Tom Stoppard Quotes

It's not clear in physics why you can't see the future.

The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things.

Modern physics often advances only by sacrificing some of our traditional philosophical convictions

Physics is becoming too difficult for the physicists.

In relativity, movement is continuous, causally determinate and well defined, while in quantum mechanics it is discontinuous, not causally determinate and not well defined.

I find the whole time travel question very unsettling if you take it to its logical extension. I think it might eventually be possible, but then what happens?

There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion: some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic.

I believe there is true expertise in some endeavors, and not in others. There is obviously no such thing as expertise in predicting the results of coin tosses, but there is expertise in predicting the behavior of lasers.

… theoretical physics is actual philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics), and it has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity) which are applicable far beyond physics.

If you aren't confused by quantum physics, then you haven't really understood it

Everything is physics and math.

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

Science rejects the indeterminate.

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

I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started.

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.

Silly ideas, worth the admission price in smiles, but they're true. Is high-energy physics interesting because it's true or because it's crazy?

Anyone who can contemplate quantum mechanics without getting dizzy hasn't understood it.

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

We do not understand much of anything, from... the "big bang" , all the way down to the particles in the atoms of a bacterial cell. We have a wilderness of mystery to make our way through in the centuries ahead.

If there really is a complete unified theory that governs everything, it presumably also determines your actions. But it does so in a way that is impossible to calculate for an organism that is as complicated as a human being. The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can't predict what they will do.

Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?

Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today

Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.