MAX TEGMARK

In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere.

This brief century of ours is arguably the most significant one in the history of our universe. We'll have the technology either to self-destruct, or [to] seed our cosmos with life. The situation is so unstable that I doubt we can dwell at this fork in the road for more than another hundred years. But if we end up going the life route instead of the death route, then in a distant future our cosmos will be teaming with life, all of which can be traced back to what we do-here and now. I don't know how we'll be thought of, but I'm sure that we won't be remembered as insignificant.

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.

Like an ostrich with its head in the sand, we humans have repeatedly assumed that all we could see was all that existed, hubristically imagining ourselves at the center of everything. In our quest to understand the cosmos, underestimation has thus been a persistent theme.

There’s no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible, and therefore never even trying.

If life were a movie, physical reality would be the entire DVD: Future and past frames exist just as much as the present one.

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

The core of a scientific lifestyle is to change your mind when faced with information that disagrees with your views, avoiding intellectual inertia, yet many of us praise leaders who stubbornly stick to their views as "strong."

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.

Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.

Like an ostrich with its head in the sand, we humans have repeatedly assumed that all we could see was all that existed, hubristically imagining ourselves at the center of everything. In our quest to understand the cosmos, underestimation has thus been a persistent theme.

There’s no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible, and therefore never even trying. In hindsight, many of the great breakthroughs in physics could have happened earlier, because the necessary tools already existed.

Amusingly, Christopher Columbus totally bungled ... by relying on subsequent less-accurate calculations and confusing Arabic miles with Italian miles, concluding that he needed to sail only 3,700 km to reach the Orient when the true value was 19,600 km. He clearly wouldn’t have gotten his trip funded if he’d done his math right, and he clearly wouldn’t have survived if America hadn’t existed, so sometimes being lucky is more important than being right.

In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere.

There’s no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible, and therefore never even trying.

If life were a movie, physical reality would be the entire DVD: Future and past frames exist just as much as the present one.

All too often, schools resemble museums, reflecting the past rather than shaping the future

The hallmark of a deep explanation is that it answers more than you ask

The core of a scientific lifestyle is to change your mind when faced with information that disagrees with your views, avoiding intellectual inertia, yet many of us praise leaders who stubbornly stick to their views as "strong."

For me, [John Wheeler] was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.

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

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.

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.

This brief century of ours is arguably the most significant one in the history of our universe. We'll have the technology either to self-destruct, or [to] seed our cosmos with life. The situation is so unstable that I doubt we can dwell at this fork in the road for more than another hundred years. But if we end up going the life route instead of the death route, then in a distant future our cosmos will be teaming with life, all of which can be traced back to what we do-here and now. I don't know how we'll be thought of, but I'm sure that we won't be remembered as insignificant.

Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.

In 2056, I think you'll be able to buy T-shirts on which are printed equations describing the unified laws of our universe.