17 quotes
An overly pragmatic attitude is not productive in the long run.
Quantum gravity (2004)
Children grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed within the four walls of their homes. Humankind as a whole does the same.
The Order of Time (2018)
The landscape is magic, the trip is far from being over.
Quantum gravity (2004)
The World is Made of Events, not Things.
The Order of Time (2018)
In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aim- lessly. You don’t get anywhere by not ‘wasting’ time – something, unfortunately, which the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.
Seven Brief Lectures on Physics (2014)
The idea that a well-defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion, an illegitimate extrapolation of our own experience
The Order of Time (2018)
Listening to a cultivated person of today who jokes and almost boasts of his scientific ignorance is as sad as listening to a scientist who boasts of not having read any poem.
Hawking was one of the good physicists of his generation, not the universal genius the popular press has depicted. It is a pity, because this confusion fogs the memory of a remarkable man.
If we formulate the fundamental theory of nature in a timeless language, we have then the problem of recovering the familiar notion of time.
Forget time (2008)
Time is... the expression of our ignorance of the full microstate.
Forget time (2008)
I argue that the best strategy for understanding quantum gravity is to build a picture of the physical world where the notion of time plays no role at all.
Forget time (2008)
The difference between past and future... cause and effect... memory and hope... regret and intention... in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference.
The Order of Time (2018)
I... interpret mechanics as a theory of relations between variables, rather than the theory of the evolution of variables in time.
Forget time (2008)
I think that physics is about escaping the prison of the received thoughts and searching for novel ways of thinking the world, about trying to clear a bit the misty lake of insubstantial dreams, which reflect reality like the lake reflects the mountains.
Quantum gravity (2004)
In the elementary equations of the world, the arrow of time appears only where there is heat. The link between time and heat is... fundamental: every time a difference is manifested between the past and the future, heat is involved.
The Order of Time (2018)
The new coherent picture is not yet available. With all their immense empirical success, G(eneral)R(elativity) and Q(uantum)M(echanics) have left us with an understanding of the physical world which is unclear and badly fragmented. At the foundations of physics there is today confusion and incoherence.
Quantum gravity (2004)
But it isn’t absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is, in the end, something good and even beautiful, because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.
The Order of Time (2018)