Theoretical Physicist Quotes

One of the brighter humans, a German-born theoretical physicist called Albert Einstein, explained relativity to dimmer members of his species by telling them, “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.” What if looking at the pretty girl felt like putting your hand on a hot stove? What was that? Quantum mechanics?

Even a good, inveterate atheist like physicist Richard Feynman once said of the fine structure constant, “All good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it…. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the ‘hand of God’ wrote that number, and we don’t know how He pushed His pencil.

...I am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It was once quipped that there is no God and Dirac is his prophet.

It is well known that theoretical physicists cannot handle experimental equipment; it breaks whenever they touch it. Pauli was such a good theoretical physicist that something usually broke in the lab whenever he merely stepped across the threshold.

If you wish to learn from the theoretical physicist anything about the methods which he uses, I would give you the following piece of advice: Don't listen to his words, examine his achievements. For to the discoverer in that field, the constructions of his imagination appear so necessary and so natural that he is apt to treat them not as the creations of his thoughts but as given realities.

Prose this bad can only occur when the author is trying to hide something. A theoretical physicist like Sheldon Lee Glashow cannot afford to write in the unreadable prose of the social sciences. He needs to communicate exceptionally complex truths in as simple and clear a language as possible.

In mysticism, knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life which becomes its living manifestation. To acquire mystical knowledge means to undergo a transformation; one could even say that the knowledge is the transformation. Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, can often stay abstract and theoretical. Thus most of today’s physicists do not seem to realize the philosophical, cultural and spiritual implications of their theories.

Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman famously said, “You should never, ever fool anybody, and you are the easiest person to fool.” The moment you tell somebody something dishonest, you’ve lied to yourself. Then you’ll start believing your own lie, which will disconnect you from reality and take you down the wrong road.

Many scientists have tried to make determinism and complementarity the basis of conclusions that seem to me weak and dangerous; for instance, they have used Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to bolster up human free will, though his principle, which applies exclusively to the behavior of electrons and is the direct result of microphysical measurement techniques, has nothing to do with human freedom of choice. It is far safer and wiser that the physicist remain on the solid ground of theoretical physics itself and eschew the shifting sands of philosophic extrapolations.

There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e - the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!

I'm convinced that Theoretical Physicist is just another way of saying BS Artist.

The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction.

Mysteries like these repeating cycles make it very interesting to be a theoretical physicist: Nature gives us such wonderful puzzles! Why does She repeat the electron at 206 times and 3,640 times its mass?

As a theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) noted, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." In other words, science advances by a series of funerals.

In the absence of experimental evidence, basic beliefs of theoretical physicists may initially have almost a religious flavor, guided by faith and aesthetics. Fortunately unlike religion, these beliefs soon face the hard test of experiment.

Personally, I get uneasy when people, especially theoretical physicists, talk about consciousness. Consciousness is not a quality that one can measure from the outside. If a little green man were to appear on our doorstep tomorrow, we do not have a way of telling if he was conscious and self-aware or was just a robot.

Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects. Three of them were among the greatest in the history of physics. One, very simple, gave the quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect—it was this work for which, sixteen years later, he was awarded the Nobel prize. Another dealt with the phenomenon of Brownian motion, the apparently erratic movement of tiny particles suspended in a liquid: Einstein showed that these movements satisfied a clear statistical law. This was like a conjuring trick, easy when explained: before it, decent scientists could still doubt the concrete existence of atoms and molecules: this paper was as near to a direct proof of their concreteness as a theoretician could give. The third paper was the special theory of relativity, which quietly amalgamated space, time, and matter into one fundamental unity. This last paper contains no references and quotes to authority. All of them are written in a style unlike any other theoretical physicist's. They contain very little mathematics. There is a good deal of verbal commentary. The conclusions, the bizarre conclusions, emerge as though with the greatest of ease: the reasoning is unbreakable. It looks as though he had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided, without listening to the opinions of others. To a surprisingly large extent, that is precisely what he had done.

A permanent state is reached, in which no observable events occur. The physicist calls this the state of thermodynamical equilibrium, or of ‘maximum entropy’. Practically, a state of this kind is usually reached very rapidly. Theoretically, it is very often not yet an absolute equilibrium, not yet the true maximum of entropy. But then the final approach to equilibrium is very slow. It could take anything between hours, years, centuries,

which had required enough dimensional finagling to make an entire university of theoretical physicists beg for mercy,

Einstein would be one of the greatest theoretical physicists of all time even if he had not written a single line on relativity.

Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can't explain what was not observed

Einstein suggested that he might be willing to move there, buy a villa, and become an engineer rather than a theoretical physicist.

There is no principle, built into the laws of nature, that says that theoretical physicists have to be happy.

It is unfair that most of the physicists who win Nobel Prizes or become household names are theorists. Newton. Einstein. Feynman. Kaku. Sheldon Cooper got the seven-season spin-off show, but Leonard? Nothing.

On the eve of the 1st Wave, the world’s leading theoretical physicist, one of the smartest guys in the world (that’s what popped up on the screen under his talking head: ONE OF THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE WORLD), appeared

No physicist started out impatient with common-sense notions, eager to replace them with some mathematical abstraction that could be understood only by rarified theoretical physics. Instead, they began, as we all do, with comfortable, standard, common-sense notions. The trouble is that Nature does not comply. If we no longer insist on our notions of how Nature ought to behave, but instead stand before Nature with an open and receptive mind, we find that common sense often doesn't work. Why not? Because our notions, both hereditary and learned, of how Nature works were forged in the millions of years our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. In this case common sense is a faithless guide because no hunter-gatherer's life ever depended on understanding time-variable electric and magnetic fields. There were no evolutionary penalties for ignorance of Maxwell's equations. In our time it's different.

The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was such a lauded lecturer in large part because, like Hui Tzu, he was skilled in finding the right analogies to illustrate his explanations of extremely abstract-and extremely difficult-concepts. He once compared a drop of water magnified 2,000 times to "a kind of teeming...like a crowd at a football game as seen from a very great distance." That description has all the precision of good physics and good poetry.

