Mark Z. Danielewski Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

If you want to penetrate into the heart of physics, then let yourself be initiated into the mysteries of poetry.

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.

Ultimately, my Ph.D. is in mathematical physics, focusing on quantum field theory and curved space-time, and I worked with Stephen Hawking.

I wouldn't have thought that a wrong theory should lead us to understand better the ordinary quantum field theories or to have new insights about the quantum states of black holes.

My work on symmetries of string theory is on what is known as strong-weak coupling duality, or S-duality.

By having simplified what is known, physicists have been led into realms which as yet are anything but simple. That at some time, they, too, will appear as simple consequences of a theory of which no one has yet dreamed is not a statement of fact.It is a statement of faith.

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

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

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.

In fact the total amount that a physicist knows is very little. He has only to remember the rules to get him from one place to another and he is all right.

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.

Physics has entered a remarkable era. Ideas that were once the realm of science fiction are now entering our theoretical — and maybe even experimental — grasp. Brand-new theoretical discoveries about extra dimensions have irreversibly changed how particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists now think about the world. The sheer number and pace of discoveries tells us that we've most likely only scratched the surface of the wondrous possibilities that lie in store. Ideas have taken on a life of their own.

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

Physics is the science of all the tremendously powerful invisibilities - of magnetism, electricity, gravity, light, sound, cosmic rays. Physics is the science of the mysteries of the universe. How could anyone think it dull?

Physics has never been a comfortable subject for human psychology. The desire to regard everything outside the human race's purview as insignificant, and everything within that purview as firmly under the control of tribal myth and custom, is as strong today as it was in the time of Galileo.