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
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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of preparation for humanity's future exploration beyond Earth.
Kip Thorne suggests that humanity has a destiny to expand into the cosmos, and it is crucial to begin establishing the necessary groundwork to achieve this ambition. This vision reflects a sense of urgency and responsibility for current generations to innovate and invest in technologies that enable space exploration, ensuring a sustainable future for the human race across the universe.
In practice
This quote can inspire discussions at a science conference about space exploration.
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.
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.
If you go down through the horizon of a black hole, at the center you don't find a tunnel that leads you to some other place in the universe.
Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world.
Scientific facts are often described in textbooks as if they just sort of exist, like nickels someone picked up on the street. But science at the cutting edge, conducted by sharp minds probing deep into nature, is not about self-evident facts. It is about mystery and not knowing. It is about taking huge risks.
When I started working with NASA in 1989 as part of a mission to send spacecraft to Pluto, I knew it would take at least 10-15 years to see results of my efforts.
In the Middle East, where populations are growing fast, the world is seeing the first collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level. For the first time in history, grain production is dropping in a geographic region with nothing in sight to arrest the decline. Each day now brings 10,000 more people to feed and less irrigation water with which to feed them.
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
It is a curious historical fact that modern quantum mechanics began with two quite different mathematical formulations: the differential equation of Schroedinger and the matrix algebra of Heisenberg. The two apparently dissimilar approaches were proved to be mathematically equivalent.
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