Edward Teller Quotes

I do feel strongly that string theory is our best hope for making progress at unifying gravity and quantum mechanics.

The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level.

Very strange people, physicists - in my experience the ones who aren't dead are in some way very ill.

The chief difficulty of modern theoretical physics resides not in the fact that it expresses itself almost exclusively in mathematical symbols, but in the psychological difficulty of supposing that complete nonsense can be seriously promulgated and transmitted by persons who have sufficient intelligence of some kind to perform operations in differential and integral calculus.

Physics as we know it will be over in six months.

To become a theoretical physicist ... you need to have a passionate love affair with the universe.

The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

There is now a feeling that the pieces of physics are falling into place, not because of any single revolutionary idea or because of the efforts of any one physicist, but because of a flowering of many seeds of theory, most of them planted long ago.

Physics is an otherworld thing, it requires a taste for things unseen, even unheard of- a high degree of abstraction... These faculties die off somehow when you grow up... profound curiosity happens when children are young. I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race... Once you are sophisticated, you know too much- far too much. Pauli once said to me, "I know a great deal. I know too much. I am a quantum ancient.".

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.

The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.

It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about we can discuss.

But even technical work filled with formulas can be valuable and important. Einstein offered a lot of technical work on quantum physics, which mostly eludes me. I refer to his work, and I have studied it, but I am not a physicist. But look at Einstein's simple statement that the most important decision you ever will make is the decision whether you live in a friendly universe or a hostile universe.

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.

Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.

We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.

I had two passions when I was a child. First was to learn about Einstein's theory and help to complete his dream of a unified theory of everything. That's my day job. I work in something called string theory. I'm one of the founders of the subject. We hope to complete Einstein's dream of a theory of everything.

I recently forced myself to read a book on quantum physics, just to try and learn something new. I was confused by the middle of the first sentence and it all went downhill from there. The only thing I can remember learning is that a parallel universe can theoretically be contained on the head of a needle. I don't really know what that means, but I am now more careful handling needles.

Physics as we know it will be over in six months - Max Born

The Universe in a Nutshell

I claim that relativity and the rest of modern physics is not complicated. It can be explained very simply. It is only unusual or, put another way, it is contrary to common sense.

I think I can safely say that nobody understands Quantum Mechanics.

We are not at the end but at the beginning of a new physics. But whatever we find, there will always be new horizons continually awaiting us.

Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign.

Michio Kaku and Albert Einstein, they're both so ahead of our time. It's just fascinating to read about them, what their theories are on loopholes and everything else. It's fascinating stuff.