us one day and said 'we would like information about what's going to happen at some coordinates... next Thursday.' This was on a Monday...they wanted us to look 3 days into the future and describe what's happening... Swann said... this looks like a big pyrotechnics display... like the fourth of July, big hemispherical display of fireworks with beautiful color traces up in the air and a bunch of trucks in the far distance...[then] The CIA could see from what he had drawn and from what they had... into the future...The CIA knew the Chinese were planning an atomic bomb test and from what Swann had drawn, that they would carry out the test and that it would fail."

"Consider a pair of electrons which interact above a quiescent Fermi sphere with an interaction of the kind that might be expected due to the phonon and the screened Coulomb fields. If there is a net attraction between the electrons, it turns out that they can form a bound state, though their total energy is larger than zero. The properties of a noninteracting system of such bound pairs are very suggestive of those which could produce a superconducting state."

"Relativity, from one viewpoint the beginning of twentieth-century physics, is from another the capstone of classical physics, the final and most elegant variation of the world view initiated by Galileo and Newton. In a sense, after Einstein, classical physics, just as after Mozart classical music, could go no further."

"The fundamental qualitative difference between the superconducting and normal ground state wave function is produced when the large degeneracy of the single particle electron levels in the normal state is removed. If we visualize the Hamiltonian matrix which results from an attractive two-body interaction in the basis of normal metal configurations, we find in this enormous matrix, sub-matrices in which all single-particle states except for one pair of electrons remain unchanged. These two electrons can scatter via the electron-electron interaction to all states of the same total momentum. We may envisage the pair wending its way (so to speak) over all states unoccupied by other electrons."

"The long and imposing list of physicists (among them Bohr, Heisenberg and Feynman) who had tried or were trying their hand at superconductivity should have given me pause. Even Einstein, in 1922 — before the quantum theory of metals was in place — had attempted to construct a theory of superconductivity. Fortunately, I was unaware of these many unsuccessful attempts. So when John invited me to join him (he, somehow, neglected to mention these previous efforts), I decided to take the plunge."

"How do we get emotions and feelings out of neurons which, presumably, don't have emotions and feelings?"

"We cannot expect in the immediate future that all women who seek it will achieve full equality of opportunity. But if women are to start moving towards that goal, we must believe in ourselves or no one else will believe in us; we must match our aspirations with the competence, courage and determination to succeed."

"Initially, new ideas are rejected. Later they become dogma, if you’re right. And if you’re really lucky you can publish your rejections as part of your Nobel presentation."

"We still live in a world in which a significant fraction of people, including women, believe that a woman belongs and want to belong exclusively in the home."

"We were witnessing the birth of a new era in endocrinology, one that started with Yalow."

"They were old enough to know such things were forbidden, yet young enough still to find the forbidden irresistible rather than terrifying."

"Heartlessness wasn’t the sole province of the rich."

"And, as was so often the case, the history taught to children was oversimplified, watered down, and ofttimes counterfactual."

"How could you comprehend things whose existence you doubt?"

"Freedom felt like… nothing. Free Will was a vacuum, a negative space. It was the absence of coercion, the absence of compulsion, the absence of agony. A gap in his consciousness where geasa had perpetually jostled for priority, demanding his obedience. It was the photographic negative of Jax’s existence during every minute of the 118 years since he’d been forged. It was overwhelming. Exhilarating. Terrifying. Overwhelming: he could do anything he wanted. But the grand sum of anything-at-all was nothing-at-all. The topology of freedom offered no gradients to nudge him, no landmarks to guide him. How did humans guide themselves? How did they know what to do and what not to do? How did they know when to do anything without the benefit of geasa and metageasa to prioritize every single action of their waking lives? How did they order their daily existence without somebody to tell them what to do?"

"First, the fact he awoke at all. Cogito, ergo how the hell aren’t I dead?"

"The fallacy of your personal bias is inherent in your choice of words."

"“Absence of proof,” said Bell, “is not proof of absence.”"

"“Sergeant,” she said as they mounted the stairs leading to her old apartments, “thank you for treating me like a human being. And, for what it’s worth, I am sorry about how this turned out.” He grunted. “It can’t be undone,” was all he said."

"He’d expected torture. He hadn’t expected surgery."

"He didn’t trust them. But he did trust their greed."

"Such were the brittle threads of a relationship built not on trust but on a slurry of fear, mutual codependence, and self-interest."

"It isn’t courtly politics if somebody doesn’t get a dagger in the back."

"It’s not my fault your makers made you humorless."

"Perhaps there really was a God, and He was just as cruel as the humans He made in His form."

"“You narrow-minded idiots have mistaken delaying the inevitable for a divinely bestowed right to survive… You aren’t noble survivors of a historical tragedy, you’re a lingering curiosity of a bygone age. The last vestige of a primitive past. Dust to be swept away. The difference between you and I, dear Berenice, is that I recognized the broom for what it was. And got out of the way.”"

"Only a fool wasted energy on things he could not control."

"But the speculation was pointless. The past was forever in the past."

"“The duke was right about you.” “He survived? That’s a shame.”"

"Your family excels at being a pain in my ass. Are you certain you’re not part Dutch?"

"“How have you acquired such intimate knowledge of our kind’s innermost construction?” “You know exactly how. You need me because I’m not burdened with a system of mores that hobbles my inquiries. So you can drop the indignation and make yourselves useful.”"

"Huygens, there are times when I take comfort in my sinful nature, for it means I’ll meet you in hell. I’ll be the one stomping on your jewels with singular dedication."

"We’ve drawn attention to ourselves with our obsessive need to stay inconspicuous."

"To lose the satchel now would prove that God, if He existed, was a truly sadistic son of a bitch."

"Every additional second the king didn’t take a bullet in the eye seemed a good sign."

"Alchemy was useful but never compassionate."

"The grotesque machine reassembled its head. The medical servitor stood, emitted a burst of ticktock cog chatter, then flung itself into the massacre with the fervor of a religious zealot."

"I’ve learned to be wary when something makes you this excited."

"“Well,” he said, “you must be feeling very proud of yourself right now.” “It occurs to me that I might be an underappreciated genius.” She paused to clutch the mast again during a particularly hard gust. “But I’ll tell you something. It’s not so wonderful, learning you were right all along to suspect the world is conspiring against you.”"

"“If you’re going to insist on giving perfectly logical and reasonable answers to stupid questions,” she said, “you may put a dent in my delusions of genius.”"

"Sometimes the contortions required to spit on Occam’s razor were just as disturbing as the insights one yearned to avoid."

"Because the universe was a cold, callous place. And they had just peered into the gulf separating the astronomically unlikely from the truly impossible."

"“It’s a debate,” he spat, “over truth. Which truth is more true? The inspiring myth or the bleak, blood-caked reality?”"

"I am a pragmatist, said Mab. I do what must be done to make a better world. “Oh, I’m sure you tell yourself that. But so does the woman who tortured Lilith. You sound exactly like her, in fact. The difference is that Berenice actually means it. She doesn’t use the pretense to justify her cruelty.”"

"Salazar consulted the map again. “Almost there,” he whispered. “Just another mile.” Arthur sighed. “Wonderful.” Anastasia rounded on him. “Go wander the tunnels on your own, you useless pencil pusher. You have zero skills of value to offer to our current situation. Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but of all the problems currently facing the city, the Guild, and the Empire, not to mention ourselves, a lack of properly filed paperwork is not one of them.”"

"“What the hell was that?” “That was a close call wrapped in some very unpleasant philosophical questions.”"

"“Have you any idea how long and painful my convalescence was?” Berenice shrugged. “Have you any idea how little I care?”"

"You’re no stranger to spinning gold from the hay of human misery, are you?"

"An especially intractable breed of problems in physics involves those with very many or an infinite number of degrees of freedom and in addition involve “renormalization.” Renormalization is explained as the existence of very many length or energy scales of importance in the physics of the problem. The renormalization group approach is a way of reducing the complexity of these problems to the point where numerical methods can be used to solve them. The Kondo problem (dilute magnetic alloys) is used as an illustration."

"The fourth aspect of renormalization group theory is the construction of nondiagrammatic renormalization group transformations, which are then solved numerically, usually using a digital computer. This is the most exciting aspect of the renormalization group, the part of the theory that makes it possible to solve problems which are unreachable by s. The Kondo problem has been solved by a nondiagrammatic computer method."

"Asymptotic freedom arises as follows. The fundamental interactions of quarks and gluons are modified by “radiative” corrections of higher order in the quark-gluon coupling constant. These radiative corrections depend on the quark and gluon momenta. A careful analysis shows that the cumulative effect of radiative corrections to all orders can be characterized by a momentum-dependent effective coupling constant. The effective coupling is found to vanish in the limit of large momenta (to be precise, large momentum transfers between the quarks and gluons). This is called asymptotic freedom. As a result of asymptotic freedom the quarks can behave as nearly free particles at short distances; this is required to explain the high energy electron scattering experiments ... Meanwhile the interactions of quarks at long distances can be strong enough to bind the quarks into the observed bound states; protons, mesons, etc."

"Sometime toward the end of my second year, I started working with Gell-Mann. I went to Gell-Mann and he gave me a problem to work on and suggested I start working with fixed source theory of K-particles, where he wanted me to do things involving strong and weak interactions. And it's when I read about fixed source theory that I began to learn about renormalization group and realized it could be applied to fixed source theory, and I don't know whether there were papers that I read about renormalization group and fixed source theory, or I worked it out for myself, but in playing around with this, sort of trying to learn what was going on, I discovered that there were great simplifications that took place when you took the fixed source equation and took them to high energies, and when you did a leading log approximation. In the end, I discovered that those equations, simplified at the high energies -- you could get exact solutions. That was part of my thesis. And that was the initial thing that sparked my interest in the renormalization group. I remember when I presented my thesis to a seminar, and this was when Feynman was there, but not Gell-Mann. I went through all this exciting mathematics and toward the end, someone said, "Yes, that's fine, but what good is it?" I remember Feynman's answer as "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth!""

"You shouldn’t choose a problem on the basis of the tool. You start by thinking about the physics problem, and the computational method should be a tool like any other. Maybe you’ll solve it using computer techniques, maybe using a contour integral; but it’s very important to approach it starting from the physics because otherwise you get lost in the use of the tool, and lose track of where you’re trying to go."

"The first efforts to turn quantum field theory into a rigorous mathematical subject occurred in the 1950s, when Wightman in particular formulated a set of axioms which define what we mean by a relativistic quantum field theory ... The subject took a significant step forward around 1970 largely through the work of Ken Wilson, who taught us to think of quantum field theory as a kind of second-order phase transition ... The Standard Model of particle physics was also formulated in the 1970s, and still stands as our best description of the strong and electroweak interactions after decades of thorough vetting in high-energy-physics experiments. ... Ken Wilson is a hero to me and many others because he provided a satisfying answer to the question: What is quantum field theory? (His was not the first answer, nor was it the complete and final answer, but nevertheless it transformed our understanding of the subject.) Wilson understood more deeply than his predecessors the meaning of renormalization."

"Ken Wilson was one of a very small number of physicists who changed the way we all think, not just about specific phenomena, but about a vast range of different phenomena."

"Wilson was quick to appreciate the promise of QCD, but he realized that to calculate the theory’s consequences at (relatively) low energies or long distances would be a demanding task. Wilson’s approach ... was revolutionary in its directness: He formulated the theory in computer-friendly form, essentially as a complicated definite integral in a space of enormously large dimension, and then set out to perform the integral numerically. Many years passed before computers and algorithms were up to the job, but lattice gauge theory amply fulfilled Wilson’s vision. The highest award in the field, awarded annually at the major international conference in Lattice Field Theory, bears Wilson’s name."

"In the past few years the search for a consistent quantum theory of gravity and the quest for a unification of gravity with other forces have led to a great deal of interest in theories with extra spatial dimensions. These extra spatial dimensions are unseen because they are compact and small, presumably with typical dimensions of the Planck length, lPl = 1.616 × 10-33 cm. If the “internal” dimensions are static and small compared to the large “external” dimensions the only role they would play in the dynamics of the expansion of the Universe is in determining the structure of the physical laws. However, if the big bang is extrapolated back to the Planck time, then the characteristic size of both internal and external dimensions were the same, and the internal dimensions may have had a more direct role in the dynamics of the evolution of the Universe."

