William Stwalley Quotes

Now, what space ultimately is - I should confess, I think most physicists believe - we don't yet know.

Physicists must feel they are in the most exciting field in the world. Their minds must be afire.

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.

I think I always wanted to go into physics. What always fascinated me about science was the desire to understand what underlies it all, and I think physics is basically the study of that.

With the discovery of the Higgs boson, one of the questions has been ticked off the list, but there are many others. We hope that we can find answers or hints for answers to at least some of them. But of course, this is in the hands of nature.

The main reason why people should care about research in fundamental physics is the same reason they care about astronomy and cosmology. People, children, want to know what we're made out of, how it works, and why the universe is the way it is.

In the history of physics, every time we've looked beyond the scales and energies we were familiar with, we've found things that we wouldn't have thought were there.

Experimental physicists break things apart to see what’s inside.

I'm just interested in science, and I try to keep track of what's going on and get my head around it - inflation, the multiverse, whatever. It's very hard for me because I don't have a scientific background, and I wasn't any good at science at school, but all of that stuff I just find incredibly attractive and fascinating.

I'm a person who's very interested in science and the universe and quantum physics and astrophysics.

A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself.

No one knows who wrote the laws of physics or where they come from. Science is based on testable, reproducible evidence, and so far we cannot test the universe before the Big Bang.

From a scientific point of view, our mission is to seek answers to the fundamental questions about the universe. Many are open - we don't know about dark matter, which accounts for a quarter of the universe's matter, nor do we know why there's antimatter.

I've always really been into science, and in the last five years I've gotten into theoretical physics and the origins of the universe.

Chemistry seems to be pretty much nailed down, and biology gains ground all the time. But physics seems to be mired in idle rumination. They think a Big Bang started the universe, but they don't really know.

I was already studying physics, but Sputnik steered me toward space, cosmology, the Big Bang, and elementary particles.

I would hope that the publicity around the Higgs boson would increase the public awareness of physics and cosmology.

We can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don't know what banged and why it banged. That's a challenge for 21st-century science.

I would like to uncover the secrets of the universe.

And what we know, or think we know, about the universe of space and time is changing very quickly.

In 50 years - or 20 years, or 200 years - our current epistemic horizon (the Big Bang, roughly) may look as parochial as the horizon Newton had to settle for in his day, but no doubt there will still be good questions whose answers elude us.

Is the universe 'elegant,' as Brian Greene tells us? Not as far as I can tell, not the usual laws of particle physics, anyway. I think I might find the universal principles of String Theory most elegant - if I only knew what they were.

We know there must be new physics. For example, we cannot explain what dark matter is.

Astronomers ought to be able to ask fundamental questions without accelerators.

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.