Robert B. Laughlin

"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)"

"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)"

"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."

"Und was ist Wahrheit? Dass das Universum im Urknall entstanden ist? ... Letztlich ist das nichts als Marketing."

"Leider sind dem Ausdruck Emergenz einige Bedeutungen zugewachsen, die für unterschiedliche Dinge stehen, darunter übernatürliche Erscheinungen, die den physikalischen Gesetzen nicht unterworfen sind. So etwas meine ich nicht. Ich verstehe darunter ein physikalisches Ordnungsprinzip."

"Einstein war Künstler und Gelehrter, aber vor allem war er Revolutionär. ... Die unbegründete Überzeugung seiner Zeit war der Äther, genauer gesagt, die der Relativität vorangehende, naive Version des Äthers. Die unbegründete Überzeugung unserer Zeit ist die Relativität selbst. Es würde vollkommen seinem Naturell entsprechen, sich die Fakten erneut vorzunehmen, sie im Geiste umzuwerfen und zu dem Schluss zu kommen, dass sein geliebtes Relativitätsprinzip keineswegs fundamental, sondern emergent ist."

"Die moderne, jeden Tag experimentell bestätigte Vorstellung des Raumvakuums ist ein relativistischer Äther. Wir nennen ihn nur nicht so, weil das Tabu ist."