A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.' The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the turtle standing on' 'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the little old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
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I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
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This required abandoning the idea that there is a universal quantity called time that all clocks measure. Instead, everyone would have his own personal time. The clocks of two people would agree if they were at rest with respect to each other but not if they were moving. This has been confirmed by a number of experiments, including one in which an extremely accurate timepiece was flown around the world and then compared with one that had stayed in place. If you wanted to live longer, you could keep flying to the east so the speed of the plane added to the earth
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The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
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We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
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For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imaginations, we learned to talk.
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I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was able to reason
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To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.
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If human life were long enough to find the ultimate theory, everything would have been solved by previous generations. Nothing would be left to be discovered.
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For what we regard as reality is conditioned by the theory to which we subscribe
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Equations are just the boring part of mathematics. I attempt to see things in terms of geometry.
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My goal is simple. It is the complete understanding of the Universe.
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My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.
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It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.
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One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.
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God not only plays dice, he throws them in the corner where you can't see them.
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It matters if you just don't give up.
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If you don't make mistakes, you aren't really trying.
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