The word 'universe' is obviously not intended to have a plural, but science has evolved in such a way that we need a plural noun for something similar to what we ordinarily call our universe.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the concept of the universe and how scientific understanding has led to the need for a broader terminology.
Leonard Susskind's quote highlights the evolution of scientific thought and the limitations of traditional language. As science progresses, especially in the realm of cosmology and theoretical physics, our understanding of the universe expands, necessitating the use of a plural term to describe multiple universes or dimensions that might exist beyond the observable universe. This points to the expanding boundaries of knowledge and the challenges of accurately describing complex scientific concepts.
In practice
In a scientific conference discussing the theories of multiverses.
Extra dimensional theories are sometimes considered science fiction with equations. I think that's a wrong attitude. I think extra dimensions are with us, they are with us to stay, and they entered physics a long time ago. They are not going to go away.
A lot of my research time is spent daydreaming - telling an imaginary admiring audience of laymen how to understand some difficult scientific idea.
Man - life in general - seems irrelevant to the workings of the universe: a mere smudge of water, grease, and carbon on a pinpoint planet circling a star of no special consequence.
I was going to engineering school but fell in love with physics.
Why is there space rather than no space? Why is space three-dimensional? Why is space big? We have a lot of room to move around in. How come it's not tiny? We have no consensus about these things. We're still exploring them.
Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.
Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.
On seeing the marsupials in Australia for the first time and comparing them to placental mammals: “An unbeliever . . . might exclaim 'Surely two distinct Creators must have been at work'”
Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.
Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms.
All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.
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