I feel that every child is born thinking like a metaphysician, toddles around playing the role of a theoretical physicist, looks for things to become an experimental scientist, but then is brainwashed by society to think like a priest.

From this point of view, the laws of science represent data compression in action. A theoretical physicist acts like a very clever coding algorithm. “The laws of science that have been discovered can be viewed as summaries of large amounts of empirical data about the universe,” wrote Solomonoff. “In the present context, each such law can be transformed into a method of compactly coding the empirical data that gave rise to that law.” A good scientific theory is economical. This was yet another way of saying so.

During the time that Landsteiner gave me an education in the field of immunology, I discovered that he and I were thinking about the serologic problem in very different ways. He would ask, What do these experiments force us to believe about the nature of the world? I would ask, What is the most. simple and general picture of the world that we can formulate that is not ruled by these experiments? I realized that medical and biological investigators were not attacking their problems the same way that theoretical physicists do, the way I had been in the habit of doing.

Quantum physicists discovered that physical atoms are made up of vortices of energy that are constantly spinning and vibrating; each atom is like a wobbly spinning top that radiates energy. Because each atom has its own specific energy signature (wobble), assemblies of atoms (molecules) collectively radiate their own identifying energy patterns. So every material structure in the universe, including you and me, radiates a unique energy signature. If it were theoretically possible to observe the composition of an actual atom with a microscope, what would we see? Imagine a swirling dust devil cutting across the desert’s floor. Now remove the sand and dirt from the funnel cloud. What you have left is an invisible, tornado-like vortex. A number of infinitesimally small, dust devil–like energy vortices called quarks and photons collectively make up the structure of the atom. From far away, the atom would likely appear as a blurry sphere. As its structure came nearer to focus, the atom would become less clear and less distinct. As the surface of the atom drew near, it would disappear. You would see nothing. In fact, as you focused through the entire structure of the atom, all you would observe is a physical void. The atom has no physical structure—the emperor has no clothes! Remember the atomic models you studied in school, the ones with marbles and ball bearings going around like the solar system? Let’s put that picture beside the “physical” structure of the atom discovered by quantum physicists. No, there has not been a printing mistake; atoms are made out of invisible energy not tangible matter! So in our world, material substance (matter) appears out of thin air. Kind of weird, when you think about it. Here you are holding this physical book in your hands. Yet if you were to focus on the book’s material substance with an atomic microscope, you would see that you are holding nothing. As it turns out, we undergraduate biology majors were right about one thing—the quantum universe is mind-bending. Let’s look more closely at the “now you see it, now you don’t” nature of quantum physics. Matter can simultaneously be defined as a solid (particle) and as an immaterial force field (wave). When scientists study the physical properties of atoms, such as mass and weight, they look and act like physical matter. However, when the same atoms are described in terms of voltage potentials and wavelengths, they exhibit the qualities and properties of energy (waves). (Hackermüller, et al, 2003; Chapman, et al, 1995; Pool 1995) The fact that energy and matter are one and the same is precisely what Einstein recognized when he concluded that E = mc2. Simply stated, this equation reveals that energy (E) = matter (m, mass) multiplied by the speed of light squared (c2). Einstein revealed that we do not live in a universe with discrete, physical objects separated by dead space. The Universe is one indivisible, dynamic whole in which energy and matter are so deeply entangled it is impossible to consider them as independent elements.

When {Born and Heisenberg and the Göttingen theoretical physicists} first discovered matrix mechanics they were having, of course, the same kind of trouble that everybody else had in trying to solve problems and to manipulate and to really do things with matrices. So they had gone to Hilbert for help and Hilbert said the only time he had ever had anything to do with matrices was when they came up as a sort of by-product of the eigenvalues of the boundary-value problem of a differential equation. So if you look for the differential equation which has these matrices you can probably do more with that. They had thought it was a goofy idea and that Hilbert didn't know what he was talking about. So he was having a lot of fun pointing out to them that they could have discovered Schrödinger’s wave mechanics six month earlier if they had paid a little more attention to him.

Albert Einstein hardly ever set foot in the laboratory; he didn’t test phenomena or use elaborate equipment. He was a theorist who perfected the “thought experiment,” in which you engage nature through your imagination, by inventing a situation or model and then working out the consequences of some physical principle. In Germany before World War II, laboratory-based physics far outranked theoretical physics in the minds of most Aryan scientists. Jewish physicists were all relegated to the lowly theorists’ sandbox and left to fend for themselves. And what a sandbox that would become.

If you want to impress someone, simply make up a vocation and preface it with the words “molecular” or “theoretical” (as in “molecular biologist” or “theoretical physicist”). After you do this no one will question the veracity of anything you say—whether it is related to your putative vocation or not.

that’s why he’s so good at Go. He was a physicist all along, that—that piece of Uranus—” “Science insult. Nice.

Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.” But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations—to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess. This imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor in physics: there are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess.

This “Hawking temperature” of a black hole and its “Hawking radiation” (as they came to be called) were truly radical—perhaps the most radical theoretical physics discovery in the second half of the twentieth century. They opened our eyes to profound connections between general relativity (black holes), thermodynamics (the physics of heat) and quantum physics (the creation of particles where before there were none). For example, they led Stephen to prove that a black hole has entropy, which means that somewhere inside or around the black hole there is enormous randomness. He deduced that the amount of entropy (the logarithm of the hole’s amount of randomness) is proportional to the hole’s surface area. His formula for the entropy is engraved on Stephen’s memorial stone at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, where he worked. For the past forty-five years, Stephen and hundreds of other physicists have struggled to understand the precise nature of a black hole’s randomness. It is a question that keeps on generating new insights about the marriage of quantum theory with general relativity—that is, about the ill-understood laws of quantum gravity.

