A Quote by Leonard Susskind

I often feel a discomfort, a kind of embarrassment, when I explain elementary-particle physics to laypeople. It all seems so arbitrary - the ridiculous collection of fundamental particles, the lack of pattern to their masses.

Leonard Susskind

Quote Topics

Arbitrary Collection Discomfort Elementary Embarrassment Explain Feel Fundamental Kind Lack Masses Often Particle Particle Physics Particles Pattern Physics Ridiculous Seems

Quote Author

Leonard Susskind
American - Physicist
Born: January 1, 1940

Quantum physics is teaching us that particles themselves don't create particles. It's what Jesus said 2,000 years ago, that it's the Spirit that gives life and that you don't get particles from more particles.

Wayne Dyer

What the string theorists do is arguably physics. It deals with the physical world. They're attempting to make a consistent theory that explains the interactions we see among particles and gravity as well. That's certainly physics, but it's a kind of physics that is not yet testable.

Sheldon Lee Glashow

Three principles - the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the utility of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality - are thus consequences of the underlying law of the elementary particles and their interactions. Those three principles need not be assumed as separate metaphysical postulates. Instead, they are emergent properties of the fundamental laws of physics.

Murray Gell-Mann

The standard model of particle physics describes forces and particles very well, but when you throw gravity into the equation, it all falls apart. You have to fudge the figures to make it work.

Lisa Randall

I had been interested in particle physics, which deals with the fundamental constituents of matter.

Ashoke Sen

When I received my B. S. degree in 1932, only two of the fundamental particles of physics were known.

Luis Walter Alvarez

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

Madeleine L'Engle

I work in string theory. This is a branch of physics which assumes that the elementary objects in the universe are not particles but one-dimensional objects, that is, strings.

Ashoke Sen

The only difference between causation and the value is that the word "cause" implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of "value" is one of preference. In classical science it was supposed that the world always works in terms of absolute certainty and that "cause" is the more appropriate word to describe it. But in modern quantum physics all that is changed. Particles "prefer" to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely committed to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is just a very consistent pattern of preferences.

Robert M. Pirsig

What physics tells us is that everything comes down to geometry and the interactions of elementary particles. And things can happen only if these interactions are perfectly balanced.

Antony Garrett Lisi

Indeed, the history of 20th century physics was in large measure about how to avoid the infinities that crop up in particle theory and cosmology. The idea of point particles is convenient but leads to profound, puzzling troubles.

Gregory Benford

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.

Robert J. Sawyer

High-energy collisions have led to the observation of many hundreds of new hadronic particle states. These new particles, which are generally unstable, appear to be just as fundamental as the neutron and the proton.

Carlo Rubbia

Particle physics suffers more from being infected by the socio-political mood of the day than from lack of spectacular opportunities for major and profound discoveries.

Leon M. Lederman

I did my masters in elementary particles. But the foundations of elementary particles is quantum theory and there were too many conceptual problems around quantum theory that I couldn't live with. So I decided I was going to work on the foundations of quantum theory. That's what I did my Ph.D on.

Vandana Shiva

In quantum physics, the study of material at the subatomic level, you get down to the tiniest levels. When they take these subatomic particles, put them in particle accelerators and collide them, quantum physicists discover there's nothing there. There's no one home - no ghost in the machine.

Wayne Dyer

A Quote by Leonard Susskind

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors