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.
Perhaps some day in the dim future it will be possible to advance the computations faster than the weather advances and at a cost less than the saving to mankind due to the information gained. But that is a dream.
Hubble touches people. When you're looking that far out, you're giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry, it touches you.
We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. We now know that's not true. That's a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you're going to lose some brainpower.
I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
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.
You may object that by speaking of simplicity and beauty I am introducing aesthetic criteria of truth, and I frankly admit that I am strongly attracted by the simplicity and beauty of mathematical schemes which nature presents us. You must have felt this too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationship, which nature suddenly spreads out before us.
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