Considered from this point of view, the fact that some of the theories which we know to be false give such amazingly accurate results is an adverse factor. Had we somewhat less knowledge, the group of phenomena which these "false" theories explain would appear to us to be large enough to "prove" these theories. However, these theories are considered to be "false" by us just for the reason that they are, in ultimate analysis, incompatible with more encompassing pictures and, if sufficiently many such false theories are discovered, they are bound to prove also to be in conflict with each other. Similarly, it is possible that the theories, which we consider to be "proved" by a number of numerical agreements which appears to be large enough for us, are false because they are in conflict with a possible more encompassing theory which is beyond our means of discovery. If this were true, we would have to expect conflicts between our theories as soon as their number grows beyond a certain point and as soon as they cover a sufficiently large number of groups of phenomena. In contrast to the article of faith of the theoretical physicist mentioned before, this is the nightmare of the theorist.

One of the things that sets Interstellar apart from other sci-fi movies is its lineup of executive producers. There’s Jordan Goldberg (Batman, Inception), Jake Myers (The Revenant), and Thomas Tull (Jurassic World). And then there’s Kip Thorne, emeritus Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Not many theoretical physicists moonlight as film producers.

From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics and determined to become a theoretical physicist. I had no real idea what that meant, but it seemed incredibly exciting to spend one's life attempting to find the secrets of the universe by using one's mind.

There are two foundational pillars upon which modern physics rests. One is Albert Einstein's general relativity, which provides a theoretical framework for understanding the universe on the largest of scales: stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and beyond to the immense expanse of the universe itself. The other is quantum mechanics, which provides a theoretical framework for understanding the universe on the smallest of scales: molecules, atoms, and all the way down to subatomic particles like electrons and quarks. Through years of research, physicists have experimentally confirmed to almost unimaginable accuracy virtually all predictions made by each of these theories. But these same theoretical tools inexorably lead to another disturbing conclusion: As they are currently formulated, general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right.

Of course, I’ve only brought up two examples. Other universal laws of physics have been used as weapons as well, though we don’t know all of them. It’s very possible that every law of physics has been weaponized. It’s possible that in some parts of the universe, even … Forget it, I don’t even believe that.” “What were you going to say?” “The foundation of mathematics.” Cheng Xin tried to imagine it, but it was simply impossible. “That’s … madness.” Then she asked, “Will the universe turn into a war ruin? Or, maybe it’s more accurate to ask: Will the laws of physics turn into war ruins?” “Maybe they already are.… The physicists and cosmologists of the new world are focused on trying to recover the original appearance of the universe before the wars more than ten billion years ago. They’ve already constructed a fairly clear theoretical model describing the pre-war universe. That was a really lovely time, when the universe itself was a Garden of Eden. Of course, the beauty could only be described mathematically. We can’t picture it: Our brains don’t have enough dimensions.” Cheng Xin thought back to the conversation with the Ring again. Did you build this four-dimensional fragment? You told me that you came from the sea. Did you build the sea? “You are saying that the universe of the Edenic Age was four-dimensional, and that the speed of light was much higher?” “No, not at all. The universe of the Edenic Age was ten-dimensional. The speed of light back then wasn’t only much higher—rather, it was close to infinity. Light back then was capable of action at a distance, and could go from one end of the cosmos to the other within a Planck time.… If you had been to four-dimensional space, you would have some vague hint of how beautiful that ten-dimensional Garden must have been.” “You’re saying—” “I’m not saying anything.” Yifan seemed to have awakened from a dream. “We’ve only seen small hints; everything else is just guessing. You should treat it as a guess, just a dark myth we’ve made up.” But Cheng Xin continued to follow the course of the discussion taken so far. “—that during the wars after the Edenic Age, one dimension after another was imprisoned from the macroscopic into the microscopic, and the speed of light was reduced again and again.…” “As I said, I’m not saying anything, just guessing.” Yifan’s voice grew softer. “But no one knows if the truth is even darker than our guesses.… We are certain of only one thing: The universe is dying.” The

Möbius Strips. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. 'Hugh G. Section,' Pam Heath, 'Bunny Day,' 'Taffy Appel'; 35 mm.; 109 minutes black and white; sound. Pornography-parody, possible parodic homage to Fosse's All That Jazz, in which a theoretical physicist ('Reaction'), who can only achieve mathematical insight during coitus, conceives of Death as a lethally beautiful woman (Heath). INTERLACE TALENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357-65-32 (Y.W.)

For a theoretical physicist such as myself, for an astronomer accustomed to thinking about the endless expanse of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each one consisting of more than a hundred billion stars, each one with its garland of planets, on one of which we dwell for a brief and fugitive moment, like specks of infinitesimal dust lost in the endlessness of the cosmos, this seems no more than obvious. Every anthropocentrism pales into insignificance in the face of this immensity. This is naturalism.

failure is costly, both to society and to individuals. Pretending that all people are equal in their abilities will not change the fact that a person with an average IQ is unlikely to become a theoretical physicist, or the fact that a person with a low level of music ability is unlikely to become a concert pianist. It makes more sense to pay attention to people’s abilities and their likelihood of achieving certain goals, so people can make good decisions about the goals they want to spend their time, money, and energy pursuing

Well firstly, darling, I am the best theoretical mathematician and physicist you will ever meet. And I am fucking well meant to be able to understand impossible shit like this,” Kay said sourly. “And secondly, I think the world is going to end, and I need to understand this if I’m going to make it stop.

Lawrence’s relentless drive for ever larger and more powerful cyclotrons epitomized the trend toward the kind of “big science” associated with the rise of corporate America in the early twentieth century. Only four industrial laboratories existed in the country in 1890; forty years later there were nearly one thousand such facilities. In most of these labs a culture of technology, not science, was supreme. Over the years, theoretical physicists like Oppenheimer, devoted to pure “small” science, would find themselves alienated from the culture of these big labs, which were often devoted to “military science.

