Words matter. These are the best Leonard Susskind Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
A lot of my research time is spent daydreaming – telling an imaginary admiring audience of laymen how to understand some difficult scientific idea.
I did not come from an academic background. My father was a smart man, but he had a fifth-grade education. He and all his friends were plumbers. They were all born around 1905 in great poverty in New York City and had to go to work when they were 12 or 13 years old.
I’m not going to argue with people about the existence of God. I have not the vaguest idea of whether the universe was created by an intelligence.
Every time a bit of information is erased, we know it doesn’t disappear. It goes out into the environment. It may be horribly scrambled and confused, but it never really gets lost. It’s just converted into a different form.
The dark energy is not exactly zero, but the first 122 decimal points are zero. That’s crazy. That is really one of the craziest things we’ve ever discovered.
The success of ordinary cosmology speaks against the idea that the universe was created in a random fluctuation.
Over the years, I began to understand that there were a lot of people out there reading physics in popular literature that they could not understand – not because it was too advanced, but because it wasn’t advanced enough.
I have a funny mental framework when I do physics. I create an imaginary audience in my head to explain things to – it is part of the way I think. For me, teaching and explaining, even to my imaginary audience, is part of the process.
I went to college because my father thought that I should learn engineering, because he wanted to go into the heating business with me. There, I realized I wanted to be a physicist. I had to tell him, which was a somewhat traumatic experience.
I’m afraid I am a bit of a technophobe – a nineteenth-century man caught in the twenty-first century. But there is one piece of technology that I would especially welcome: a device to automatically balance restaurant tables on all four legs so that they don’t rock back and forth.
You are a victim of your own neural architecture which doesn’t permit you to imagine anything outside of three dimensions. Even two dimensions. People know they can’t visualise four or five dimensions, but they think they can close their eyes and see two dimensions. But they can’t.
Eventually, when the universe expands enough, all that will be left is the dark energy.
Unforeseen surprises are the rule in science, not the exception. Remember: Stuff happens.
Space can vibrate, space can fluctuate, space can be quantum mechanical, but what the devil is it? And, you know, everybody has their own idea about what it is, but there’s no coherent final consensus on why there is space.
I’m a great believer that scientists should spend as much time as possible explaining, and you do explain in the process of teaching.
The word ‘universe’ is obviously not intended to have a plural, but science has evolved in such a way that we need a plural noun for something similar to what we ordinarily call our universe.
It seems hopelessly improbable that any particular rules accidentally led to the miracle of intelligent life. Nevertheless, this is exactly what most physicists have believed: intelligent life is a purely serendipitous consequence of physical principles that have nothing to do with our own existence.
Is the universe ‘elegant,’ as Brian Greene tells us? Not as far as I can tell, not the usual laws of particle physics, anyway. I think I might find the universal principles of String Theory most elegant – if I only knew what they were.
Science blogs bore me. When everyone is an expert, no one is an expert.
I’m doing physics because I’m curious about how it works – full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, don’t worry about whether somebody is going to be able to do an experiment next week, just figure it out.
I have always enjoyed explaining physics. In fact it’s more than just enjoyment: I need to explain physics.
Physics is perceived as a lonesome, nerdy kind of enterprise that has very little to do with human feelings and the things that excite people day-to-day about each other. Yet physicists in their own working environment are very social creatures.
