Physicists From The United States

"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."

"Science is empirical: knowing the answer is nothing. Testing your knowledge means everything."

"Theorists always know the answer. They're just sometimes right."

"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."

"... 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 ..."

"We only see shadows of reality. We shouldn't expect those shadows to behave sensibly."

"It is a shame when nonsense can substitute for fact with impunity."

"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."

"Science simply forces us to revise what is sensible to accommodate the universe, rather than vice versa."

"If you have nothing in quantum mechanics, you will always have something."

"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 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."

"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"

"To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes — even in a scientific text."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"A number of current theoretical explorations will turn out to be passing fancies..."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"Kids are my favorites … their spirit and curiosity has not yet been dulled by schools."

"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."

"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."

"It is important that we subscribe to the requirements of nature."

"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."

"Why is it so?"

"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."

"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."

"We are trying to understand the implications of quantum mechanics. The subject is very old, but we are still learning."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"With Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the fundamental role of experimental errors became a basic feature of physics."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."