During our glorious year of 1974–5, while I was dithering over gravitational waves, and Stephen was leading our merged group in black hole research, Stephen himself had an insight even more radical than his discovery of Hawking radiation. He gave a compelling, almost airtight proof that, when a black hole forms and then subsequently evaporates away completely by emitting radiation, the information that went into the black hole cannot come back out. Information is inevitably lost. This is radical because the laws of quantum physics insist unequivocally that information can never get totally lost. So, if Stephen was right, black holes violate a most fundamental quantum mechanical law. How could this be? The black hole’s evaporation is governed by the combined laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity—the ill-understood laws of quantum gravity; and so, Stephen reasoned, the fiery marriage of relativity and quantum physics must lead to information destruction. The great majority of theoretical physicists find this conclusion abhorrent. They are highly sceptical. And so, for forty-four years they have struggled with this so-called information-loss paradox. It is a struggle well worth the effort and anguish that have gone into it, since this paradox is a powerful key for understanding the quantum gravity laws. Stephen himself, in 2003, found a way that information might escape during the hole’s evaporation, but that did not quell theorists’ struggles. Stephen did not prove that the information escapes, so the struggle continues. In my eulogy for Stephen, at the interment of his ashes at Westminster Abbey, I memorialised that struggle with these words: “Newton gave us answers. Hawking gave us questions. And Hawking’s questions themselves keep on giving, generating breakthroughs decades later. When ultimately we master the quantum gravity laws, and comprehend fully the birth of our universe, it may largely be by standing on the shoulders of Hawking.

A popular feel for scientific endeavors should, if possible, be restored given the needs of the twenty-first century. This does not mean that every literature major should take a watered-down physics course or that a corporate lawyer should stay abreast of quantum mechanics. Rather, it means that an appreciation for the methods of science is a useful asset for a responsible citizenry. What science teaches us, very significantly, is the correlation between factual evidence and general theories, something well illustrated in Einstein’s life. In addition, an appreciation for the glories of science is a joyful trait for a good society. It helps us remain in touch with that childlike capacity for wonder, about such ordinary things as falling apples and elevators, that characterizes Einstein and other great theoretical physicists.

A common refrain among theoretical physicists is that the fields of quantum field theory are the “real” entities while the particles they represent are images like the shadows in Plato's cave. As one who did experimental particle physics for forty years before retiring in 2000, I say, “Wait a minute!” No one has ever measured a quantum field, or even a classical electric, magnetic, or gravitational field. No one has ever measured a wavicle, the term used to describe the so-called wavelike properties of a particle. You always measure localized particles. The interference patterns you observe in sending light through slits are not seen in the measurements of individual photons, just in the statistical distributions of an ensemble of many photons. To me, it is the particle that comes closest to reality. But then, I cannot prove it is real either.

Or maybe precision is itself reaching some kind of limits, where dimensions can be neither made nor measured—not so much because humans are too limited in their faculties to do so but, rather, because as engineering reaches ever downward, the inherent properties of matter start to become impossibly ambiguous. The German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, in helping in the 1920s to father the concepts of quantum mechanics, made discoveries and presented calculations that first suggested this might be true: that in dealing with the tiniest of particles, the tiniest of tolerances, the normal rules of precise measurement simply cease to apply. At near-and subatomic levels, solidity becomes merely a chimera; matter comes packaged as either waves or particles that are by themselves both indistinguishable and immeasurable and, even to the greatest talents, only vaguely comprehensible.

Supersymmetry was (and is) a beautiful mathematical idea. The problem with applying supersymmetry is that it is too good for this world. We simply do not find particles of the sort it predicts. We do not, for example, see particles with the same charge and mass as electrons, but a different amount of spin. However, symmetry principles that might help to unify fundamental physics are hard to come by, so theoretical physicists do not give up on them easily. Based on previous experience with other forms of symmetry, we have developed a fallback strategy, called spontaneous symmetry breaking. In this approach, we postulate that the fundamental equations of physics have the symmetry, but the stable solutions of these equations do not. The classic example of this phenomenon occurs in an ordinary magnet. In the basic equations that describe the physics of a lump of iron, any direction is equivalent to any other, but the lump becomes a magnet with some definite north-seeking pole.

I am a physicist, not a biologist.… But I am very much excited by your article in May 30th Nature, and think that brings Biology over into the group of “exact” sciences.… If your point of view is correct each organism will be characterized by a long number written in quadrucal (?) system with figures 1, 2, 3, 4 standing for different bases.… This would open a very exciting possibility of theoretical research based on combinatorix and the theory of numbers!… I have a feeling this can be done. What do you think?

We have established on thermodynamic grounds that to make a cell from scratch requires a continuous flow of reactive carbon and chemical energy across rudimentary catalysts in a constrained through-flow system. Only hydrothermal vents provide the requisite conditions, and only a subset of vents – alkaline hydrothermal vents – match all the conditions needed. But alkaline vents come with both a serious problem and a beautiful answer to the problem. The serious problem is that these vents are rich in hydrogen gas, but hydrogen will not react with CO2 to form organics. The beautiful answer is that the physical structure of alkaline vents – natural proton gradients across thin semiconducting walls – will (theoretically) drive the formation of organics. And then concentrate them. To my mind, at least, all this makes a great deal of sense. Add to this the fact that all life on earth uses (still uses!) proton gradients across membranes to drive both carbon and energy metabolism, and I’m tempted to cry, with the physicist John Archibald Wheeler, ‘Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind for so long!’ Let

Atheism is the default position in any scientific inquiry, just as a-quarkism or a-neutrinoism was. That is, any entity has to earn its admission into a scientific account either via direct evidence for its existence or because it plays some fundamental explanatory role. Before the theoretical need for neutrinos was appreciated (to preserve the conservation of energy) and then later experimental detection was made, they were not part of the accepted physical account of the world. To say physicists in 1900 were 'agnostic' about neutrinos sounds wrong: they just did not believe there were such things. As yet, there is no direct experimental evidence of a deity, and in order for the postulation of a deity to play an explanatory role there would have to be a lot of detail about how it would act. If, as you have suggested, we are not “good judges of how the deity would behave,” then such an unknown and unpredictable deity cannot provide good explanatory grounds for any phenomenon. The problem with the 'minimal view' is that in trying to be as vague as possible about the nature and motivation of the deity, the hypothesis loses any explanatory force, and so cannot be admitted on scientific grounds. Of course, as the example of quarks and neutrinos shows, scientific accounts change in response to new data and new theory. The default position can be overcome.

