Greg Egan Quotes

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract.

There are 15 main theories in physics, and we know all of them. If there weren't a finite number of theories, there would not be a point to physics.

Physics is nothing but the ABC's. Nature is an equation with an unknown, a Hebrew word which is written only with consonants to which reason has to add the dots.

I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.

There's branches of science which I don't understand; for example, physics. It could be said, I suppose, that I have faith that physicists understand it better than I do.

There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work.

Mathematics in general is fundamentally the science of self-evident things.

Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics

I thought I should study physics because it's fundamental to all science.

Bubbles are very simplified versions of some of the basic laws of the universe.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

There is a physics to the world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes completely self-centered and ego-driven, which is the death of a memoir.

I thought I wanted to be a physicist in high school until I learned that there was much more math than philosophy in it. I assumed I would just sit around all day and think.

Only in mathematics and physics was I, through self-study, far beyond the school curriculum, and also with regard to philosophy as it was taught in the school curriculum.

For a physicist mathematics is not just a tool by means of which phenomena can be calculated, it is the main source of concepts and principles by means of which new theories can be created.

The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation.

A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics.

In the beginning God said, the four-dimensional divergence of an antisymmetric, second rank tensor equals zero, and there was light, and it was good. And on the seventh day he rested.

The smallest thought could not exist unless the entire universe and the laws of physics were in some way encouraging it.

...quantum mechanics—the physics of our world—requires that you hold such pedestrian complaints in abeyance.

Think how hard physics would be if particles could think

The content of physics is the concern of physicists, its effect the concern of all men.

Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.

Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.

Mathematics is not something that you find lying around in your back yard. It's produced by the human mind. Yet if we ask where mathematics works best, it is in areas like particle physics and astrophysics, areas of fundamental science that are very, very far removed from everyday affairs.