"We live in a hot, expanding Universe. We also live in a Universe that on 'large' scales is homogeneous, the same at every point, and isotropic, the same in every direction. There is an ample (and growing) body of evidence for homogeneity and isotropy. The isotropy and homogeneity of the Universe is the most fundamental principle in modern cosmology. In fact, it is called the Cosmological Principle."

"The precision cosmological measurements have lead to the latest cosmological model, usually called the standard cosmological model, or ΛCDM, where Λ indicates Einstein’s cosmological constant (or more generally, dark energy), and CDM stands for cold dark matter. ... The most remarkable feature of the standard cosmological model is that it seems capable of accounting for all cosmological observations; i.e., it seems to work!"

"Leon and I used to tease each other, because he's an experimentalist and I'm a theorist. And experimentalists are jealous of theorists, because theorists are smarter."

"You can have all your scientific method down, all your experiments done accurately and recorded in minute detail. But most of the significant, universe-changing advances in science were not done by methodically plodding ahead with reasonable steps. Things like Einstein's theory of relativity or the foundations of quantum mechanics came about more as hunches. Scientists talk about a theory being elegant - it just feels right. Sometimes you have to just trust your instincts. People often talk about following your head or your heart, but sometimes there's a deeper feeling you follow. Sometimes you follow your guts, your instincts. Scientists are also trained to do that."

"I also love working for the government (no really!). There is more security working for a government lab and I didn't have to get tenure. The people at NASA are so good -so dedicated, so fun to be with"

"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."

"Is our universe fundamentally a mess, or is there some simple and natural structure that all this could emerge from, or be parts of? One approach to answering these questions is String Theory (or, more generally, M-Theory), but string unification models have grown excessively in complexity while producing zero predictive progress. After several decades of extensive theoretical exploration leading nowhere, it is time to consider that the string program may have been a wrong turn. If we backtrack, imagining String Theory never happened, we can go in a new direction, building on the success of Grand Unified Theories and recent progress in Loop Quantum Gravity. The structures of GUTs and LQG rely heavily on Lie groups and are remarkably compatible. By considering the known Lie groups and fields of physics as parts of a larger geometric whole, we move towards Lie group unification."

"I think that, without experimental checks, physics can — and has — gone off the rails ... experiment has to be the ultimate decider of what is good physics."

"For almost a decade, Lisi moved on no fixed schedule between Maui, where he likes to surf, and the mountains of the West, where he snowboards. Four years ago, Lisi persuaded his girlfriend, Crystal Baranyk, who is an artist, to move with him into an old Colorado ski-shuttle van; he remodelled it himself, shipped it to Maui, and parked it by the beach. They lived in the van for a year, with no toilet. He worked intermittently, sometimes as a snowboard instructor, once on a short-term consulting contract when a friend’s software company needed an algorithm solved, but mostly he tried to think about physics."

"Back then, he admits, his theory still had some shortcomings; for example the three generations of fermions didn't quite come out right. But this was in 2007. In the years since, Garrett has solved some of the remaining puzzles. Still, his masterpiece is unfinished, not yet to his full satisfaction."

"Islam does not reach a balance point with the native civilization; it dominates and annihilates the indigenous culture over time. This process of total civilizational domination is the Law of Islamic Saturation. The doctrine calls for jihad to never cease until the native population submits to the Sharia. As time goes on, the Sharia brings about submission to Islam. The doctrine is totalitarian, so the result is totalitarian. Islam is the most successful totalitarian system in history. There are post-Communist societies and post-Nazi societies but, there are no post Islamic societies."

"The secret to productivity in so many fields -- and in origami -- is letting dead people do your work for you. Because what you can do is take your problem, and turn it into a problem that someone else has solved, and use their solutions."

"When you get math involved, problems that you solve for aesthetic value only, or to create something beautiful, turn around and turn out to have an application in the real world. And as weird and surprising as it may sound, origami may someday even save a life."

"Church officials in the past may have looked with great suspicion on the writings of, say, Teilhard de Chardin; but this same Church did, after all, produce a Teilhard. Even earlier, John Henry Newman was made a cardinal notwithstanding his liberal views. Prominent theologians in every era, going back to the most ancient Church fathers, argued cogently and consistently against a literalist interpretation of scripture. On the other hand, I'm sure you could find closet creationists in the Catholic Church today."

"Once an idea gets turned into a story, people pay attention long enough to listen. And they'll remember it. The images from Dante are far more vivid than the arguments of Aquinas."

"Even an atheist has to believe that the concept, at least, of "God" does exist, whether or not that concept is true or useful or the best way to approach things."

"Something like 10000 meteorites hit Earth a year. Three-quarters land in the ocean. Given how long they last, and how fast they come down, you might expect to see a meteorite roughly every two square kilometers. But in fact, you don't. They're completely lost."

"Science doesn't stop when it comes up with a nice answer. It looks for more data. It comes up with new ideas. It's willing to admit it's wrong."

"Science books go out of date. We throw the old one away when a newer one comes out, when we have new theories. But we don't throw away our old data; we merely interpret them differently. New theories try to account for old data (and new data) in new ways."

"The truth is so simple, and yet I tremble as I put it into words. On a cosmological scale, the universe is symmetric in time. What we know as God is simply the collective consciousness traveling opposite to our temporal orientation. God’s realm is our unknowable future; everything that is real to Him remains only possibility to us. Ironically, the reverse is also true: The reality of our past remains unknown to God."

"“And we know that Burnouts are prone to fighting; it’s just a matter of time before they attack us.” Channing had heard these reports a hundred times. He had tried to explain that they were inventing imaginary dangers because no real ones threatened."

"“History,” Daddy was saying, “has seen thousands of religions, millions of cults, billions of individual belief systems. All of them have been a search for truth, however misguided. Everyone felt the same innate spiritual feelings, but rationalized them in very different ways. And how indeed was prescientific humanity supposed to find the truth? It would have been easier to deduce the inner workings of the sun by staring at it. There was no framework, no alternate source of truth from which they could determine why our spirituality existed. “But with science came that framework. A framework that blatantly contradicted the false truths that most religions had already locked into their belief system. The literalist religions contended with the heliocentric solar system and biological evolution, both in disagreement with supposed “truths” that had been locked in by people who simply could not have known better. Even mystical religions, with fewer scientific premises to contradict, had their own difficulties. They had to contend with the realization that there was no unphysical soul, no sharp division between mind and body, no action at a distance. Humans had an instinct to seek out the truth, but instinct without a framework only drove them in the wrong direction. “So what was science’s advantage over primitive religions? The advantage of being wrong. To a believer, a religion cannot be wrong, and its evolution is fundamentally limited by this supposed fact. Beliefs that are locked in cannot change, because to change one part requires a questioning of the whole system. But a scientist is always wrong, always in doubt. Constantly framing hypotheses and disproving them, science is always narrowing down the field of what is not true, instead of finding what is true in a single step. “Science can never be true in the way that a religion can; there are always uncertainties, always the possibility that some new revolution can overthrow the old ways of thinking. And the scientists themselves welcome the revolution! Those who turn their science into a religion, those who instinctively believe in the old theories as absolute truth, they are left behind in the next revolution.”"

"“Over most of human history science did a vastly better job of locating the truth—by burning down the alternatives—than did religion’s wild stabs in the dark. And eventually, thanks to science, there wasn’t much darkness left. And—to no great surprise—in the small patch of darkness where science had cornered truth, there wasn’t a single traditional religion left. “Yes, most religions claimed they fit in with modern science, but it was usually science that they were warping to fit their religion.”"

"“No, no, no,” Paul said, shaking his head “Occam’s razor. This is getting far too complicated. The simplest explanation is that”—he waved his hand up at the moon—“that God doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”"

"I’m just saying it’s a possibility. Just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean it’s not true."

"She shrugged. “Maybe he is making sense. Maybe we’re just not trying hard enough to understand.”"

"“I was right! He said he was in a spaceship! A small spaceship! It’s some alien spaceship up by the moon!” Without hesitating, she turned her attention back to God. “Are you in orbit around the moon?” Her smile softened a little bit. “He says…he says the moon is going around him.” Paul shrugged. “Well, it’s all a matter of perspective, I suppose. But I still don’t buy this alien business.” Katrina rolled her eyes. “I’m sorry, dear, if it messes up your theology and all that, but I’m telling you, we are communicating with an alien intelligence here.”"

"It was an awfully persuasive theory, he had to admit. And even if it was wrong, he was starting to realize that God had to be an alien. There just wasn’t any other possible explanation. And that really scared him. All his life he had been so sure of his religion. When his daughters had died, it was the only thing he had left to hold on to. But had the devotion of his life to religion been misplaced? No, it couldn’t be. God couldn’t be an electronic alien. There had to be another explanation.… He forced a stop to that line of thought. He knew a rationalization when he saw it, and he considered himself pretty good at keeping his mind from coming to false conclusions just because of his beliefs. He used to be a scientist, after all. Not someone who would rationalize away clear evidence of aliens just because of some statements in the Journal. He had always told Katrina that if new scientific proof surfaced that his religion was wrong, he would admit he was mistaken. Well, now that had happened. There simply were intelligent aliens in the universe, and he would have to come to grips with it."

"Feelings of desperation clouded his mind. Could this be? Was this the final trap of a “provable” religion based purely on science? Was it inevitable that advances in scientific knowledge would disprove any religion, given enough time? And if science kept advancing, if they could never know everything, then no religion could ever be eternally true. In his last sermon Paul had claimed that science had backed God into a tiny corner of the unknown; but what if known science was the tiny corner, and the unknown lay vaster than anyone had imagined? If so, how could any religion ever claim to be compatible with science?"

"As remarkably strange as this event was, after a very short while he began to get bored. One of the great human abilities, he thought: tuning out the most fantastic events just because they happen slightly too often."

"Basically the American modernization (of nuclear weapons), and Russia’s unfortunate inability to improve their early-warning system, has resulted in a situation where everything is potentially a lot more dangerous, because an accident could much more easily occur. And this is both a social, political and technical problem."

"[Putin's] afraid of the misinformed American president doing something that gets everybody killed. He’s not worried about us getting ourselves killed, but he is worried about Russia. So what he wants to do is make it clear to anybody — to a child on a bicycle — that you cannot win. They will destroy the United States in response, no matter what your defenses can or cannot do."

"We’re talking about a wall of fire that encompasses everything around us at the temperature of the center of the sun. That will literally turn us to less than ash, if this thing gets going. I can’t emphasize how powerful these weapons are. When they detonate, they’re actually four or five times hotter than the center of the sun, which is 20 million degrees Kelvin. They’re 100 million degrees Kelvin at the center of these weapons."

"The idea of magnetic trapping is that in a magnetic field, an atom with a magnetic moment will have quantum states whose magnetic or Zeeman energy increases with increasing field and states whose energy decreases, depending on the orientation of the moment compared to the field. The increasing-energy states, or low-field-seekers, can be trapped in a magnetic field configuration having a point where the magnitude of the field is a relative minimum. [No dc field can have a relative maximum in free space (Wing, 1984), so high-field-seekers cannot be trapped.] The requirement for stable trapping, besides the kinetic energy of the atom being low enough, is that the magnetic moment move adiabatically in the field. That is, the orientation of the magnetic moment with respect to the field should not change."

"While in high school, I spent a summer working in a university research lab. The graduate student who mentored me shared this insight: physicists are people who get paid for working at their hobby. For me, that has been a joyous truth. Physicists don’t get paid much, but we sure have a lot of fun. And so, my first wish for you is that, whatever you do, you will work at something you love."

"Wineland and Haroche realized a long-standing dream of quantum physics: studying the behavior of single quantum objects. The founders of quantum mechanics believed that studying a single quantum system, like a single atom or a single photon, was beyond the realm of experimental possibility. Many believed that it did not even make sense to talk about a single atom; only the behavior of an ensemble could be meaningful. In fact, Schrödinger asserted: “…we never experiment with just one electron or atom ... In thought experiments, we sometimes assume that we do; this invariably entails ridiculous consequences…” ... The groups of Haroche and Wineland turned this idea on its head; not only did they use individual atoms and photons to elucidate some of the strangest aspects of quantum mechanics, they have even used them to make practical devices."

