10 quotes
All I can say to the younger theorists is: don’t trust anyone over 45, except maybe me, and I’m not so sure about me.”
More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon (2011)
Surely there are more levels of organization between human ethology and DNA than there are between DNA and quantum electrodynamics, and each level can require a whole new conceptual structure.
More Is Different (1972)
“Of course I am not religious—I don’t in fact see how any scientist who thinks at all deeply can be so ...”
More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon (2011)
My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance.
“We atheists can . . . argue that, with the modern revolution in attitudes toward homosexuals, we have become the only group that may not reveal itself in normal social discourse”.
More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon (2011)
Mathematicians are used to game-playing according to a set of rules they lay down in advance, despite the fact that nature always writes her own. One acquires a great deal of humility by experiencing the real wiliness of nature.
... the state of a really big system does not at all have to have the symmetry of the laws which govern it; in fact, it usually has less symmetry.
More Is Different (1972)
That Big Science culture in the USA, and similar groups elswhere, tended to have separate, direct access to government and hence to funding sources. It was independent to a great extent of the rest of science, of which it was never a majority component except in funding.
More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon (2011)
The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other.
More Is Different (1972)
My Harvard classmate, Thomas S. Kuhn wrote, some years ago, an influential book about scientific revolutions. Fortunately, many scientific revolutions do not follow his scenario, but the one he focused on, the discovery of quantum mechanics, is well described by his model, which is most valid for a revolution occurring in the central core of a mature science.
More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon (2011)