If you have somebody who's brilliant and highly creative with a different point of view than you have, and a very different intellectual background, great things can happen.
Kip ThorneRead
We're going to need a definitive quantum theory of gravity, which is part of a grand unified theory - it's the main missing piece.
Interpretation
A complete understanding of gravity is essential for unifying physics into a comprehensive theory.
Kip Thorne emphasizes the necessity of developing a definitive quantum theory of gravity as a critical component for establishing a grand unified theory in physics. This implies that without a robust understanding of how gravity operates at quantum levels, the quest for a cohesive framework explaining all fundamental forces and particles remains incomplete.
In practice
In a physics seminar discussing the future of theoretical physics.
If you have somebody who's brilliant and highly creative with a different point of view than you have, and a very different intellectual background, great things can happen.
I think that the future of the human race is to spread through the universe, and now is the time that we should be laying the foundations for that.
Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity.
'Closed timelike curve' is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.
If you think that the distance from the Earth to the nearest planet where we could live comfortably... is being, like, from New York to Australia... what we've achieved so far, in going to the moon, that's about two-and-a-half inches. So that's the challenge.
A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size. That's not true. A black hole is made from warped space and time.
Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly.
Like the entomologist in search of colorful butterflies, my attention has chased in the gardens of the grey matter cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.
The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing.
It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve for ever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress.
Nnothing tends more to the corruption of science than to suffer it to stagnate. These waters must be troubled, before they can exert their virtues.
What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.
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