"I think a lot people had this idea that science advances through eureka moments and it's true to some extent. But my experience has been that it's a lot of really hard work, where finally you have figured out what's going on and you can then move on to the next stage."

"The secrets of our universe don't discriminate, these secrets can and should be unraveled by all those who wish to embark on that journey, and my aim is to clear as many barriers and leave these physics spaces better than I entered them."

"Many of us who are underrepresented in STEM have taken on the responsibility of spearheading institutional change toward more just, equitable, and inclusive working environments as a form of survival, I'm putting in more work on top of the research I do because I recognize that I do better research if I feel supported and if I feel like I can bring my whole self to my job. My hope is that one day Black and brown women and gender-queer folks interested in science can pursue just that and not have to fight for their right to be a scientist or defend that they are worthy of doing science."

"Once I got to college and took my first college-level course, I knew that physics was what I wanted to study. I learned about quantum superposition and Schrodinger's cat. It blew my mind, and as they say, the rest is history!"

"That number is still so jarring to me. I found out that there were only about 150 black women with a PhD in physics while in graduate school. I was on the verge of quitting. I was having such a hard time keeping up with my studies and just belonging. I was the only black, Latina, and lesbian in my classes. I stood out like a sore thumb, and I felt isolated. I also didn't feel a sense of belonging at the university or city level. The micro-aggressions I encountered, not only in the classroom but going to the mall or getting groceries, were so exhausting!"

"To me, community outreach has two major benefits: to promote scientific literacy and the importance of physics research, and to foster a curiosity and passion for physics. One of the many barriers I've encountered in my decades worth of outreach experience is the lack of trust society has towards physicists. This in part has to do with the lack of diversity in physics. There have been many instances in history where scientists have used a biased view of science as a tool of oppression, racism, and sexism. By including a more diverse cross-section of the population in physics studies, the public interest and trust in physics and physicists will increase as well. That's why I believe community outreach and increasing diversity in physics are symbiotic. By focusing efforts on outreach, especially to underrepresented minorities, you foster excitement in physics that leads to a future of diverse physicists that can then better encompass the interests of society as a whole, which in turn makes community outreach more accessible to a diverse population."

"While to a certain extent, I do agree that organizations will thrive with a more diverse workforce due to the difference in experience and the ways in which we all think, we not only have to focus efforts on recruitment but also retention, and to do the latter, there needs to be a cultural shift at the organizational level."

"As a lesbian, seeing Fermilab make such a visible and intentional stand for LGBTQIA+ physicists, technicians, and engineers at the lab is just another way of fostering an inclusive work environment."

"You learn as you go, and I think the most important thing to remember is that you are not your failures. That was a hard pill for me to swallow and something I'm still working through but the scientific process is built on failing! We have a theory, we test it, and a lot of the times that theory is wrong. That doesn't mean you aren't smart or you shouldn't continue testing other theories! Scientific exploration would come to a screeching halt if at every failed theory a scientist would quit."

"For me, physics isn't physics without outreach."

"People say the South is racist, but it wasn't until I moved north that I was really barraged with microaggressions on a daily basis. One instance was when I was sick and missed a couple of days of classes. This was reported to my adviser as my having missed weeks of coursework. When I was in class I was ignored, but when I was not there I stuck out like a sore thumb. It's hard to separate your microaggressions when you deal with intersecting minoritized identities. Was it because I was the only woman? The only Black person? The only Mexican? The only lesbian?"

"Jedidah Isler visited Syracuse, and she reached out to me to have lunch. I wasn't doing well—I had failed my quals—but the fact that this prestigious Black woman physicist reached out to me made an impression. I was embarrassed to go, but her candor and vulnerability about going through these spaces that were not built for us helped me understand that it was not my fault that I didn't fit in. Meeting with her validated my feelings. We discussed impostor syndrome. We discussed finances."

"I think there was a lack of understanding around the police killings and how they mentally and emotionally affect Black people. But I think my colleagues are listening and want to learn, and the lab is responsive."

"We want to make a cultural shift in physics, and we have laid out seven strategic goals. They include hiring Black scientists, restructuring leadership and decision-making entities, and investing in Black communities."

"Vacuum expectation values of products of neutral scalar field operators are discussed. The properties of these distributions arising from , the absence of negative energy states and the positive definiteness of the scalar product are determined. The vacuum expectation values are shown to be boundary values of analytic functions. Local commutativity of the field is shown to be equivalent to a symmetry property of the analytic functions. The problem of determining a theory of a neutral scalar field given its vacuum expectation values is posed and solved."

"… there are other things wrong with these models but the fundamental trouble is the non-uniqueness of the vacuum as was first shown by , , and STEINMANN … Actually, … has shown that the cluster decomposition property is not only necessary but sufficient for the uniqueness of the vacuum, if there is at least one cyclic vacuum. … HEPP, K., JOST, R., RUELLE, D. and STEINMANN, O., Necessary condition on Wightman functions, Helv. Phys. Acta 34 (1961) 542. BORCHERS, H.J., On the structure of the algebra of field observables, Nuovo Cim. 24 (1962) 214"

"Why was the discovery of the ... so important for the physics of the 1920s and 30s? The answer is manifold. The Dirac equation provided a relativistic description of spin ½ particles and in particular of the electron. In doing so, it gave a relativistic description of spin and opened the way for the application of group theory to the description of particles of arbitrary spin. The reinterpretation of the Dirac equation as a field equation that followed from Dirac's theory of holes was decisive in the conceptual transformation of single particle theory to many particle (quantum field) theory. The resulting quantum electrodynamics of spin ½ particles, refined by two generations of theoretical work, is the best theory we have. Although it is an approximation since it does not include the effects of weak and strong interactions it has survived many stringent experimental tests when applied to electrons and s."

"The family of mathematical problems discussed here has emerged in recent years as a result of efforts to put a small chapter of quantum field theory, the so-called external field problem, on a sound mathematical footing. The external field problems is special because the partial differential equations for the unknown field is linear, but the coefficients are allowed to vary in space and time and that gives rise to some surprises, which seem to be of general interest. There is a vast and in large part turgid mathematical physics literature on the subject. To make the general wisdom which has accumulated there more readily available to a mathematical audience I have, in the following, tried to place the problems in their physical context, and still to bring out the essential mathematical questions many of which remain to be answered."

"From the very beginning of quantum mechanics, the notion of the position of a particle has been much discussed. In the nonrelativistic case, the proof of the equivalence of matrix and wave mechanics, the discovery of the uncertainty relations, and the development of the statistical interpretation of the theory led to an understanding which, within the inevitable limitations of the nonrelativistic theory, may be regarded as completely satisfactory."

"... when I was a graduate student in the 1950s, I had to learn a lot about cosmic ray physics — because that's where all the information was coming from about new particles. And I remember how surprised I was when a professor — at Princeton where I was a student — Arthur Wightman, told me that pretty soon physicists would no longer be worried about cosmic rays. They would be getting the information about particles from new kinds of s — which would accelerate known particles like s, which are the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, or s to very high energy where they would collide with each other or with stationary targets. And in that collision new matter would be formed."

"The conditions for spacetime supersymmetry of the heterotic in backgrounds with arbitrary metric, torsion, Yang-Mills and dilaton expectation values are determined using the sigma model approach. The resulting equations are explicitly solved for the torsion and dilaton fields, and the remaining equations cast in a simple form. Previously unnoticed topological obstructions to solving these equations are found. The equations are shown to agree to leading order in perturbation theory with those derived in a field theory approach, provided one considers a more general ansatz than in previous analyses by allowing for a warp factor for the metric. Exact solutions with non-zero torsion are found, indicating a new class of finite sigma models."

"Low-energy effective field theories arising from string compactifications are generically inconsistent or ill-defined at the classical level because of conifold singularities in the moduli space. It is shown, given a plausible assumption on the degenaracies of black hole states, that for type II theories this inconsistency can be cured by nonperturbative quantum effects: the singularities are resolved by the appearance of massless Ramond-Ramond black holes."

"It is shown that many of the s of type II string theory and d = 11 supergravity can have boundaries on other p-branes. The rules for when this can and cannot occur are derived from charge conservation. For example it is found that membranes in d = 11 supergravity and IIA string theory can have boundaries on s. The boundary dynamics are governed by the self-dual d = 6 string. A collection of N parallel fivebranes contains 12N(N–1) self-dual strings which become tensionless as the fivebranes approach one another."

"Much of over the last century has concerned the reductionist quest to uncover the laws of nature at ever shorter distances. In the last decade it has become increasingly clear, from a variety of investigations, that this long march into the has neglected a surprising wealth of uncharted phenomena in the deep (IR). Far from being a boring place where all is trivial and well-understood, the deep IR in four-dimensional Minkowski space has a rich structure which we are only beginning to understand. Applications range from the IR divergence problem in , 𝒩=4 Yang-Mills and color memory in in black hole information and a possible fundamental new perspective on space, time and nature."

"The uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics says that all spacetime positions are slightly uncertain. ... Nothing is immune from the uncertainty principle. ... Applying the uncertainty principle to Einstein's , we find the rug of physics pulled from under our feet."

"We have no idea what science will look in, say, twenty or thirty years. ... Every scientist has to bet. Science is not a science — it's an art and a gamble."

"Why would there be math that had no physical manifestation?"

"Each year, on December tenth, thousands of worshippers convene in to commemorate the passing of an arms dealt known as the merchant of death. The eschatological ritual features all the rites and incantations befitting a 's funeral. Haunting dirges play as the worshippers, bedecked in mandatory regalia, mourn the merchant. He is eerily present; his visage looms over the congregants as they feast on exotic game, surrounded by fresh-cut flowers imported from the merchant's . The event culminates with the presentation of gilded, graven images bearing his likeness. This ritual is the annual award ceremony, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was an occult sacrament."

"We should be agnostic as to what the might be."

"I'm an experimentalist. I like to look at hard data. And there — string theory is a distant second to because it doesn't make any observable predictions. ... As an experimentalist, I like when a theory makes a prediction. My job is to not prove theorists right — it's to disprove everybody else."

"Friedman had suffered health problems over the years. But news of his death stunned friends and colleagues, including UCSD physicist Brian Keating, who recruited him to , and physicist-science fiction author of . The trio made up “The Three Physicists,” an informal group that periodically met to give public talks on science and philosophy. ... With Brin and Keating, he also dove into esoterica, tackling subjects such as the physics of free will."

"Master of ceremonies was Dr. Harvey J. Brudner of Highland Park, a retired scientist and physicist, who is an Alliance director and a long time aficionado of Kilmer. Since 1985 Brudner has been curator of the Kilmer birthplace house. He remains head of the Joyce Kilmer Centennial Commission, established to honor the 100th year of Kilmer's birth."

"On a new derivation of Birkhoff's strong ergodic hypothesis he once remarked in exasperation: "To be any more immaculate they will have to begin sterilizing the paper as well as the theorem !""

"... he gave a seminar in Oxford about his ideas on liquid helium, but on this occasion even the theorists were baffled. Onsager's final comment in reply to a question was: "The results are not bad when you consider the enormity of the swindle which I have perpetrated!""

"Of the electroencephalogram he once remarked: "It is like trying to discover how the telephone system works by measuring the fluctuations in the electric power used by the telephone company.""

"There's a time to soar like an eagle and a time to burrow like a worm. It takes a pretty sharp cookie to know when to shed the feathers and (long pause) to begin munching the humus! (characteristic Onsager giggle)."

"There are a lot of folks, some quite talented, who arm themselves with methods and then go hunting for vulnerable problems; but to accept a problem on its own terms and then forge your own weapon--now that's real class!"

"They made the mistake there of assigning Onsager to the basic Chemistry I, II course. He just couldn't think at the level of a freshman. Frankly, he was fired. I won't say he was the world's worst lecturer, but he was certainly in contention. He was difficult to understand anyway, but he also had the habit of lecturing when his back was to the students and he was writing on the blackboard. To compound matters, he was a big man, and students had to peer round him just to try and see what was being written."

"In the days of Kepler and Galileo, it was fashionable to announce a new scientific result through the circulation of a cryptogram which gave its author priority and his colleagues headaches. Onsager is one of the few moderns who operates in this tradition."

