Paul Davies Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign.

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.

There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end ofthe search for the ultimate laws of nature.

To the extent that we even understand string theory, it may imply a massive number of possible different universes with different laws of physics in each universe, and there may be no way of distinguishing between them or saying why the laws of physics are the way they are. And if I can predict anything, then I haven't explained anything.

I get paid to do what I love. If you understand physics, the foundation of the atomic theory and relativity, you understand how the future is going to unfold. You understand what things are not possible. You understand why things work. I get paid to do what I love the most, and that is to work on the Unified Field Theory and to see the future.

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

The bedrock nature of space and time and the unification of cosmos and quantum are surely among science's great 'open frontiers.' These are parts of the intellectual map where we're still groping for the truth - where, in the fashion of ancient cartographers, we must still inscribe 'here be dragons.'

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.

What you can show using physics, forces this universe to continue to exist. As long as you're using general relativity and quantum mechanics you are forced to conclude that God exists.

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now, All that remains is more and more precise measurement

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.

Look at the size of the universe and look at what we're discovering about string theory. There's a wide-eyed sense of we're just getting started here.

There's very little that shocks me because I consider life a miracle so I guess what shocks me is that life exists. How the hell did we get here? What shocks me is that bacteria alter their genes and resist antibiotics and viruses resist vaccines.

The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.

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

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