Perhaps Einstein himself said it best when he said, “I have no special talents.… I am only passionately curious.” In fact, Einstein would confess that he had to struggle with mathematics in his youth. To one group of schoolchildren, he once confided, “No matter what difficulties you may have with mathematics, mine were greater.” So why was Einstein Einstein? First, Einstein spent most of his time thinking via “thought experiments.” He was a theoretical physicist, not an experimental one, so he was continually running sophisticated simulations of the future in his head. In other words, his laboratory was his mind. Second, he was known to spend up to ten years or more on a single thought experiment. From the age of sixteen to twenty-six, he focused on the problem of light and whether it was possible to outrace a light beam. This led to the birth of special relativity, which eventually revealed the secret of the stars and gave us the atomic bomb. From the age of twenty-six to thirty-six, he focused on a theory of gravity, which eventually gave us black holes and the big-bang theory of the universe. And then from the age of thirty-six to the end of his life, he tried to find a theory of everything to unify all of physics. Clearly, the ability to spend ten or more years on a single problem showed the tenacity with which he would simulate experiments in his head.

There are some respects in which the concepts of modern theoretical physics differ from those of the Newtonian system. To begin with, the conception of 'force', which is prominent in the seventeenth century, has been found to be superfluous. 'Force', in Newton, is the cause of change of motion, whether in magnitude or direction. The notion of cause is regarded as important, and force is conceived imaginatively as the sort of thing that we experience when we push or pull. For this reason it was considered an objection to gravitation that it acted at a distance, and Newton himself conceded that there must be some medium by which it was transmitted. Gradually it was found that all the equations could be written down without bringing in forces. What was observable was a certain relation between acceleration and configuration; to say that this relation was brought about by the intermediacy of 'force' was to add nothing to our knowledge. Observation shows that planets have at all times an acceleration towards the sun, which varies inversely as the square of their distance from it. To say that this is due to the 'force' of gravitation is merely verbal, like saying that opium makes people sleep because it has a dormitive virtue. The modern physicist, therefore, merely states formulae which determine accelerations, and avoids the word 'force' altogether. 'Force' was the faint ghost of the vitalist view as to the causes of motions, and gradually the ghost has been exorcized.

The black hole solution of Einstein's equations is also a work of art. The black hole is not as majestic as Godel's proof, but it has the essential features of a work of art: uniqueness, beauty, and unexpectedness. Oppenheimer and Snyder built out of Einstein's equations a structure that Einstein had never imagined. The idea of matter in permanent free fall was hidden in the equations, but nobody saw it until it was revealed in the Oppenheimer-Snyder solution. On a much more humble level, my own activities as a theoretical physicist have a similar quality. When I am working, I feel myself to be practicing a craft rather than following a method. When I did my most important piece of work as a young man, putting together the ideas of Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and Richard Feynman to obtain a simplified version of quantum electrodynamics, I had consciously in mind a metaphor to describe what I was doing. The metaphor was bridge-building. Tomonaga and Schwinger had built solid foundations on the other side, and my job was to design and build the cantilevers reaching out over the water until they met in the middle. The metaphor was a good one. The bridge that I built is still serviceable and still carrying traffic forty years later. The same metaphor describes well the greater work of unification achieved by Stephen Weinberg and Abdus Salam when they bridged the gap between electrodynamics and the weak interactions. In each case, after the work of unification is done, the whole stands higher than the parts.

It was about this same time that Oppenheimer met the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, whose lectures he had attended at Harvard. Here was a role model finely attuned to Robert’s sensibilities. Nineteen years older than Oppenheimer, Bohr was born—like Oppenheimer—into an upper-class family surrounded by books, music and learning. Bohr’s father was a professor of physiology, and his mother came from a Jewish banking family. Bohr obtained his doctorate in physics at the University of Copenhagen in 1911. Two years later, he achieved the key theoretical breakthrough in early quantum mechanics by postulating “quantum jumps” in the orbital momentum of an electron around the nucleus of an atom. In 1922, he won the Nobel Prize for this theoretical model of atomic structure.

The realization that symmetry is the key to the understanding of the properties of subatomic particles led to an inevitable question: Is there an efficient way to characterize all of these symmetries of the laws of nature? Or, more specifically, what is the basic theory of transformations that can continuously change one mixture of particles into another and produce the observed families? By now you have probably guessed the answer. The profound truth in the phrase I have cited earlier in this book revealed itself once again: "Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos." The physicists of the 1960s were thrilled to discover that mathematicians had already paved the way. Just as fifty years earlier Einstein learned about the geometry tool-kit prepared by Riemann, Gell-Mann and Ne'eman stumbled upon the impressive group-theoretical work of Sophus Lie.

It is the best of times in physics. Physicists are on the verge of obtaining the long-sought theory of everything. In a few elegant equations, perhaps concise enough to be emblazoned on a T-shirt, this theory will reveal how the universe began and how it will end. The key insight is that the smallest constituents of the world are not particles, as had been supposed since ancient times, but “strings”—tiny strands of energy. By vibrating in different ways, these strings produce the essential phenomena of nature, the way violin strings produce musical notes. String theory isn’t just powerful; it’s also mathematically beautiful. All that remains to be done is to write down the actual equations. This is taking a little longer than expected. But, with almost the entire theoretical-physics community working on the problem—presided over by a sage in Princeton, New Jersey—the millennia-old dream of a final theory is sure to be realized before long. It is the worst of times in physics. For more than a generation, physicists have been chasing a will-o’-the-wisp called string theory. The beginning of this chase marked the end of what had been three-quarters of a century of progress. Dozens of string-theory conferences have been held, hundreds of new Ph.D.’s have been minted, and thousands of papers have been written. Yet, for all this activity, not a single new testable prediction has been made; not a single theoretical puzzle has been solved. In fact, there is no theory so far—just a set of hunches and calculations suggesting that a theory might exist. And, even if it does, this theory will come in such a bewildering number of versions that it will be of no practical use: a theory of nothing. Yet the physics establishment promotes string theory with irrational fervor, ruthlessly weeding dissenting physicists from the profession. Meanwhile, physics is stuck in a paradigm doomed to barrenness.