"... a reluctance to publish anything except fully-polished work, combined with the habit of dropping valuable hints couched in gnomic terms. The obscurity of his utterances is not due to a desire to mislead; rather it is a result of an inability to appreciate the limitations of his hearers. To those who have been able to appreciate what he tries to say, he has been a source of deep stimulation."

"He had been warned that non-theoreticians would be present and that he should phrase his talk in not too technical language. He plunged, nevertheless, into the mathematics of spinor algebras. After about twenty minutes, one of the many experimentalists in the audience had the courage to ask him what a spinor was. Onsager replied, thoughtfully: "A spinor--no, a set of spinors--is a set of matrices isomorphic to the orthogonal group." With that he gave the famous Onsager grin, twinkled his Nordic blue eyes at the bewildered faces around him, and continued the lecture as if nothing had happened."

"Onsager regarded chess, so he said, as too much like real problem-solving to spend much time on it. When he wanted to unwind from his work he would play solitaire, and bridge was a good relaxation in company."

"... when asked by Longworth how he would explain the electrophoretic effect in "physical terms," he picked up Longsworth, chair and all, and carried him across the room."

"One day Onsager told him he had decided to try an experiment on the separation of isotopes by thermal diffussion. "Fine," said Kraus, and was doubly pleased when Lars told him that the only equipment he would need was a long tube. But his encouragement was quickly withdrawn when Onsager explained that the tube must be made of platinum and would have to stretch from the basement to the third floor of the chemistry building. Kraus never pestered him again about doing an experiment, which "was too bad," writes Julian Gibbs, "because no one succeeded in conducting this experiment until more than a decade later, when it was needed as part of the Manhattan Project for the atomic bomb.""

"Pauli judging the World War II period in physics wrote in a letter to Casimir: “Nothing much of interest has happened except for Onsager’s exact solution of the Two-Dimensional Ising Model.”"

"In 1944, E. Onsager produced, quite unexpectedly, an exact evaluation of the partition function of the model in two dimensions. It was a real tour de force. I had studied his paper in Chicago in the spring of 1947, but did not understand the method, which was very, very complicated, with many algebraic somersaults... I was thus led to a long calculation, the longest in my career. Full of local, tactical tricks, the calculation proceeded by twists and turns. There were many obstructions. But always, after a few days, a new trick was somehow found that pointed to a new path... after about six months of work off and on, all the pieces suddenly fitted together, producing miraculous cancellations, and I was staring at the amazingly simple final result[, the spontaneous magnetization of the ising model.]"

"Samkya and Vedanta propound the evolution of universe in it inanimate and animate aspects, more comprehensively than modem science does. Vedanta derives it from primal Divine Energy or Sakti and Sarokhya from proto-Nature or Prakriti."

"Only inspired insight guided by faith in the simplicity of nature somehow revealed the interplay of the concepts of energy and entropy."

"It is argued that if extraterrestrial intelligent beings exist, then their spaceships must already be present in our solar system."

"The biologists argue that the number of evolutionary pathways leading from one-celled organisms to intelligent beings is minuscule when compared with the total number of evolutionary pathways, and thus even if we grant the existence of life on 109 to 1010 planets in our Galaxy, the probability that intelligence has arisen... [there] on any planet but our own is still very small. I agree..."

"[T]he probability of the evolution of creatures with the technological capability of interstellar communication within five billion years after the development of life on an Earth-like planet is less than 10-10, and thus we are the only intelligent species now existing in this Galaxy."

"The basic idea... is straightforward and... has led other authors, such as Fermi... Dyson... Hart... Simpson... and Kuiper & Morris... to conclude that extraterrestrial beings do not exist: if they did exist and possessed the technology for interstellar communication, they would also have developed interstellar travel and thus would already be present in our solar system."

"[A]n intelligent species with the technology for interstellar communication would necessarily develop the technology for interstellar travel, and this would automatically lead to the exploration and/or colonization of the Galaxy in less than 300 million years."

"[T]hat any intelligent species which develops... interstellar communication will also have... rocketry... is... a consequence of the principle of mediocrity... (that our own evolution is typical)... [T]he human species developed rockets 600 years before... radio waves..."

"[I]t seems likely that a species engaging in interstellar communication would possess a fairly sophisticated computer technology. ...Sagan has asserted that 'Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence... will require... computer actuated machines with abilities approaching... intelligence'."

"I shall assume that such a species will... develop a self-replicating universal constructor with intelligence comparable to the human level—such a machine should be developed within a century, according to the experts...—and... combined with present-day rocket technology would make it possible to explore and/or colonize the Galaxy in less than 300 million years, for an initial investment less than the cost of operating a 10 MW microwave beacon for several hundred years, as proposed by SETI..."

"It is a deficiency in computer technology, which prevents us from beginning the exploration of the Galaxy tomorrow."

"What one needs is a self-reproducing universal constructor... a machine capable of making any device... capable of making a copy of itself. Von Neumann has shown... that such... is theoretically possible, and... a human being is a universal constructor specialized to perform on the surface of the Earth."

"The payload of a probe to another stellar system would be a self-reproducing universal constructor with human level intelligence (...a von Neumann machine) together with an engine... travelling... within the stellar target system—[the engine] could be an electric propulsion system... or a ..."

"[M]aterials [to reproduce the von Neumann machine] should be available in virtually any stellar system—including systems—in the form of meteors, asteroids, comets, and other debris from the formation of the stellar system. ...[M]aterial in asteroids are highly differentiatied; many... are largely nickel-iron, while others contain large amounts of hydrocarbons."

"As the copies of the space probe were made, they would be launched at the stars nearest the target star. When these probes reached these stars, the process would be repeated... until the probes covered all the stars of the Galaxy."

"[T]he von Neumann machine would be programmed to explore the stellar system... and relay information... back to the original solar system..."

"Even if there were no planets in the stellar system... the... machine could be programmed to turn some of the material into an O'Neill colony..."

"[T]he information to manufacture a human being is contained in the genes of a single human cell. Thus if an extraterrestrial intelligent species possessed the knowledge to synthesize a living cell—and... experts assert... the human race could develop such knowledge within 30 years—they could program a von Neumann machine to synthesize a fertilized egg cell of their species. If they possessed artificial womb technology—and such... is in the beginning stages... on Earth... they could... synthesize members of their species... As suggested by Eiseley... these beings could be raised... by the robots... free to develop their own civilization..."

"[T]he problem of interstellar travel has been reduced to... transporting a von Neumann machine to another stellar system. This can be done even with present-day rocket technology."

"Hunter has pointed out that by using a Jupiter swingby to approach the Sun and then giving a velocity boost at perihelion, a solar system escape velocity... is possible with present-day chemical rockets... [M]ost other stars should have planets (or companion stars) with characteristics sufficiently close to... the Jupiter-Sun system to use this launch strategy in reverse to slow down in the other solar system."

"[T]hus... any intelligent species would develop at least the rocket technology capable of... a travel velocity ves of 3 x 10-4c. At this velocity the travel time to the nearest stars would be between 104 and 105 years. This... would necessitate... self-repair capacity... Nuclear power-souces would supply the power... If power utilization during the free-fall period was... low, even chemical reactions could supply the power."

"As ves is of the same order as the stellar random motion velocities, very sensitive guidance would be required... not... an insuperable problem with the assumed level of computer technology."

"[A] von Neumann cannot become obsolete... instructed by radio to make the latest devices..."

"Once the exploration and/or colonization of the Galaxy has begun, it can be modeled... by the mathematical theory of island colonization... developed... by MacArthur & Wilson... since... islands... are closely analogous to stars in the heaven, and von Neumann machines are even more closely analogous to biological species."

"The probability that intelligent life which eventually attempts interstellar communication will evolve in a star system is usually expressed by the :p = f_pn_ef_lf_if_cwhere f_p is the probability that a given star system will have planets, n_e is the number of habitable planets in a solar system, f_l is the probability that life evolves on a habitable planet, f_i is the probability that intelligent life evolves on a planet with life, and f_c is the probability that an intelligent species will attempt interstellar communication within 5 billion years after the formation of the planet..."

"The problem with the Drake equation is that only f_p—and to a lesser degree n_e— is subject to experimental determination... [O]ne must have a fairly large sample; for f_l, f_i, and f_c we have only... the Earth. However, if... any intelligent species... will begin... galactic exploration within 100 years after developing... interstellar communication... the sample size is enlarged... Since f_p—and n_e can... be determined by direct astrophysical measurement, the fact that extraterrestrial intelligent beings are not present in our solar system permits us to obtain a direct astrophysical measurement of an upper bound to... f_lf_if_c, which depends only on biological and sociological factors."

"This argument assumes that the five probabilities... do not vary rapidly with galactic age. The available astrophysical evidence and most theories of the formation of solar systems indicate... this... is valid."

"The factors f_lf_if_c should not depend strongly on the evolution of the Galaxy... and so can be regarded as constants. Since the Galaxy is between 11 and 18 billion years old, the number N of stars older than 5.3 billion years is about twice the number of stars formed after the Sun, and thus approximately equal to the number of stars in the Galaxy, 1011. Thus p \leqslant 10^{-11}. If we accept the usual values of f_p=0.1 to 1 and n_e = 1 found in most discussions... then f_lf_if_c \leqslant 10^{-10}. The number of communicating civilizations now existing in our Galaxy is less than or equal to p x (number of stars in galaxy) = 1; that is to say, us."

"I shall provide a physical foundation for eschatology—the study of the ultimate future—by making the physical assumption that the universe must be capable of sustaining life indefinitely... for infinite time... [W]e have to have some theory for the future of the physical universe—since it unquestionably exists— and this is the most beautiful postulate: that total death is not inevitable. All other theories of the future necessarily postulate the ultimate extinction of everything... there is nothing uglier than extermination. We physicists know that a beautiful postulate is more likely to be correct than an ugly one. Why not adopt the Postulate of Eternal Life, at least as a working hypothesis?"

"Paul Dirac was the first physicist to argue for the Postulate of Eternal Life: "With my assumption... life need never end. There is no decisive argument for dediding between [certain] assumptions. I prefer the one that allows the possibility of endless life. One may hope that some day the question will be decided by direct observation."

"[T]he eternal life assumption... implies... there must exist in this future (but in two precise mathematical senses, also in the present and the past) a Person Who is simultaneously transcendent to yet immanent in the physical universe of space, time, and matter. In the Person's immanent temporal aspect... changing (forever growing in knowledge and power), but in the... transcendent eternal aspect, forever complete and unchanging. How this comes about as a matter of physics will be described..."

"[I]s the God (...Person ...) the God? ...the uncreated Creator of the ...universe ...Who exists necessarily ... i.e., the Person's nonexistence would be a logical contradiction."

"Only if God is not in any sense contingent can one avoid regress posed in the query, who created God?"

"The Omega Point is in essence the Tillich-Pannenberg God: Being itself, but the mode of Being is futurity. This establishes the Omega Point as the God... there cannot be more being than all Being..."

"[T]his necessary existence... and omniscience... can... be consistent with... free will... by showing that... William James's definition of and free will might be physically realized in . This physical indeterminism can arise only in the context of quantum gravity... completely different from the "indeterminism" arising from the uncertainty principle. (Nonrelativistic quantum mechanics is... deterministic)"

"This new... physical indeterminism was... discovered in the 1980s and is... a consequence of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem"

"One avoids... contradiction between contingency and necessity by avoiding... sharp distinction between God and... reality. This... distinction... leads to gnostic heresy: ...a wholly other God... divorced from our ...world. It also leads... to the Problem of Evil... naturally resolved in the Omega Point Theory."

"Wolfhart Pannenberg... suggested... there may exist a... universal physical field (analogous to Teilhard's "radial energy")... as the source of all life, and... identified with the Holy Spirit. ...[T]he universal wave function... is a... field with the essential features of Pannenberg's... "energy" field. ...If this identification is made ...as a matter of physics ...God is in the world, everywhere... with us... at all times."

"The in its counts as a person because, at any time in our future, the collective information processing system will have generated, or will be able to generate, subprograms which will be able to pass the ; high intelligence will be required at least collectively in order to survive in the increasingly complex environment near the final state."

