51 quotes
Elementary particles are terribly boring, which is one reason why we're so interested in them.
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (1993)
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
The First Three Minutes (1977)
It seems that scientists are often attracted to beautiful theories in the way that insects are attracted to flowers — not by logical deduction, but by something like a sense of smell.
Today for real mystery one has to look to cosmology and elementary particle physics.
The principles of quantum mechanics are so contrary to ordinary intuition that they can best be motivated by taking a look at their prehistory.
Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (2012)
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The reductionist worldview is chilling and impersonal. It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because that is the way the world works.
Whatever faith you have, you ought to be willing to confront it with the discoveries of science.
I suppose that this is a rather melancholy view of human life, but melancholy is one of the distinctive creations of our species, and not without its own consolations.
Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries pp. 47–48 (2001)
There is one constant that seems to be fine tuned...and that is dark energy.
The Atheism Tapes (2004)
I do not use Dirac’s bra-ket notation, because for some purposes it is awkward […]
Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (2012)
Perhaps the most important immediate consequence of Planck’s work was to provide long-sought values for atomic constants.
Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (2012)
It is with Isaac Newton that the modern dream of a final theory really begins.
Dreams of a Final Theory (1992)
It is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
The Atheism Tapes (2004)
Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.
The Atheism Tapes (2004)
If you really limit me to one question, it would be: Why is the world the way it is?
Our job in physics is to see things simply, to understand a great many complicated phenomena in a unified way, in terms of a few simple principles.
A theorist today is hardly considered respectable if he or she has not introduced at least one new particle for which there is no experimental evidence.
It doesn't work to build half an accelerator. The particles need to go all the way around.