Characteristically, however, Oppenheimer never took the time to develop anything so elegant as a theory of the phenomenon, leaving this achievement to others decades later. And the question remains: Why? Personality and temperament appear to be critical. Robert instantly saw the flaws in any idea almost as soon as he had conceived it. Whereas some physicists—Edward Teller immediately comes to mind—boldly and optimistically promoted all of their new ideas, regardless of their flaws, Oppenheimer’s rigorous critical faculties made him profoundly skeptical. “Oppie was always pessimistic about all the ideas,” recalled Serber. Turned on himself, his brilliance denied him the dogged conviction that is sometimes necessary for pursuing and developing original theoretical insights. Instead, his skepticism invariably propelled him on to the next problem.5 Having made the initial creative leap, in this case to black-hole theory, Oppenheimer quickly moved on to another new topic, meson theory.

The adjective “efficient” in “efficient markets” refers to how investors use information. In an efficient market, every titbit of new information is processed correctly and immediately by investors. As a result, market prices react instantly and appropriately to any relevant news about the asset in question, whether it is a share of stock, a corporate bond, a derivative, or some other vehicle. As the saying goes, there are no $100 bills left on the proverbial sidewalk for latecomers to pick up, because asset prices move up or down immediately. To profit from news, you must be jackrabbit fast; otherwise, you’ll be too late. This is one rationale for the oft-cited aphorism “You can’t beat the market.” An even stronger form of efficiency holds that market prices do not react to irrelevant news. If this were so, prices would ignore will-o’-the-wisps, unfounded rumors, the madness of crowds, and other extraneous factors—focusing at every moment on the fundamentals. In that case, prices would never deviate from fundamental values; that is, market prices would always be “right.” Under that exaggerated form of market efficiency, which critics sometimes deride as “free-market fundamentalism,” there would never be asset-price bubbles. Almost no one takes the strong form of the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) as the literal truth, just as no physicist accepts Newtonian mechanics as 100 percent accurate. But, to extend the analogy, Newtonian physics often provides excellent approximations of reality. Similarly, economists argue over how good an approximation the EMH is in particular applications. For example, the EMH fits data on widely traded stocks rather well. But thinly traded or poorly understood securities are another matter entirely. Case in point: Theoretical valuation models based on EMH-type reasoning were used by Wall Street financial engineers to devise and price all sorts of exotic derivatives. History records that some of these calculations proved wide of the mark.

Theoretical physicists are Platonists. Until the last few years, they believed that the entire universe, the one universe, was generated from a few principles of symmetry and mathematical truths, perhaps throwing in a handful of parameters like the mass of the electron. It seemed that we were closing in on a vision of our universe in which everything could be calculated, predicted, and understood. However, two theories in physics, called “eternal inflation” and “string theory,” now

indicate that the same fundamental principles, from which the laws of nature derive, lead to many different self-consistent universes, with many different properties. It is as if you walked into a shoe store, had your feet measured, and found that a size 5 would fit you, a size 8 would also fit, and a size 12 would fit equally well. Such wishy-washy results make theoretical physicists extremely unhappy. Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.

Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, called him ‘the most original mind of his generation’, while in its obituary The New York Times described him as ‘arguably the most brilliant, iconoclastic and influential of the postwar generation of theoretical physicists’.

Whereas most theoretical physicists rely on careful mathematical calculation to provide a guide and a crutch to take them into unfamiliar territory, Feynman’s attitude was almost cavalier.

Theoretical physics is one of the hardest of human endeavours, combining as it does subtle and abstract concepts that normally defy visualizations with a technical complexity that is impossible to master in its entirety. Only by adopting the highest standards of mathematical and conceptual discipline can most physicists make progress. Yet Feynman appeared to ride roughshod over this strict code of practice and pluck new results like ready-made fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.

Perhaps the most energetic and persistent advocate of the claim that time is illusory is the British physicist Julian Barbour. Impressively, Barbour has managed to do interesting research in physics for decades now without any academic position, publishing dozens of papers in respected journals. He has supported himself in part by translating technical papers from Russian to English—in his spare time, tirelessly investigating the idea that time does not exist, constructing theoretical models of classical and quantum gravity in which time plays no fundamental role.

That Logic was invented by a philosopher is a significant fact. Many a profession could claim the indispensability of clear thinking for sound practice. So why was logic not invented by an admiral or a general, or by a physician or a physicist? Why indeed was logic not invented by a mathematician: why is Aristotle not the Gottlob Frege of the ancient world? Logos is nothing if not a corrective to common sense. Logos has an inherent obligation to surprise. It began with the brilliant speculations of the Pythagoreans-- the original neopythagoreans, as one wag has put it--with regard to a number theoretic ontology. Apart from the physicists, the great majority of influential practitioners of logos before Plato allowed logos to operate at two removes from common sense. The first was the remove at which speculative science itself would achieve a degree of theoretical maturity. But the second remove was from science itself. The first philosophers were unique among the practitioners of logos in that they created a crisis for logos. In the hands of the sophists, philosophy had become its own unique problem. It was unable to contain the unbridled argumentative and discursive fire-power of logos. In fact, philosophy has had this same sort of problem--the problem of trying to salvage itself from its excesses--off and on ever since. Thus, logic was invented by a philosopher because it was a philosopher who knew best the pathological problematic that philosophy had itself created. -Eds. Dov Gabbay & John Woods. (2004) John Woods & Andrew Irvine. "Aristotle's Early Logic." Handbook of the History of Logic, Volume 1: Greek and Indian Logic. PP. 27-100.

In an article in the December 2012 Scientific American, Cambridge theoretical physicist David Tong wrote: “Physicists routinely teach that the building blocks of nature are discrete particles such as the electron or quark. That is a lie. The building blocks of our theories are not particles but fields: continuous, fluidlike objects spread throughout space.

As theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) noted, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

By 2020, a chip with today’s processing power will cost about a penny,” CUNY theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explained in a recent article for Big Think,23 “which is the cost of scrap paper. . . . Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries—cell phone, Internet—that we all seem to take for granted.