"[T]he human-type mind is a manifestation of an extremely low level of information processing... Nevertheless, the Omega Point is still a Person... because a Being with Its level of computer capacity could easily create a Turing-Test-passing subprogram to speak for it. ...[O]ur resurrected selves probably will interact with such a program... For lack of a better term, I shall refer to the total universal information processing system in existence at any given global time as the "universal mind.""

"There is an interesting connection between my claim that the Omega Point is a Person because it contains a Turing-Test-passing subprogram, and the Christian notion of Person, as this word is applied to God. In classical Greek, the word prosopon (πρόσωπον)—persona is the Latin equivalent—primarily meant "face" or "countenance," but the word also meant a mask that an actor wore to indicate the character... By the fourth century A.D. ...this word had come to refer to those innate aspects of the human mentality which differentiate one human being from another. Today the word... refers to the total individual human mind, including the innate and learned aspects... [T]o interact with us human beings as a Person... the Omega Point would be revealing only a miniscule portion... a Person in the original sense and in the fourth century sense... '."

"It would... not be... inaccurate to regard one of the subprograms of the universal mind in the far future, one with a Turing Test-passing subprogram, as an "angel.""

"[I]nclusion of the whole past, present, and future universal history in the Omega Point is more than a mere mathematical artifact. ...[T]he Omega Point "experiences" the whole of universal history "all at once.""

"[W]e cannot "see" a person who lived a few centuries before, because the light rays... have... left the solar system. Conversely, we cannot "see" the Andromeda galaxy as it now is, but... as it was 2 million years ago. So we experience as "simultaneous" the events on the boundary of our past ... But all timelike and lightlike curves converge upon the Omega Point. ...[L]ight rays from all people who died... from all... people now... from all [future] people... intersect there. The light rays... from people... are not lost forever... [T]hese rays will be intercepted and intercepted again, by the living beings who... engulfed the physical universe near the Omega Point. All the information which can be extracted from those rays will be extracted at the instant of the Omega Point."

"The germ theory was resurrected... by Pasteur and his new medical physics. Thus... physics had to be extended to medicine in order to save the germ theory. Similarly, for religion to survive, physics must be extended into theology."

"With the introduction into physics of the Dirac/Dyson Eternal Life Postulate, science has taken the last independent stronghold of theology."

"[T]he claim that the central concern of religion is nonsense. Throughout human history, the central concern of religion has been human self-interest. In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, all morality has been obtained from declarative sentences of the form "Thou shalt not kill—because you'll go to Hell if you do!" In the Hindu-Buddhist tradition... "...—because you'll be born as a cockroach if you do!" ...In both cases, the appeal is to physics, not to fundamental moral postulates."

"The essential difficulty with divorcing morality from facts is that... there would be no way to resolve moral disputes. Morality would... be... a matter of taste... [I]n... so-called disputes over morality there is... no disagreement over fundamental moral principles, only... over facts. ...[C]onsider ...the abortion issue. There is no dispute over "Thou shall not kill,"... only... whether a fetus is a "person.""

"It is often said that the central concern of religion is an attempt to answer... "What is the relationship between humanity and the universe (and/or God). I agree... the factual answers... led to the ethical norms of... religions. The sharp distinction between fact and value which is common in twentieth-century philosophy and in the West was not present in the traditional religions. ...[T]his sharp distinction is ...contrary to the continued existence of science ...The growth and existence of science require certain ethical norms: for example, THOU SHALT NOT IMPOSE YOUR THEORIES ON OTHERS BY FORCE. Only persuasion, based on rational argument and experimental results, is allowed."

"[T]o really test the Theory, we will need the upgrade and either the SSC—the Texas Supercollider—or the European LHC. ...[P]erhaps it would be worth several billion dollars to establish that God exists, and that one day we will all be resurrected to live forever with Him/Her."

"ouch—what a disappointment! Nothing prepared me for just how B-A-D it is."

"I really admired Barrow and Tipler's Anthropic Cosmic Principle, and now... it's clear how much of the actual wordcraft... was the work of Barrow."

"I don't have any trouble... imagining nanotechnology, von Neumann probes, AI exceeding human intelligence within 50 years, or the biosphere expanding to fill... the universe. But none of that is new, and Tipler tells it less clearly than others..."

"[U]nless I'm missing something, the wheels fall off Starship Eternity."

"I noted many apparent gaping holes in his arguments or assumptions of facts contrary to the best available knowledge... [V]irtually all... dismissed with the all-purpose argument: "...ruled out by the Omega Point Boundary Condition.""

"[W]hy worry about a big rock hitting the Earth, destruction of the biosphere by inadvertent human action, accidental nuclear war..? Surely the Boundary Condition rules out those much smaller worries... Don't worry; be happy."

"[H]ow... information will be reconstituted that will allow... resurrection of the dead. ...[N]o information has been lost (the black holes having been popped by a semi-mystical process...) ...admitting that opacity and thermalisation of information may present a bit of a problem ...we'll just ...conjure up a computer with a storage capacity of 101070 bits ...and to Hell with the lost information..."

"Ok, the visible universe has around 1080 particles in it. The universe at Tipler's point of maximum expansion is, say, 10,000 times bigger... But... we're not using mere matter to store bits anymore. We're using (drumroll) the Higgs field... And when will this happen? ..."between 10−1010 and 10−10123 seconds before the Omega Point is reached". Whew, saved by the Gong of Doom."

"And how are we going to use the Higgs field to compute, organise information systems out of free quarks and pure energy... the Boundary Condition Postulate... that says that on Easter Day, 2001, Jesus Christ will return, raise the dead, etc. ...inevitable."

"I take the last existing copy of the complete works of Tipler and heave it across the event horizon of my TidyTrash&#8482; home black hole."

"Tipler's Taub universe event horizon can opener makes the black hole horizon go away. What about the singularity? ...[Y]ou now have a very large number of naked singularities... converging toward the Omega Point, which should make things even more interesting for the universal brain emerging there."

"Suppose there were a computer... which could run a completely faithful simulation of me—even a simulation at the quantum level so good the Pauli Exclusion Principle wouldn't let us in the same room. Would it be me? Would my consciousness somehow be shared..."

"[H]ow would this work if the brain and computer were separated by several light years? And if not, then what difference does it make if 1032 years of death intervene before the simulation begins to run? ...continuity of consciousness?"

"What a pile of crap."

"The review in Nature called POI a "masterpiece of pseudoscience". ...I don't think it's that good."

"The mechanics of 'steering' the universe to the omega point require actions to be taken throughout space. ...[I]ntelligences will have to spread all over the universe in time to make the first necessary adjustments. This is one of a series of deadlines that Tipler has shown that we would have to meet—and he has shown that meeting... them is, to the best of our... knowledge, physically possible."

"Tipler makes the point that the science of cosmology has tended to study the past... of spacetime. But most of spacetime lies to the future... Existing cosmology does address the issue of whether the universe will or will not recollapse, but... there has been very little theoretical investigation of the greater part of spacetime. ...[T]he lead-up to the has received far less study than the aftermath of the Big Bang. Tipler sees the omega-point theory as filling that gap. ...[It] deserves to become the prevailing theory of the future of spacetime until and unless it is experimentally (or otherwise) refuted. (Experimental refutation is possible because the existence of an omega point in our future places certain constraints on the condition of the universe today.)"

"Tipler makes... additional assumptions—some plausible, others less so—which enable him to fill in more details of future history. ...[His] quasi-religious interpretation... and his failure to distinguish that... from the underlying scientific theory, that have prevented the latter from being taken seriously."

"Tipler notes that an infinite amount of knowledge will have been created by the time of the omega point. He... assumes... the [far future] intelligences will, like us, want (or... need)... knowledge other than... necessary for... survival. ...[T]hey have the potential to discover all [physically knowable] knowledge, and Tipler assumes that they will do so. So in a sense, the omega point will be omniscient."

"Tipler makes use of a handy linguistic device... common in mathematical physics... misleading if taken too literally. ...[T]o identify a limiting point of a sequence with the itself. ...What he does not mean is that there is that there is a knowing entity literally at the end point of ... there is no physical entity there at all. Thus... the knows nothing, and can... exist only because some... explanations... refer to the limiting properties of physical events..."

"Tipler uses the theological term 'omniscient'... but... The omega point will not know everything. The overwhelming majority of abstract truths... will be inaccessible to it as they are to us."

"Tipler says, it will be omnipotent. But... this... is not absolute. ...[I]t is strictly limited by the available matter and energy, and is subject to the laws of physics."

"Since the intelligences in the computer will be creative thinkers, they must be classified as "people". ...And so he claims... at the omega-point limit... an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent society of people. This society, Tipler identifies as God."

"[P]eople near the omega point could not... communicate their wishes to us, or work miracles (today). They did not create the universe... [nor] invent the laws of physics—nor could they violate those laws... They may listen to prayers... (perhaps by detecting very faint signals), but they cannot answer them. They are... opposed to religious faith, and have no wish to be worshipped. ...But Tipler ...argues that most of the core features of the God of the Judeo-Christian religions, are... properties of the . Most religious people will... disagree..."

"In his enthusiasm... Tipler has neglected part of the Popperian lesson about what the growth of knowledge must look like. If the omega point exists, and if... created in the way... Tipler... set out... the late universe will... consist of embodied thoughts of inconceivable wisdom, creativity and sheer numbers. But... problem solving means rival s, errors, criticism, refutation and backtracking. Admittedly, in the limit (which no one experiences), at the instant the universe ends, everything that is comprehensible may have been understood. But at every finite point our descendants' knowledge will be riddled with errors. Their knowledge will be greater, deeper and broader than we can imagine, but they will make mistakes on a correspondingly titanic scale too. Like us, they will never know certainty or physical security, for their survival, like ours, will depend on... creating a continuous stream of new knowledge. If they... fail, even once... to increase... computing speed and memory capacity... the sky will fall in on them and they will die. Their culture... will be split by passionate controversies. ...[I]t seems unlikely that it could... be regarded as a 'person'. Rather... a vast number of people interacting... disagreeing. ...often ...mistaken, and many mistakes ...uncorrected for... long periods (subjectively). Nor... ever... morally homogeneous...Nothing will be sacred... and... people will continually be questioning assumptions that other[s]... consider... fundamental moral truths. ...[B]y the methods of reason, every... controversy will be resolved. But... replaced by... more... fundamental controversies. Such... is very different from... God... But... some subculture within it... will be resurrecting us if Tipler is right."

"[I]f the observed acceleration were to continue forever, the Theory would be refuted. But the expansion of life to engulf the universe is EXACTLY what is required to cancel the positive cosmological constant (a.k.a. the Dark Energy)..."

"The Omega Point Theory suggests that the particle physics Standard Model (SM) is sufficient to explain both [dark matter and dark energy]: the Dark Energy is just the currently uncancelled part of the positive cosmological constant, and the Dark Matter is just the Standard Model SU(2)_{left} field, coupled to the SM Higgs field. I was very worried when I wrote PHYSICS OF IMMORTALTIY that the entropy in the CMBR would make an acceleration in the collapsing phase of universal history impossible. I propose to solve this problem by claiming the temperature of the CMBR — currently "measured"... 2.2726 degrees — is actually... ! I show in a paper I put on the lanl data base (xxx.lanl.gov) last November that such an apparently ridiculous claim is possible, because any quantized gauge field in a homogeneous and isotropic universe would NECESSARILY have a Planckian spectrum, even at zero temperature! What the measurements of CMBR showing that it is Planckian... are really measuring... not the temperature, but the size of the universe. In my paper, I show how to convert the... "temperature" of 2.2726 into the size of the universe."

"I relate deeply to Tipler’s... concept that future technology may... resurrect the dead... by... "copying them to the future" and... allow myself to contemplate such possibilities. There may be a point where consciousness becomes a important factor in the destiny of the universe, where conscious beings develop the capability to choose and build the universe they want to inhabit, and invite the dead of past ages to join the party by copying them to the future. ...[T]his soft rationalist, high level and not detailed concept ...will, I hope, be detailed and realized by future scientists and engineers."

"Tipler has been criticized... for mixing religion with science. ...also ...for making wrong scientific assumptions. ...[I]t appears that the is accelerating and ...left to itself, will never enter the phase ...a prerequisite for the scenario ...Tipler is certainly wrong on many points that will be corrected by future scientists. But dismissing him as a crank is... like dismissing Leonardo as a crank because his aircraft sketches wouldn’t fly..."

