Quotes from Leonard Susskind

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 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 a great believer in our ability to come up with the ideas necessary to solve the big questions. I have less confidence that we'll be able to find a consensus about which ones are right without experiment.

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.

You have to say now that space is something. Space can vibrate, space can fluctuate, space can be quantum mechanical, but what the devil is it?

Unforeseen surprises are the rule in science, not the exception. Remember: Stuff happens.

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.

There is a philosophy that says that if something is unobservable -- unobservable in principle -- it is not part of science. If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs to the realm of metaphysical speculation, together with astrology and spiritualism. By that standard, most of the universe has no scientific reality -- it's just a figment of our imaginations.

Dick Feynman was a genius of visualization (he was also no slouch with equations): he made a mental picture of anything he was working on. While others were writing blackboard-filling formulas to express the laws of elementary particles, he would just draw a picture and figure out the answer.

There is so much to groak; So little to groak from.

I would guess that there are limits to what we can understand. But old people always think there are limits to what we can understand. It's the young people who push past those limits.

the three-dimensional world of ordinary experience—the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people—is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional surface. This new law of physics, known as the Holographic Principle, asserts that everything inside a region of space can be described by bits of information restricted to the boundary.

The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." — THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

Unforeseen surprises are the rule in science, not the exception. Remember: Stuff happens.

We often say that the earth is a sphere, but to be precise, the term sphere refers only to the surface. The correct mathematical term for the solid earth is a ball.

If a system is chaotic (most are), then it implies that however good the resolving power may be, the time over which the system is predictable is limited. Perfect predictability is not achievable, simply because we are limited in our resolving power.

Heat is the energy of random chaotic motion, and entropy is the amount of hidden microscopic information.

In most cases the tiniest differences in the initial conditions—the starting state—leads to large eventual differences in outcomes. This phenomenon is called chaos. If a system is chaotic (most are), then it implies that however good the resolving power may be, the time over which the system is predictable is limited.

If necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is the father. The Einstein summation convention is the offspring of this happy marriage.

The units that we use reflect our own size. The origin of the meter seems to be that it was used to measure rope or cloth: it's about the distance from a person's nose to his or her outstretched fingers. A second is about as long as a heartbeat. And a kilogram is a nice weight to carry around. We use these units because they are convenient, but fundamental physics doesn't care that much about us. The

world seems filled with people who are genuinely, deeply interested in physics but whose lives have taken them in different directions. This book is for all of us.

The frightening thing—frightening, I don't know if it's frightening—frustrating, frightening, fascinating thing is we know with virtual certainty that the universe is at least a thousand times bigger in volume than the horizon, than we can ever, ever, ever in principal ever see. So we know there's stuff out there that we will never be able to detect. And we can't tell what it is. We can't tell if it's similar to us.

The frightening thing—frightening, I don't know if it's frightening—frustrating, frightening, fascinating thing is we know with virtual certainty that the universe is at least a thousand times bigger in volume than the horizon, than we can ever, ever, ever in principle ever see. So we know there's stuff out there that we will never be able to detect. And we can't tell what it is. We can't tell if it's similar to us.

By itself, the Holographic Principle was not enough to win the Black Hole War. It was too imprecise, and it lacked a firm mathematical foundation. The reaction to it was skepticism: The universe a hologram? Sounds like science fiction. The fictitious future physicist Steve passing to the "other side" while the emperor and the count watch him being immolated? Sounds like spiritualism.