Lewis Thomas Quotes

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

We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe.

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.

People want to know about what's going on with what's in the universe, what are particles like, what are the basic rules of nature. It's a lot of curiosity out there.

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

Not only am I not persuaded by the testimony; I do not even understand it. For me the charm of quarks is well hidden ...

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.

The standard model of particle physics says that the universe consists of a very small number of particles, 12, and a very small number of forces, four. If we're correct about those 12 particles and those four forces and understand how they interact, properly, we have the recipe for baking up a universe.

We ought to teach kids more about the Big Bang and entropy and particles. Every high school graduate should know that everything in the universe is made of a handful of particles. That's not a hard thing to know. But that's not what's emphasized.

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.

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.

I read a lot of science books - I love cosmology, quantum theory, particle physics. So my idea of a great read would probably put you directly into a coma.

There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance implies only ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

Many physicists these days sound like the Delphic oracle - with equations.

Often, when I want to read something that is satisfying to me as theology, what I actually read is string theory, or something like that - popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies - because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. It is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. That's theology.

Silly ideas, worth the admission price in smiles, but they're true. Is high-energy physics interesting because it's true or because it's crazy?

The aim of particle physics is to understand what everything’s made of, and how everything sticks together. By everything I mean me and you, the Earth, the Sun, the 100 billion suns in our galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Absolutely everything.

[T]he atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.

A page from a journal of modern experimental physics will be as mysterious to the uninitiated as a Tibetan mandala. Both are records of enquiries into the nature of the universe.

You're entitled to say, if you're so smart, why don't you tell me what that dark matter is? And I'll have to confess I don't know.

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.

Most people don't have time to master the very mathematical details of theoretical physics.

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

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