Quotes About Science

All of the lightest stable quarks and leptons have heavier replicas. No one knows why they are there, or what they are good for. When physicists first realized that the muon, a particle first seen in cosmic rays, was nothing other than a heavier version of the electron (200 times heavier), the physicist I.I. Rabi asked, "Who ordered that?

My second concern about Occam's Razor is just a matter of fact. The world is more complicated than any of us would have been likely to conceive. Some particles and properties don't seem necessary to any physical processes that matter—at least according to what we've deduced so far. Yet they exist. Sometimes the simplest model just isn't the correct one.

calculations

Nothing about our world is inconsistent with the existence of a multiverse.

Trillions of solar neutrinos pass through you each second, but interact so weakly that you never notice.

So, in a sense, looking under the lamppost for dark matter is appropriate.

The problem is that string theory is defined at an energy scale that is about ten million billion times larger than those we can experimentally explore with our current instruments.

Early in the twentieth century, the physicist Lord Rutherford, best known for his landmark discovery of the atomic nucleus, famously pronounced, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

you can't simply compare a hypothesis to a single competing model and treat that one alternative suggestion as a substitute for all the remaining options.

Science certainly is not the static statement of universal laws we all hear about in elementary school. Nor is it a set of arbitrary rules. Science is an evolving body of knowledge. Many of the ideas we are currently investigating will prove to be wrong or incomplete. Scientific descriptions certainly change as we cross the boundaries that circumscribe what we know and venture into more remote territory where we can glimpse hints of the deeper truths beyond.

The goal of particle physics is to discover matter's most basic constituents and the most fundamental physical laws obeyed by those constituents.

That's what's "special" in special relativity: the "special" inertial frames are only a small subset of all possible reference frames.

They tell us remarkable things, such as that extra dimensions can be infinite in size yet remain unseen, or that we can be living in a three-spatial-dimensional sinkhole in a higher-dimensional universe.

If large extra dimensions solve the hierarchy problem, higher-dimensional gravity would become strong at about a TeV.

But speculation is the only way to make progress in our understanding.

Apparently there's a right and wrong answer in chemistry, whereas in psychology, you can say whatever you want as long as you write five pages

Medicine—to the extent that it can be called a science—is a sensual science, one in which we collect data about a patient through touch and the other senses according to a systematic method in order to make a diagnosis.

In science, there is something called a "jackpot effect," where a male scientist hires women in his lab early in the development of a certain field, and these women hire other talented women, and, as a result, the field ends up with an unusually high number of women. Something like this was at work in cryptanalysis. A few key women proved themselves gifted, early on; a few key men were willing to hire and encourage

A medieval physician needed the patient's astronomical details, just as a modern GP would check his or her blood pressure.

Contemporary medical technology is not an advancement in medicine- it indicates the failure of Caucasian medical science and is a sign of ignorance. Technology cannot replace the human ability to diagnose disease by looking, touching and smelling to perform treatments without drugs.

Our separation from the natural world may have given us the fruits of technology and science, but it has left us bereft of any instinctual connection to the spiritual dimension of life—the connection between our soul and the soul of the world, the knowing that we are all part of one living, spiritual being.

Quantum mechanics is weird. I don't understand it. Just live with it. You don't have to understand the nature of things in order to build cool devices.

It's hard to build large-scale, general-purpose quantum computers. I hope that we can cross that hurdle soon and build general-purpose quantum computers with hundreds or thousands of quantum bits. But the most important hurdle is in our own understanding. Unless we can understand how the world processes information at a quantum level, we will remain in the dark.

Yes, I am a quantum mechanic! Those darn quantum computers break all the time.