Celia Green Quotes

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.

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.

My present work concerns the problems connected with the theory of elementary particles, the theory of gravitation and cosmology and I shall be glad if I can manage to make some contribution to these important branches of science.

I do feel strongly that string theory is our best hope for making progress at unifying gravity and quantum mechanics.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I think the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles would revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

String theory has had a long and wonderful history. It originated as a technique to try to understand the strong force. It was a calculational mechanism, a way of approaching a mathematical problem that was too difficult, and it was a promising way, but it was only a technique. It was a mathematical technique rather than a theory in itself.

We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature. The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.

I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.

I'm a fan of supersymmetry, largely because it seems to be the only route by which gravity can be brought into the scheme. It's probably not even enough, but it's a way forward to get gravity involved. If you have supersymmetry, then there are more of these particles. That would be my favourite outcome.

Very much, string theory is simply a work in progress. What we are inching toward every day are predictions that within the realm of current technology we hope to test. It's not like we're working on a theory that is permanently beyond experiment. That would be philosophy.

I just think too many nice things have happened in string theory for it to be all wrong. Humans do not understand it very well, but I just don't believe there is a big cosmic conspiracy that created this incredible thing that has nothing to do with the real world.

As for the forces, electromagnetism and gravity we experience in everyday life. But the weak and strong forces are beyond our ordinary experience. So in physics, lots of the basic building blocks take 20th- or perhaps 21st-century equipment to explore.

I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.

The biggest conceptual change over the last 100 years in the way physicists think about the world is symmetry.

What lots of people have been trying to do ever since is find what's beyond the current Standard Model. So far, it has stood impervious to all attacks.

As accelerators reach higher and higher energies, we may need a new Standard Model, or, at least, today's may need to be modified, but that's the way science operates.

Theorists can create all sorts of theories which go beyond the Standard Model. But there's not one bit of experimental evidence to point out which way you should go.