Quotes About Theory

maybe his libido was submerged in some sort of polymorphous love of nature, as some biographers have theorized about Thoreau.

Chaos doesn't mean that the system is behaving randomly, it means that it is unpredictable because it has many variables, it is too complex to measure, and even if it could be measured, theoretically the measurement cannot be done accurately and the tiniest inaccuracy would change the end result an enormous amount.

In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one 'episteme' that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice.

Artemidoro, en todo caso, ha hecho algo muy diferente que compilar los ejemplos más célebres de los presagios oníricos confirmados por la realidad. Ha emprendido la tarea de escribir una obra de método, y esto en dos sentidos: deberá ser un manual utilizable en la práctica cotidiana y deberá ser, también, un tratado de alcance teórico sobre la validez de los procedimientos interpretativos.

It would take a civilization far more advanced than ours, unbelievably advanced, to begin to manipulate negative energy to create gateways to the past. But if you could obtain large quantities of negative energy—and that's a big "IF"—then you could create a time machine that apparently obeys Einstein's equation and perhaps the laws of quantum theory.

The quantum theory is based on the idea that there is a probability that all possible events, no matter how fantastic or silly, might occur.

In Einstein's equation, time is a river. It speeds up, meanders, and slows down. The new wrinkle is it can have whirlpools and fork into two rivers. So, if the river of time can be bent into a pretzel, create whirlpools and fork into two rivers, then time travel cannot be ruled out.

In other words, the reason why the string theory cannot be solved is that twenty-first mathematics has not yet been discovered.

One consequence of this formulation is that a physical principle that unites many smaller physical theories must autoomatically unite many seemingly unrelated branches of mathematics. This is precisely what string theory accomplishes. In fact, of all physical theories, string theory unites by far the largest number of branches of mathematics into a single coherent picture. Perhaps one of the by-products of the physicists' quest for unification will be the unification of mathematics as well.

The problem is that while twenty-first-century physics fell accidentally into the twentieth century, twenty-first-century mathematics hasn't been invented yet. It seems that we may have to wait for twenty-first-century mathematics before we can make any progress, or the current generation of physicists must invent twenty-first-century mathematics on their own.

A quantum theory of gravity that unites it with the other forces is the Holy Grail of physics.

According to Einstein, there is no gravitational pull. The earth warps the space-time continuum around our bodies, so space itself pushes us down to the floor. Thus, it is the presence of matter that warps space around it, giving us the illusion that there is a gravitational force pulling on neighboring objects.

Because both quantum theory and Einstein's theory of gravity are united in ten-dimensional space, we expect that the question of time travel will be settled decisively by the hyperspace theory. As in the case of wormholes and dimensional windows, the final chapter will be written when we incorporate the full power of the hyperspace theory.

Tachyons at first seem to violate causality, but physicists believe that their true purpose was to set off the big bang and hence they are not observable anymore.

Three of the four forces (excluding gravity) are therefore united by quantum theory, giving us unification without geometry, which appears to contradict the theme of this book and everything we have considered so far.

in string theory, the dimensionality of space-time is fixed at ten dimensions.

Einstein wrote, "Quantum mechanics calls for a great deal of respect. But some inner voice tells me that this is not the true Jacob. The theory offers a lot, but it hardly brings us any closer to the Old Man's secret. For my part, at least, I am convinced that He doesn't throw dice.")

So string theory and M-theory are really the same theory, except that string theory is a reduction of eleven-dimensional M-theory to ten dimensions.)

Kip Thorne says, "By 2020, physicists will understand the laws of quantum gravity, which will be found to be a variant of string theory.

Riemann found that in four spatial dimensions, one needs a collection of ten numbers at each point to describe its properties.

Fourth is Lambda, the cosmological constant, which determines the acceleration of the universe.

There was only one period of time when energy on this enormous scale was readily available, and that was at the instant of Creation. In fact, the hyperspace theory cannot be tested by our largest atom smashers because the theory is really a theory of Creation. Only at the instant of the Big Bang do we see the full power of the hyperspace theory coming into play. This raises the exciting possibility that the hyperspace theory may unlock the secret of the origin of the universe.

If we now take a Kaluza-Klein theory defined in 4+N dimensions and then curl up N dimensions, we will find that the equations split into two pieces. The first piece is Einstein's usual equations, which we retrieve as expected. But the second piece will not be the theory of Maxwell. We find that the remainder is precisely the Yang-Mills theory, which forms the basis of all subatomic physics! This is the key to turning the symmetries of wood into the symmetries of marble.

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman was fond of saying that no one really understands the quantum theory. Ironically, although the quantum theory is the most successful theory ever proposed by the human mind