Just three or four decades ago, if you wanted to access a thousand core processors, you’d need to be the chairman of MIT’s computer science department or the secretary of the US Defense Department. Today the average chip in your cell phone can perform about a billion calculations per second. Yet today has nothing on tomorrow. “By 2020, a chip with today’s processing power will cost about a penny,” CUNY theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explained in a recent article for Big Think,23 “which is the cost of scrap paper. . . . Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries—cell phone, Internet—that we all seem to take for granted.

Many scientists (the most notable being Albert Einstein) think in visual, spatial, and physical images rather than in mathematical terms and words. (N.B.: That the theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, used an arboreal term to picture the cosmos [i.e., affirming that the universe "could have different branches,"] is a tribute to his [very visual] primate brain.)

been studying alternative propulsion technologies for interstellar travel [and] said they had, for example, determined that Einstein’s equations dealing with relativity theory were incorrect. I asked him to clarify that. Did he mean that Skunk Works employed theoretical physicists, ‘Einstein types,’ to look for alternative means of space travel? Rich said ‘Yes,’ [then] went on to say that they had proved that Einstein was wrong. He made a mistake. “I didn’t know how that set with other people in the room, but

When humans or computers learn from experience, they are using induction: recognizing regularities amid irregular streams of information. From this point of view, the laws of science represent data compression in action. A theoretical physicist acts like a very clever coding algorithm. “The laws of science that have been discovered can be viewed as summaries of large amounts of empirical data about the universe,” wrote Solomonoff. “In the present context, each such law can be transformed into a method of compactly coding the empirical data that gave rise to that law.” A good scientific theory is economical. This was yet another way of saying so

In school, we’re given the false impression that scientists took a straight path to the light switch. There’s one curriculum, one right way to study science, and one right formula that spits out the correct answer on a standardized test. Textbooks with lofty titles like The Principles of Physics magically reveal “the principles” in three hundred pages. An authority figure then steps up to the lectern to feed us “the truth.” Textbooks, explained theoretical physicist David Gross in his Nobel lecture, “often ignore the many alternate paths that people wandered down, the many false clues they followed, the many misconceptions they had.”15 We learn about Newton’s “laws”—as if they arrived by a grand divine visitation or a stroke of genius—but not the years he spent exploring, revising, and tweaking them. The laws that Newton failed to establish—most notably his experiments in alchemy, which attempted, and spectacularly failed, to turn lead into gold—don’t make the

Not coincidentally, the growing popularity of globalism is linked to an anti-biblical worldview that involves the push for same-sex marriage, dismantling the institution of marriage, abortion, New Age and occult beliefs, and a decline in morals. “The biblical perspective that God has laid out is very antithetical to the kinds of things that globalists aspire to,” Missler says. “But it’s no surprise because the Bible talks about how this globalism appeal is going to be the very instrument that will be used to enslave people.” The widespread acceptance of globalism and its anti-biblical positions didn’t appear out of nowhere. Some of the world’s most prominent figures have promoted globalism and the creation of a world government, including iconic broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite, theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, author and biochemistry professor Isaac Asimov, Soviet statesman Mikhail Gorbachev, UN assistant secretary-general Robert

The famous theoretical physicist and pioneer in quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg, said it eloquently, “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”671 I would have to agree.

Out of clutter, find simplicity. —Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist

Theoretical physicists studying inflationary models have discovered that almost all of them are eternal, in the sense that they stop inflating in patches rather than all at once. This means that the potential for creating universes, in the guise of inflation, is always expanding faster than it is decaying away, and it will therefore never stop. We live in an infinite, eternal, fractal multiverse comprised of an infinite number of universes like ours, alongside an infinite number of universes with different physical laws. We exist because it is inevitable. Almost.

Arguments from beauty have failed us in the past, and I worry I am witnessing another failure right now. “So what?” you may say. “Hasn’t it always worked out in the end?” It has. But leaving aside that we could be further along had scientists not been distracted by beauty, physics has changed—and keeps on changing. In the past, we muddled through because data forced theoretical physicists to revise ill-conceived aesthetic ideals. But increasingly we first need theories to decide which experiments are most likely to reveal new phenomena, experiments that then take decades and billions of dollars to carry out. Data don’t come to us anymore—we have to know where to get them, and we can’t afford to search everywhere. Hence, the more difficult new experiments become, the more care theorists must take to not sleepwalk into a dead end while caught up in a beautiful dream. New demands require new methods. But which methods? I hope the philosophers have a plan.

As Cosmic Vibration, all things are one; but when Cosmic Vibration becomes frozen into matter, it becomes many--including man's body, which is a part of this variously divided matter.* (*footnote: Recent advances in what theoretical physicists call 'superstring theory' are leading science toward an understanding of the vibratory nature of creation. Brian Greene, Ph.D., professor of physics at Cornell and Columbia Universities, writes in The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: Vintage Books, 2000): 'During the last thirty years of his life, Albert Einstein sought relentlessly for a so-called unified field theory--a theory capable of describing nature's forces within a single, all-encompassing, coherent framework...Now, at the dawn of the new millennium, proponents of string theory claim that the threads of this elusive unified tapestry finally have been revealed...' 'The theory suggests that the microscopic landscape is suffused with tiny strings whose vibrational patterns orchestrate the evolution of the universe,' Professor Greene writes, and tells us that 'the length of a typical string loop is...about a hundred billion billion (1020) times smaller than an atomic nucleus.')

What the mediocrity principle tells us is that our state is not the product of intent, that the universe lacks both malice and benevolence, but that everything does follow rules—and that grasping those rules should be the goal of science. THE POINTLESS UNIVERSE SEAN CARROLL Theoretical physicist, Caltech; author, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time THE WORLD CONSISTS of things, which obey rules.

Theoretical physicists have since envisaged the cosmos in terms not so different from his, as a patchwork multiverse containing all possible worlds infinitely repeated. If they’re right, and if Blanqui was right, then among all those worlds surely there is one—there must be—in which humans have, at the brink of the abyss, stepped back and learned to live inside of time, and to hold each other there. To hold tight to everything outside of us, and everything within, to everything above and below. Perhaps it’s not this world. But perhaps it is.

