Abdus Salam Quotes

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.

The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.

I'm a student of patterns. At heart, I'm a physicist. I look at everything in my life as trying to find the single equation, the theory of everything.

I think there's this essential human desire to have a unified field theory. Everyone is like, 'I want to unlock the single secret to 'Lost.' There isn't any one secret. There is not a unified field theory for 'Lost,' nor do we think there should be, because philosophically, we don't buy into that as a conceit.

We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.

To call everything that appears illogical, fantasy, fairy tale, or chimera would be practically to admit not understanding nature.

The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.

The question not many ask is: why are the laws of physics like they are?

The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.

Art, science, philosophy, religion -- each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience.

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be ''Seek simplicity and distrust it.''

Complex things are easy to do. Simplicity's the real challenge.

But nature did not deem it her business to make the discovery of her laws easy for us.

A modern mathematical proof is not very different from a modern machine, or a modern test setup: the simple fundamental principles are hidden and almost invisible under a mass of technical details.

Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed.

Making the complicated simple is true creativity.

Anybody can make the simple complecated. Creativity is making the complecated simple.

Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.

Overload 'em with information an' they'll kill yeh jus' to simplify things.

Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the occurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of the simplification of human life implied in even the best of it purposes.

You can cram a truth into an epigram - the truth, never.

Nature is made in such a way as to be able to be understood. Or perhaps I should put it-more correctly-the other way around, and say that we are made in such a way as to be able to understand Nature.

The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine. The simplicity of nature is not that which may be easily read but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made.

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws.