No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you're going to fail.
String theory is the most developed theory with the capacity to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics in a consistent manner. I do believe the universe is consistent, and therefore I do believe that general relativity and quantum mechanics should be put together in a manner that makes sense.
When general relativity was first put forward in 1915, the math was very unfamiliar to most physicists. Now we teach general relativity to advanced high school students.
The idea that there could be other universes out there is really one that stretches the mind in a great way.
Sometimes nature guards her secrets with the unbreakable grip of physical law. Sometimes the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon.
My mom says: 'Why aren't you a doctor?' and I'm like, 'I am a doctor!' and she's all, 'No, I mean a real doctor.' She reads my books, but she says they give her a headache.
I think it's too fast to say that all sci-fi ultimately winds up having some place in science. On the other hand, imaginative minds working outside of science as storytellers certainly have come upon ideas that, with the passing decades, have either materialized of come close to materializing.
Most scientists like to operate in the context of economy. If you don't need an explanatory principle, don't invoke it.
I like 'The Simpsons' quite a lot. I love the irreverent character of the whole show. It's great.
Every moment is as real as every other. Every 'now,' when you say, 'This is the real moment,' is as real as every other 'now' - and therefore all the moments are just out there. Just as every location in space is out there, I think every moment in time is out there, too.
Relativity challenges your basic intuitions that you've built up from everyday experience. It says your experience of time is not what you think it is, that time is malleable. Your experience of space is not what you think it is; it can stretch and shrink.
I do feel strongly that string theory is our best hope for making progress at unifying gravity and quantum mechanics.
The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand.
There are many of us thinking of one version of parallel universe theory or another. If it's all a lot of nonsense, then it's a lot of wasted effort going into this far-out idea. But if this idea is correct, it is a fantastic upheaval in our understanding.
We know that if supersymmetric particles exist, they must be very heavy; otherwise we would have spotted them by now.
It's hard to teach passionately about something that you don't have a passion for.
Very much, string theory is simply a work in progress. What we are inching toward every day are predictions that within the realm of current technology we hope to test. It's not like we're working on a theory that is permanently beyond experiment. That would be philosophy.
I think the appropriate response for a physicist is: 'I do not find the concept of God very interesting, because I cannot test it.'
Writing for the stage is different from writing for a book. You want to write in a way that an actor has material to work with, writing in the first person not the third person, and pulling out the dramatic elements in a bigger way for a stage presentation.
Falsifiability for a theory is great, but a theory can still be respectable even if it is not falsifiable, as long as it is verifiable.