"The Physics of Christianity... received... bad reviews from very smart people like John Walker."

"India is truly a mystery containing all that is the worthiest, most spiritual, and intellectual in humankind and the worst aspects of humankind one could ever hope to find including total lack of concern for others, extreme material poverty, and spiritual bankruptcy and fraud. India is the world in other words with everything in the world revealed both of the highest form and lowest denominator. I love India. I hate India. I cannot ever go to India without returned with strong feelings about it. My later writings would not be the same without my frequent stays in India and the influences that this country has had on my thoughts and feelings. If India did not exist, we would create it just as it is perfect in its imperfection."

"s and massive s in the mass range 2–20 have been proposed as candidates to provide the in the halo of our galaxy."

""What is the Universe made of?" The question is one of the deepest unanswered mysteries in all of human existence. Solving the puzzle has been my life's work and is the hottest research topic in cosmology and particle physics today."

"... On my father’s side, I come from a family of artists and architects. My grandfather was a Bauhaus architect in Germany and my grandmother was a painter. When my father as a child was tinkering around in the basement with chemistry sets, his mother said to him, “You’ll never make a living in science. Why don’t you go into the family business, the arts?” Well, he defied that advice. He was actually a PhD student with Heisenberg in Göttingen, and then a post-doc with Enrico Fermi in Chicago. After that he went to Caltech where he switched to biology and became one of the founders of the field of molecular biology. He founded the department of molecular biology at the . My mother was from a town on the Swiss-German border called , and she actually got her PhD in biology at age 22."

"... in the seventies the work of and Rubin ... looked at galaxies and found evidence for dark matter in every single one."

"What physics explains the enormous disparity between the gravitational scale and the typical mass scale of the elementary particles?"

"... there's an argument that the Standard Model plus gravity is all there is, and the has nothing to do with nature. And that argument is that the properties of the world, the properties of particle physics in particular, are determined partly ... largely? ... by a ."

"... a very special type of falsehood common in explanations of physics for nonexperts ... a physics fib or, more simply, a phib. Phibs are often found in articles and books about the universe. They arise when well-intentioned physicists, faced with a nonexpert's question, are trying to concoct a short, memorable tale to serve as a compromise between giving no answer at all and giving a correct but incomprehensible one."

"... Are we thinking about the wrong? Are we thinking about quantum field theory wrong? Are there particles at the Large Hadron Collider that are hiding from us? ... It's true that the Large Hadron Collider has vast data sets. And when you have a gigantic amount of data, if you don't ask exactly the right question, you might not see what's actually in there. So, we have to be very thoughtful about all the different questions that we should ask of this data."

"One very interesting idea is that when we get to the smallest size of all, we don't find a particle, but rather an ultra-tiny vibrating string."

"Two well-regarded measurements for the expansion rate of the universe disagree, leaving cosmologists very puzzled. It may be that something large has been overlooked in our theory of the . This discrepancy is called the and it has led to a very interesting conversation within the cosmology community."

"I'm not personally a fan of the idea of SUSY and I never have been. But it's possible and we should continue to look for it. For one thing, if supersymmetry is false, then superstring theory is false. I don't believe in superstring theory either, but I like it. I kind of hope it's right. But hope isn't good enough in science."

"The history of can be considered nothing less than a huge triumph for science. Over the course of a little more than a century of effort, our understanding of the world of atomic and subatomic physics went from a vague understanding of atoms, to one that is much more detailed. Early in this hundred-year-long period, we learned about electrons (1897), then how they circle a dense nucleus (1911), followed by the discovery of the s (1917) and s (1932) that form the nucleus. From the 1930s onward, researchers used both cosmic rays and particle accelerators to discover antimatter (1932), and particles that don’t exist in atoms (e.g., the [1936] and [1956], as well as a huge number of others)."

"One of the first scientific concepts taught to children is the idea that matter can be a solid, liquid, or gas. Indeed, if you were to ask most American adults how many there are, the most likely answer you would get is three. It would not be unreasonable to consider this to be common knowledge. Yet the scientifically savvy know of far more phases of matter than the familiar three. is another, as is . And there are many more that exist at extreme temperatures or pressures. Change the conditions under which matter finds itself, and it will act in unexpected ways."

"The universe is filled with thermal radiation having a current temperature of 2.75 K. Originating in the very early universe, this radiation furnishes strong evidence that the Big Bang cosmology best describes our expanding universe from an incredibly hot, compacted early stage until now. The model can be used to extrapolate our physics backward in time to predict events whose effects might be observable in the 2.75 K radiation today. The spectrum and isotropy are being studied with sophisticated microwave radiometers on the ground, in balloons, and in satellites. The results are as predicted by the simple theory: the spectrum is that of a blackbody (to a few percent) and the radiation is isotropic (to 0.01 percent) except for a local effect due to our motion through the radiation."

"David Todd Wilkinson died on 5 September 2002 in Princeton, New Jersey, after having battled cancer for 17 years. His role in the measurements of the thermal (CMB) was key to the completion of the program of cosmological tests that began with Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the expanding universe in 1929."

"The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, under study by NASA since 1976, will map the spectrum and the angular distribution of diffuse radiation from the universe over the entire wavelength range from 1 micron to 1.3 cm. It carries three instruments: a set of differential s (DMR) at 23.5, 31.4, 53, and 90 , a far infrared absolute (FIRAS) covering 1 to 100 cm-1, and a covering 1 to 300 s. They will use the ideal space environment, a one year lifetime, and standard instrument techniques to achieve orders of magnitude improvements in sensitivity and accuracy, providing a fundamental data base for cosmology. The instruments are united by common purpose as well as similar environmental and orbital requirements. The data from all three experiments will be analyzed together, to distinguish nearby sources of radiation from the cosmologically interesting diffuse background radiations."

"NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite mission, the COBE, laid the foundations for modern cosmology by measuring the spectrum and anisotropy of the and discovering the . ... The COBE observed the universe on the largest scales possible by mapping the cosmic microwave and infrared background radiation fields and determining their spectra. It produced conclusive evidence that the hot Big Bang theory of the early universe is correct, showed that the early universe was very uniform but not perfectly so, and that the total luminosity of post–Big Bang objects is twice as great as previously believed."

"… the technical question was, “Is the Big Bang the right story? Is the expanding universe the right story?” And there are a lot of sub-questions in that. If it is the right story, then how did the galaxies come? Where did they come from? Because it seemed quite mysterious. People were just beginning to realize that there was a structure that had been seen in the maps of where the galaxies are located, and that we had no clue what made that happen. So what is there to measure? Well, there’s not very many things to measure. You can measure the galaxies or you can look for this cosmic background radiation. And if you could measure it, it would tell you something that you never knew before."

"A few words to the young women: When you combine a career with raising a family, the family responsibilities generally rest more heavily on you than on your husband, and you may need to proceed more slowly with your career than you would without a family. This may have its good side in that you can save up some interesting and important things to do after your children have left the nest. However, the responsibilities can often be so heavy as to frustrate a woman's career, and a lack of suitable child-care facilities is a major roadblock. To me it is no mystery why there are not more women in leadership positions in science. It has been mentioned that I am the first woman to receive the Howard Vollum Award, and of course I am very proud to be chosen. But when it is no longer considered unusual for a woman to be so honored or to achieve a position of leadership in public life, then we women will know that we have made it."

"... during the past 20–30 years, the subject of has—as a result of advances in measurement technologies—been transformed from a chiefly theoretical endeavor that explored beautiful theorems, involving the and equations, to an experimental science—a science that has come of age as one can now make real-time measurements at the levels at which geophysical happenings are taking place. And absolute gravimetry (along with very long baseline interferometry, global positioning satellites, satellite ranging, etc.) was and is contributing to this revolution."

"Determinations of the fit into the oftentimes-unappreciated area of physics called precision measurement—an area which includes precision measurements, and . The determination of big G—a measurement which on the surface appears deceptively simple—continues to be one of 's greatest challenges to the skills and cunning of s. In spite of the fact that, on the scale of the Universe, big G's effects are so large as to single-handedly hold everything together, on the scale of an individual research laboratory, big G's effects are so small that they go unnoticed…hidden in a background of much larger forces and noise sources. It is this ‘smallness’ that makes determining the precise value of this (seemingly unrelated to the rest of physics) fundamental constant so difficult."

"He was passionate about JILA and the future of JILA. He was a strong advocate for hiring [a leading researcher in ]. He had a great sense of the qualitative understanding of a lot of physics, especially . I remember talking to him about the design of an experiment and him having good suggestions. He was a big advocate for the instrument shop. I think part of it is because he admired those guys for building and designing things."

"Most physicists will remember Jim Faller for his contributions to ."

"One should mention right at the start that one still does not understand whether quantum mechanics and special relativity are compatible at a fundamental level in our Minkowski four-space world. One generally assumes that this means finding a complete Yang-Mills gauge theory or the interaction of gauge fields with fermionic matter fields, the simplest form being quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Associated with this picture is the belief that the fundamental vector meson excitations are massive (as opposed to photons, which arise in the limiting case of an abelian gauge symmetry. The proof of the existence of a “mass gap” appears a necessary integral part of solving the entire puzzle. This question remains one of the deepest open issues in theoretical physics, as well as in mathematics. Basically the question remains: can one give a mathematical foundation to the theory of fields in four-dimensions? In other words, can do quantum mechanics and special relativity lie on the same footing as the classical physics of Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, or Schrödinger—all of which fits into a mathematical framework that we describe as the language of physics. This glaring gap in our fundamental knowledge even dwarfs questions of whether there are other more complicated and sophisticated approaches to physics—those that incorporate gravity, strings, or branes—for understanding their fundamental significance lies far in the future. In fact, one believes that stringy proposals, if they can be fully implemented, have limiting cases that appear as relativistic quantum fields, just as relativistic quantum fields describe non-relativistic quantum theory and classical physics in various limiting cases."

"At first sight, the problem of constructing a quantum theory of gravity sounds easy since there are no experimental constraints! The task is simply to find any theory which unifies general relativity and quantum theory. However, on second thought, the problem sounds extremely difficult. General relativity teaches us that gravity is just a manifestation of the curvature of space and time. So quantum gravity must involve the quantization of space and time, something we have no previous experience with. Surprisingly, even though there are no experimental constraints, this is a constraint on quantum gravity which was found in the early 1970’s by studying black holes. Motivated by the close analogy between the laws of black hole mechanics and ordinary thermodynamics, Bekenstein proposed that ..."

"Ten years ago, it was common (and correct) to distinguish the two main approaches to by saying that string theory ... was perturbative, and background dependent while the other approach ... was non-perturbative and background independent. In light of this, it is not surprising that most relativists were not interested in string theory. … One of the main things that has changed over the past decade is that we now know that string theory does not just involve strings. Higher (and lower) dimensional objects (called s) play an equally fundamental role. Using these branes, convincing evidence has been accumulated that all five of the perturbative string theories are just different limits of the same theory, called . (There is no agreement about what the M stands for.) There is yet another limit in which M theory reduces to eleven dimensional ."

"A hundred years ago our view of space and time was dramatically changed by the introduction of special relativity. Ten years after that, Einstein made spacetime dynamical in his general theory of relativity. It has long been expected that quantum gravity will require an even more radical change in our view of spacetime. String theory is a promising approach to a consistent quantum theory of gravity. In the past few decades a new picture of spacetime has been emerging from this theory. While this picture is far from complete, it is already clear that spacetime has many different features than it does in relativity."

"Much of the of the Universe is thought to reside in some as yet unidentified . This view is based on the analysis of trajectories of luminous ‘‘tracers’’ that map out the local potential, assuming that gravity is the only long ranged interaction between ordinary and dark matter. This assumption should be tested experimentally if possible. Laboratory tests of the can constrain (at an interesting level) any exotic coupling between ordinary and dark matter when analyzed as a test of the uniformity of towards the center of the Galaxy."

"In my opinion the situation constitutes a crisis in fundamental physics that is every bit as profound as that which preceded the advent of quantum mechanics. ... Today, in the absence of a clear theoretical framework with relevant predictive power, the Dark Energy problem is best characterized as a data and discovery driven endeavor, spiced with interesting theoretical speculation."