The argument is that we are influenced by historical research.” Michael Simpson glanced over at Sophie before continuing. “When one commences an education, to become say a physicist or a chemist in today’s society, one is automatically loaded up with all the accumulated knowledge of what is wrong and what is right. Many of the scientists thus have a very similar line of attack for new problems. And this colours our scientific progress. We advance, but only in small steps. True progress most often is made when some individual looks at a problem from a totally new angle, and that is hard when everybody has been through the same basic foundations. Take Albert Einstein. The revolutionary ideas he came up with weren’t the result of discussions with equal minded academics in the university hall. They were a result of Albert Einstein’s relentless pondering and single minded focus on theoretical abstractions, alone in a small crummy patent office in Switzerland, back in 1905. If Einstein at an early stage had discussed his ideas with colleagues at a university, there is a real danger he would have been set forth on a different line of thinking, and quite possibly we wouldn’t have the theory of relativity in the form we have it today.

But in the Persian dream Pauli realizes that this "second dimension" is not merely a theoretical physicist's attempt to add fuel to intellectual fires-to go beyond QM into a new, broader physics that includes the psyche-but is a hidden dimension that appears as a being. This being tells Pauli that he knows about the secret workings of nature, but he is unable to understand the difficult language of QM. He also tells Pauli that Pauli would not understand his language. But this "being" wants admittance to academia. He feels a need to enter into the dialogue of modern physics, perhaps to learn that language so that he can reveal his secrets to physicists. He pressures Pauli. This being is the spirit of matter and the hidden dimension that Pauli was seeking.

What is surely impossible is that a theoretical physicist, given unlimited computing power, should deduce from the laws of physics that a certain complex structure is aware of its own existence.

Whenever liquid water makes the transition to ice, energy is given off to the surroundings. In the process, the water itself assumes a state that is both more ordered and lower in energy. It is a general rule that any system that can give off heat and thereby assume a state of lower energy will do so. For the purpose of illustration, let's assume that the energy set free by the freezing of water is extremely high-so high that it surpasses the energy that is by virtue of Albert Einstein's E = mc^2 connected with the very existence of the water molecules. What would happen? In this fictitious case, it would pay energetically if water in the form of ice were spontaneously created from a space that beforehand contained no water at all. Thus there would be a certain probability for this to occur-never mind that anti-ice would have to be produced too. Let's imagine that it occurs: a crystal of ice is created spontaneously out of the void. Like every crystal, it would have some preferred direction in space and a certain location. Consequently, the perfect symmetry of space would be broken. These imagined circumstances do not exist in reality as far as ice is concerned, but they apply roughly for one of the most imaginative constructs of physics-the so-called Higgs field. This field appears spontaneously in a void as its walls are cooled down-starting from the absurdly high temperature of 10^15 degrees. The field will appear in an ordered state; for a poetic simile, think of ice flowers growing on a window. The energy needed for its existence is smaller than the energy liberated by its falling into that ordered pattern. This pattern is not to be understood in terms of spatial geometry; rather, it refers to the abstract space made up of the properties of elementary particles. In geometrical space, it is merely a field resembling a particularly simple distribution; to every point in space, we assign one and the same complex number. This implies that the Higgs field does not break geometrical symmetry-it breaks an abstract symmetry of elementary particles. In fact, it was introduced into modern theoretical physics by the Scottish physicist Peter Higgs for that very reason-to break an abstract symmetry that would not permit elementary particles to have masses.

The fact that all heated objects emit light of the same colour at the same temperature was well known to potters long before 1859, the year that Gustav Kirchhoff, a 34-year-old German physicist at Heidelberg University, started his theoretical investigations into the nature of this correlation.

Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surprise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind more securely.” —ALBERT EINSTEIN, GERMAN THEORETICAL PHYSICIST

James Clerk Maxwell and his theory of electromagnetism. Born in 1831 in Edinburgh, Maxwell, the son of a Scottish landowner, was destined to become the greatest theoretical physicist of the nineteenth century. At the age of fifteen, he wrote his first published paper on a geometrical method for tracing ovals.

In fact it’s the view of the more thoughtful historians, particularly those who have spent time in the same bar as the theoretical physicists, that the entirety of human history can be considered as a sort of blooper reel. All those wars, all those famines caused by malign stupidity, all that determined, mindless repetition of the same old errors, are in the great cosmic scheme of things only equivalent to Mr. Spock’s ears falling off.

One of Oppenheimer’s students, the American theoretical physicist Philip Morrison, recalls that “when fission was discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppenheimer’s office a drawing—a very bad, an execrable drawing—of a bomb.

Note: Whenever I study Albert Einstein's Quotes, I realize he was only a theoretical physicist but not a philosopher in the context of literature. What do you think about it? --- Weak people revenge Strong people forgive Intelligent people ignore - Albert Einstein --- Weak people stay powerless Strong people revenge Intelligent people forgive - Ehsan Sehgal

Szilard’s good friend and fellow Hungarian, the theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner, who was studying chemical engineering at the Technische Hochschule at the time of Szilard’s conversion, watched him take the University of Berlin by storm.

Underdetermination—where two different theories give the same predictions—is rarely an all-or-nothing affair, because the distinction between theoretical and observational claims is blurry. Apparent cases of underdetermination often get resolved over time as one theory turns out to be more powerful as a framework. The only realistic cases of exact underdetermination seem to be where two theories are mathematically equivalent; in these cases, physicists—and some, but not all, philosophers of physics—regard them as the same theory.

One good metric for understanding is your ability to explain a concept in the absolute simplest terms. As Albert Einstein, the brilliant theoretical physicist, famously put it, “If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.

He had not become violent, though his behavior had been what Hansen termed “extraordinarily wilful.” Later on, in private, Hansen wondered whether Gideon’s behavior had not always been wilful, in that it had always been self-directed, and whether he should not have used, instead, the word “irrational.” That would have been the expectable word. But its expectability led him to wonder if Gideon’s behavior (as a theoretical physicist) had ever been rational; and, in fact, if his own behavior (as a theoretical physicist, or otherwise) had ever been adequately describable by the term “rational.” He said nothing, however, of these speculations, and worked very hard for several weekends at building a rock garden at the side of his house.