Occupation: Physicist Birth: 1953
The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests..
Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity..
If you reject the infinite, you are stuck with the finite, and the finite is parochial... the best explanation of anything eventually involves univer….
Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow..
Despite the unrivaled empirical success of quantum theory, the very suggestion that it may be literally true as a description of nature is still gree….
Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars, and by intelligent beings who understand the processes that power stars, but by nothing else in the….
Is the human race a universal constructor?.
If we can't program it, we can't understand it..
Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense....
If you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it..
The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level….
Humans may or may not have cosmic significance, and if they do, it will be by hitching a ride on the objective centrality of knowledge in the cosmic ….
I chop and change between what is called 'work' and what is called 'recreation.' There are no discontinuities in my day. I only play tennis with peop….
I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we us….
It is possible to build a virtual-reality generator whose repertoire includes every possible environment..
The brain is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that ….
The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which ….
The most important application of quantum computing in the future is likely to be a computer simulation of quantum systems, because that's an applica….
Quantum computation is a distinctively new way of harnessing nature. It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in coll….
No precautions, and no precautionary principle, can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. We need a stance of problem-fixing, not just problem-a….
Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them..