"Ground-based and s suffer from sources of image quality degradation that typically preclude achieving the . For 𝐷=10 m class telescopes at optical wavelengths (𝜆 ∼500), the typical achieved of around 1 for a celestial (absent correction) is about 100 times worse than the diffraction limit. A variety of factors contribute to this image degradation, including: • index of refraction variations in the , • “ground layer” or “boundary layer” due to the boundary condition of zero wind velocity at the Earth’s surface, • perturbations to due to local topography and structures, • turbulence within the enclosure, due to ambient and driven airflow through the slit and vents in the dome, • thermally driven air currents due to power dissipation on the telescope top end, and other locations, • turbulence and thermal currents in the vicinity of the primary mirror due to temperature differences between the mirror and the adjacent air, • tracking errors and vibrations in the , • wind-driven oscillations and motions of the mirror support systems, and • quasi-static s in the optical system."

"So when I finished my Ph.D., in retrospect it's kind of hard to believe that I had the audacity to do what I am about to describe. But I sort of looked around and asked myself, "What's the most interesting remaining , and where can I go to work on it?" ... the problem ..."

"Take from the air every aëroplane; from the roads every automobile; from the country every train; from the cities every electric light; from ships even wireless apparatus; from oceans all cables; from the land all wires; from shops all motors; from office buildings every elevator, telephone, and typewriter; let epidemics spread at will; let major surgery be impossible—all this and vastly more, the bondage of ignorance, where knowledge now makes us free, would be the terrible catastrophe if the tide of time should but ebb to the childhood days of men still living! ... Therefore, whoever desires progress and prosperity, whoever would advance humanity to a higher plane of civilization, must further the work of the scientist in every way he possibly can."

"A scientist looks for a description of the universe in terms of a model that allows him to understand how things work, allows him to predict how things are going to work, and allows him to put together devices that work according to his predictions."

"Modern civilization depends on science...James Smithson was well aware that knowledge should not be viewed as existing in isolated parts, but as a whole, each portion of which throws light on all the other, and that the tendency of all is to improve the human mind, and give it new sources of power and enjoyment...narrow minds think nothing of importance but their own favorite pursuit, but liberal views exclude no branch of science or literature, for they all contribute to sweeten, to adorn, and to embellish life...science is the pursuit above all which impresses us with the capacity of man for intellectual and moral progress and awakens the human intellect to aspiration for a higher condition of humanity."

"I came to realize that many people choose scientific beliefs the same way they choose to be Methodists, or Democrats, or Chicago Cubs fans. They judge science by how well it agrees with the way they want the world to be."

"Two hundred years ago, educated people imaged that the greatest contribution of science would be to free the world of superstition and humbug. It has not happened. Ancient beliefs in demons and magic still sweep across the modern landscape, but they are now dressed in the language and symbols of science: a best-selling health guru explains that his brand of healing is grounded in quantum theory; half the population believes Earth is being visited by space aliens who have mastered faster-than-light travel; and educated people wear magnets in their shoes to draw energy from the Earth. This is pseudoscience."

"What may begin as an honest error...has a way of evolving through almost imperceptible steps from self-delusion to fraud. The line between foolishness and fraud is thin. Because it is not always easy to tell when that line is crossed, I use the term voodoo science to cover them all: pathological science, junk science, pseudoscience and fraudulent science."

"The integrity of science is anchored in the willingness of scientists to test their ideas and results in direct confrontation with their scientific peers."

"Every step taken by science claims territory once occupied by the supernatural."

"It is not so much knowledge of science that the public needs as a scientific worldview—an understanding that we live in an orderly universe, governed by physical laws that cannot be circumvented."

"America's astronauts have been left stranded in low-Earth orbit, like passengers waiting beside an abandoned stretch of track for a train that will never come, bypassed by the advance of science."

"Few scientists or inventors set out to commit fraud. In the beginning, most believe they have made a great discovery. But what happens when they finally realize that things are not behaving as they believed?"

"[T]he uniquely American myth of the self-educated genius fighting against a pompous, close-minded establishment."

"They are betting against the laws of thermodynamics. No one has ever won that wager."

"For a million years, our species was confronted with a world we could not hope to understand. Now, within a span of a single human lifetime, the book of nature has been opened wide. On its pages we are finding, if not a simple world, at least an orderly world in which everything from the birth of stars to falling in love is governed by the same natural laws."

"Those [natural] laws cannot be circumvented by any amount of piety or cleverness, but they can be understood. Uncovering them should be the highest goal of a civilized society. Not...because scientists have any claim to greater intellect or virtue, but because the scientific method transcends the flaws of individual scientists. Science is the only way we have of separating the truth from ideology, or fraud, or mere foolishness."

"I think . I never would have guessed it. Even as an undergraduate, once I’d learned a little physics, I would have thought that the universe was eternal, static, and always in equilibrium. So in graduate school when I found out that the universe was expanding, I was awestruck. Then I learned if we could measure the expanding universe, the way we record the growth of a child with marks on a doorframe ... , we could determine the age of the universe and predict its ultimate fate. This was staggering! I knew this is what I wanted to do. Since that time, charting the expanding universe to determine its nature has been my passion. Though I have to add: knowing what I know now, that the , I feel like King Alfonso X of Castile who saw Ptolemy’s and reportedly said “If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking on creation thus, I should have recommended something simpler.”"

"Today we are able to make very precise measurements of the by measuring the distances and s of . The shift in a supernova’s due to the expansion of space gives its redshift (z) and the relation between redshift and distance is used to determine the expansion rate of the universe. Supernovae with greater redshifts, lying at greater distances, reveal the past expansion rate as their light was emitted at an epoch when the universe was younger. Supernovae Type Ia were the suitable candidate for these measurements as you need objects that are very luminous (thus can be observed even when they are very far) and highly uniform (so that intrinsic scatter doesn't blur the signal). Supernovae Type Ia are the most luminous of the common supernova types, peaking at 4 billion , and thus allowing us to look at extreme large distances."

"is about the gravity of empty space, the gravity of the vacuum. And the vacuum is a concept that we address in and quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is physics on microscopic scales, while Einstein's theory of general relativity ... is physics on macroscopic scales. These two theories are both great, but they don't work together. We don't have what's called a quantum theory of gravity, the way the two are united. However, dark energy actually requires you to use both of these branches of physics. So our hope is that by observing how the universe actually does physics at that interface, we will learn how to unify those."

"Less than a century ago we had no idea that there was more to the universe than our own Milky Way. the immense size of the universe, the fact that it is expanding, the fact that it is populated with such things as – all this and more had to be discovered before we could do the work that led us to contemplate an ."

"Not only does it swallow anything that comes too near it but no one lives to tell the tale ... there are footprints leading in, and no footprints leading out ... If black holes weren’t real, I think the science-fiction writers would have wanted to invent them."

"Having that bit of diabolical contrariness is a weird pleasure of being a scientist. You’re always trying to figure out, “OK, how could I be fooling myself into a wrong conclusion?” Because the more you get those things right, the more chances you have of catching the universe doing something that our brains never would’ve imagined. Scientists build out of what seems like a stance of weakness. So, one might think it’s terrible that scientists are always discovering new ways that they’re wrong, or it’s terrible that they’re only probabilistically sure of facts. But that’s really where scientists’ superpower has come from. We have been able to figure out amazing solutions to problems or surprises about the world. Much of that can be traced back to being willing to be wrong and being comfortable with finding the ways you’re wrong. And for this purpose, you want to build strong relationships with people who are going to tell you when you’re wrong, who will disagree with you, or who compete with you. They’re your best bet at figuring out where you’re making a mistake."

"# Science is constantly, systematically and inexorably revisionary. It is a self-correcting process and one that is self-destroying of its own errors..."

"# A related trait of science is its destruction of idols, destruction of the gods men live by... Science has no absolute right or absolute justice... To live comfortably with science it is necessary to live with a dynamically changing system of concepts... it has a way of weakening old and respected bonds..."

"# Not only are the tenets of science constantly subject to challenge and revision, but its prophets are under challenge too..."

"# Further, the findings of science have an embarrassing way of turning out to be relevant to the customs and to the civil laws of men—requiring these customs and laws also to be revised..."

"# Certainly we have seen spectacular changes in the concept of private property and of national borders as we have moved into the space age..."

"# Moreover, the pace of technological advance gravely threatens the bountiful and restorative power of nature to resist modification..."

"# Another trait of science that leads to much hostility or misunderstanding by the non-scientist is the fact that science is practiced by a small elite... (which) has cultural patterns discernibly different from those of the rest of society..."

"# The trait that to me seems the most socially important about science, however, is that it is a major source of man's discontent with the status quo..."

"The notion that global warming is a fact and will be catastrophic is drilled into people to the point where it seems surprising that anyone would question it, and yet, underlying it is very little evidence at all. Nonetheless, there are statements made of such overt unrealism that I feel embarrassed. I feel it discredits science. I think problems will arise when one will need to depend on scientific judgment, and by ruining our credibility now you leave society with a resource of some importance diminished."

"With respect to science, the assumption behind consensus is that science is a source of authority and that authority increases with the number of scientists. Of course, science is not primarily a source of authority. Rather, it is a particularly effective approach to inquiry and analysis. Skepticism is essential to science; consensus is foreign."

"We're talking of a few tenths of a degree change in temperature. None of it in the last eight years, by the way. And if we had warming, it should be accomplished by less storminess. But because the temperature itself is so unspectacular, we have developed all sorts of fear of prospect scenarios – of flooding, of plague, of increased storminess when the physics says we should see less. I think it's mainly just like little kids locking themselves in dark closets to see how much they can scare each other and themselves."

"Based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Niño, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc. Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false."

"The deep gender bias of science (including medicine), of its very ways of seeing problems, resonates, Keller argues, in its "common rhetoric." Mainly "adversarial" and "aggressive" in its stance toward what it studies, "science can come to sound like a battlefield.""

"Throughout history philosophers and mystics have sought a compact key to universal wisdom, a finite formula or text which, when known and understood, would provide the answer to every question. The Bible, the Koran, the mythical secret books of Hermes Trismegistus, and the medieval Jewish Cabala have been so regarded. Sources of universal wisdom are traditionally protected from casual use by being hard to find, hard to understand when found, and dangerous to use, tending to answer more and deeper questions than the user wishes to ask. Like God the esoteric book is simple yet undescribable, omniscient, and transforms all who know It. The use of classical texts to foretell mundane events is considered superstitious nowadays, yet, in another sense, science is in quest of its own Cabala, a concise set of natural laws which would explain all phenomena. In mathematics, where no set of axioms can hope to prove all true statements, the goal might be a concise axiomatization of all “interesting” true statements."

"Ω is in many senses a Cabalistic number. It can be known of, but not known, through human reason. To know it in detail, one would have to accept its un-computable digit sequence on faith, like words of a sacred text. It embodies an enormous amount of wisdom in a very small space, inasmuch as its first few thousand digits, which could be written on a small piece of paper, contain the answers to more mathematical questions than could be written down in the entire universe, including all interesting finitely-refutable conjectures. Its wisdom is useless precisely because it is universal: the only known way of extracting from Ω the solution to one halting problem, say the Fermat conjecture, is by embarking on a vast computation that would at the same time yield solutions to all other equally simply-stated halting problems, a computation far too large to be carried out in practice. Ironically, although Ω cannot be computed, it might accidentally be generated by a random process, e.g. a series of coin tosses, or an avalanche that left its digits spelled out in the pattern of boulders on a mountainside. The initial few digits of Ω are thus probably already recorded somewhere in the universe. Unfortunately, no mortal discoverer of this treasure could verify its authenticity or make practical use of it."

"Recently I attended a workshop on the study of complexity at which two MIT computer scientists, Tom Toffoli and Norman Margolus, demonstrated the operation of an and gate on a computer monitor. Also watching the show was Charles Bennett of IBM, an expert on the mathematical foundations of computation and complexity. I remarked to Bennett that what we were watching was an electronic computer simulating a cellular automaton simulating a computer. Bennett replied that these successive embeddings of computational logic reminded him of Russian dolls."

