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.
Any difficulties which the world faces today will be as nothing compared to the full effects which global warming will have on the world-wide economy.
Chemistry... is like the maid occupied with daily civilisation; she is busy with fertilisers, medicines, glass, insecticides ... for she dispenses the recipes.
When the sexes differ in beauty, in the power of singing, or in producing what I have called instrumental music, it is almost invariably the male which excels the female.
It is to them [fossils] alone that we owe the commencement of even a Theory of the Earth ... By them we are enabled to ascertain, with the utmost certainty, that our earth has not always been covered over by the same external crust, because we are thoroughly assured that the organized bodies to which these fossil remains belong must have lived upon the surface before they came to be buried, as they now are, at a great depth.
The popularisation of scientific doctrines is producing as great an alteration in the mental state of society as the material applications of science are effecting in its outward life. Such indeed is the respect paid to science, that the most absurd opinions may become current, provided they are expressed in language, the sound of which recals [sic] some well-known scientific phrase.
Economics is in many respects the queen of the soft sciences. It's expected to be better than the rest. It's my view that economics is better at the multi-disciplinary stuff than the rest of the soft science. And it's also my view that it's still lousy.
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