"If it is assumed, without due Scriptural support, that the purpose of revelation is to give mankind a source-book of information on all phases of physical, mental, spiritual, sociological, artistic, and scientific life — a source-book which must have meaning for the people to whom it was addressed and to all the generations coming after them in spite of the changes which are continuously occurring — then we have the greatest difficulty in maintaining the doctrine of an inerrant Scripture. If, on this stand, we adopt the position of “arbitrary inerrancy,” we essentially jeopardize the whole truth of Christianity by attempting to balance the great wealth and weight of God’s revelation in Christ upon our ability to show that the words of Scripture can be judged inerrant even when we examine them on the basis of criteria they were not written to satisfy. How much of liberalism and rejection of Biblical revelation has been precipitated as a blind reaction against such a stand!"

"The human senses are tools of science in studying the natural world. If you can see it, hear it, feel, taste, or smell it, then science can’t work with it. This isn’t meant superficially, for scientists have developed a great variety of instruments that extend the capabilities of science far beyond the unaided senses. But even with the most subtle of instruments, the link between instrument and scientist is in the form of a meter needle whose location is seen, a photographic record or computer tape that can be read, or an audible signal that can be heard."

"Evolution is a scientific question on the biological level; it would be unfortunate indeed if a scientific question were permitted to become the crucial point for Christian faith."

"We believe in Creation. We praise the Lord for that faith. But let us avoid either posing creation and evolution as intrinsically antithetical alternatives, the acceptance of one demanding the rejection of the other, or presenting creation as a scientific mechanism alternative to evolution, as though good science must ultimately lead to the verification of fiat creation and a falsification of evolution."

"In my considered opinion the peer review system, in which the proposals rather than the proposers are reviewed, is the greatest disaster to be visited upon the scientific community in this century"

"Since I started working in high energy physics it certainly hasn't been lonely and there haven't been a lack of female role models."

"Black women are a different story. But there were minority women working at the Fermilab experiments whom I was very happy to see. And at the ATLAS experiment there are a noticeable fraction of African descent. So I think things are improving because, historically, all of the icons in our field have been white men."

"I didn’t know what my life would look like as a black postdoc or faculty member."

"I looked to the women such as my mother who had had academic careers, and tried to think about how I could shape my life to look something like that, and I realized that it could be something I could make work."

"I’m still somewhat in shock"

"You have to build up from the bottom."

"I don’t think there’s another physicist in the town of Selborne, so that things slowly leak out over the news. But there’s no marching in the street here."

"That’s right. I, my motivation was really coming from seeing that something does work, the brain, and understanding more about how the brain works would be necessary to understand thought consciousness or what have you."

"And that it somehow was related to collective phenomena in networks. And I slowly wove my way from an interest in how the brain functioned to a question of how could hardware or software, or whatever you want to call it, wetware, produce such a thing."

"And the centre of gravity of my knowledge and understanding moved slowly from much more physics oriented to the neurobiological one. And somewhere along the line, this connection between AI, networks, neural networks and physics developed."

"In a good physics problem, you have a system which is well defined and where you can understand something about how collectively it may work in a way which is more robust than the individual little bits and pieces. You don’t leap into a problem overall saying, I want to understand how mind works."

"You have to build up from the bottom. If you were doing weather, you would say, well, I want to understand what storms are without going back to interacting air nitrogen molecules."

"I’m just curious about how things work. I think I became a scientist because my mom had been a physics teacher and she brought home cool demos—I saw a laser and I thought that was awesome. She’d bring home dry ice and I thought that it was amazing that gas could be a solid. I’ve always liked quantitative puzzles and so it’s a way to combine, sort of, curiosity about things around me with my tendency to be quantitative about things. What I study now is materials. I’m interested in why materials behave the way they do. Much of the technology in the world around us is built upon materials that have very specific properties."

"AI and physics is really a two-way street: AI’s influence on how we research new physics phenomena, but also applying physics thinking to the way that AI systems operate."

"I basically told them, in no uncertain terms, that this was not the way that I thought physics research should be going. And they agreed with me, actually, about the off-the-shelf use of machine learning."

"Where would someone live within the academic ecosystem if they wanted to dive into physics topics, but also computation and statistics? That was the motivation for submitting a grant to the NSF to start this institute.If you think about AI solely as it applies to fundamental physics research, we have massive challenges in our field and we’re trying to understand some of the deepest questions in nature."

"Cosmology is another area with massive amounts of data and massive computational costs to run simulations of the universe. Without something like machine learning, we simply wouldn't be able to tackle those problems."

"there is physics for AI, where there are concepts from physics that can help you build better AI tools, even if you aren’t directly studying physical systems. You can build machine learning architectures that have physics-style reasoning embedded and those concepts turn out to be quite powerful."

"Invoking the simple principle of translational symmetry — which in nature gives rise to conservation of momentum — led to dramatic improvements in image recognition"

"Emmy Noether proved two deep theorems, and their converses, on the connection between and s. Because these theorems are not in the mainstream of her scholarly work, which was the development of modern abstract algebra, it is of some historical interest to examine how she came to make these discoveries. The present paper is an historical account of the circumstances in which she discovered and proved these theorems which physicists refer to collectively as . The work was done soon after . The failure of local energy conservation in the general theory was a problem that concerned people at that time, among them David Hilbert, Felix Klein, and Albert Einstein. Noether's theorems solved this problem. With her characteristically deep insight and thorough analysis, in solving that problem she discovered very general theorems that have profoundly influenced modern physics."

"In 1943 fear that the German war machine might use s was abating and among s another fear was taking its place - that of a postwar nuclear arms race with worldwide proliferation of nuclear weapons. Manhattan Project scientists and engineers began to discuss uses of in the postwar world. Niels Bohr, Leo Szilard, James A. Franck and others launched a concerted effort to lay groundwork for international control of the technology. Realizing the devastation nuclear weapons could cause and that they could be made and delivered much more cheaply than conventional weapons of the same power, they tried to persuade policy makers to take into account long range consequences of using atomic bombs and not base their decisions on short range military expediency alone. They met with little success. The scientists' main message, unheeded then and very relevant now, is that worldwide international agreements are needed to provide for inspection and control of nuclear weapons technology. Their memoranda and reports remain as historic documents eloquently testifying to their concern."

"Enrico Fermi lived from 1901 to 1954, a period of great progress in physics and a period in which opportunities for women to study and work in institutions of higher learning increased significantly in Europe and North America. Though there are a few examples of women who made important contributions to physics in the 18th century such as and , it was only in Fermi's time that the number began to increase significantly. It is remarkable that almost immediately after they gained entrance to laboratories and universities, among them appeared women of great creative ability who made lasting contributions to physics. This talk is mainly about some of these whose scientific lives are not as well known as their contributions deserve — Emmy Noether, , , . Additionally, some outstanding women whose work played a role in Enrico Fermi's life in physics are noted - , , , and ."

"Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard worked together at in 1939-40, just after was discovered, to ascertain the feasibility of a nuclear chain reaction, and then on the construction of the first nuclear reactor. Szilard believed a nuclear bomb could be built, and that the Germans may be doing so, but Fermi was sceptical. The Anglo-American project to build a bomb began late in 1941 after brought the to the attention of U. S. physicists. Szilard recalled "On matters scientific or technical there was rarely any disagreement [but] Fermi and I disagreed from the very start of our collaboration about every issue that involved not science but principles of action in the face of the approaching war. If the nation owes us gratitude — and it may not — it does so for having stuck it out together as long as was necessary." As the war with Germany was drawing to a close and the successful construction of the atomic bombs was well underway, these two men took opposing positions regarding use of the bombs."

"Although she was primarily a particle theorist, her most important work may well be her contribution to our understanding of superconductivity. She was a trailblazer for and, in her retirement, led the effort to chronicle the contributions of women to physics in the 20th century."

"We develop a for computing sums over random surfaces which arise in all problems containing (like , three-dimensional etc.). These sums are reduced to the exactly solvable quantum theory of the two-dimensional Liouville lagrangian. At D = 26 the string dynamics is that of harmonic oscillators as was predicted earlier by dual theorists, otherwise it is described by the nonlinear integrable theory."

"We have no better way of describing elementary particles than quantum field theory. A quantum field in general is an assembly of an infinite number of interacting harmonic oscillators. Excitations of such oscillators are associated with particles. The special importance of the harmonic oscillator follows from the fact that its excitation spectrum is additive, i.e. if E1 and E2 are energy levels above the ground state then E1 + E2 will be an energy level as well. It is precisely this property that we expect to be true for a system of elementary particles."

"can be understood in a very simple way by means of the Peierls argument. Namely, while the energy of the string is proportional to its length, the entropy of it also grows linearly (since the number of random curves grows exponentially with their lengths). Thus at a certain temperature the entropy takes over and infinitely long strings begin to dominate. That means liberation."

"Based at Princeton University, Polyakov was chosen from a shortlist of three, which included string theorist of the and a trio of researchers – of the , of the and of Stanford University. The shortlist and ultimate winner were chosen by a panel comprising nine physicists – seven of whom are string theorists and one a topological-insulator pioneer. Not surprisingly, string-theory naysayer of Columbia University is not pleased. “The [ceremony] was largely a string theory hype-fest…,” he wrote on his blog . Meanwhile in a very different dimension of the , Lubos Motl is elated and writes “Sasha Polyakov is a giant because he is a string-theory pioneer and because he has cracked many phenomena in gauge theories.” Motl also makes a confession of sorts about what he discovered while alone in Polyakov’s office…"

"Alexander Polyakov, a now at Princeton University, caught a glimpse of the future of in 1981. A range of mysteries, from the wiggling of strings to the binding of s into s, demanded a new mathematical tool whose silhouette he could just make out. ... In his paper he sketched out a formula that roughly described how to calculate averages of a wildly chaotic type of surface, the “.” His work brought physicists into a new mathematical arena, one essential for unlocking the behavior of theoretical objects called strings and building a simplified model of quantum gravity. Years of toil would lead Polyakov to breakthrough solutions for other theories in physics, but he never fully understood the mathematics behind the Liouville field. Over the last seven years, however, a group of mathematicians has done what many researchers thought impossible. In a trilogy of landmark publications, they have recast Polyakov’s formula using fully rigorous mathematical language and proved that the Liouville field flawlessly models the phenomena Polyakov thought it would."

"Everyone acknowledges that there are crucial tests to be made and information to be found in the com­ing round of experimentation; so that, given only the resources needed to exploit the visible scien­tific opportunities, we surely face very exciting times. Moreover, the proponents acknowledge, even if everything goes as expected, that there will remain much more to be known than can be revealed in the next round of experimentation. In­deed, there are very stirring visions about what may lie out there beyond the immediately foreseeable do­mains of direct, experimental at­tack. The trouble, however, is this: they conceive that these farther reaches may lie forever beyond direct exper­imental investigation and that, for what can be reached, we may alrea­dy have the basic framework in hand."

"Relativistic quantum theory predicts that particles having must come in pairs with opposite charges but identical masses (and identical lifetimes if unstable). One member of the pair is called the particle, the other the antiparticle. Which is called by which name is a matter of history and convenience. It turns out that there are other kinds of "charge" in addition to electric charge; for example, so-called . The necessity of particle-antiparticle paris obtains for charges of any kind. Thus, not only is there an antiproton to the proton, there is an antineutrino to the neutron. The neutron is electrically neutral but it has baryon number charge."

"Isidor Rabi, on a leave from in the early 1960s, came to Princeton as a visitor to its history department. On several occasions during that year, when the elevated conversation in the history department got to be too much for him, he would drop into my office to “talk physics.” We had already by that time developed a sage-rookie relationship. “What are you up to these days?” he would begin. But when I started to tell, he would cut me and all other theorists of my generation short as mere scribblers and launch into tales of the golden days of his generation, when giants trod the earth. So they had, I knew. After all, he got started in physics as quantum mechanics was being born. This put-down was conveyed with great good humor and I was not at all discomfited; indeed I relished the barbs and the tales."

"Enrico Fermi was the great magnet at . His grasp of physics, and both, was awesome. He took his teaching seriously. We’ve all encountered lecturers who cover up trivialities in layers of formalism and obfuscation. Fermi, the other way around, always got to the heart of things even in the most truly complex situations and exposed it with simplicity and clarity. He was almost too lucid. We could follow and marvel at his tricks and shortcuts but we often stumbled when left to our own devices."