Terry Pratchett Quotes

Physicists have as their calling the answering of questions once thought to be unknowable.

Chemistry seems to be pretty much nailed down, and biology gains ground all the time. But physics seems to be mired in idle rumination. They think a Big Bang started the universe, but they don't really know.

From a scientific point of view, our mission is to seek answers to the fundamental questions about the universe. Many are open - we don't know about dark matter, which accounts for a quarter of the universe's matter, nor do we know why there's antimatter.

I've always really been into science, and in the last five years I've gotten into theoretical physics and the origins of the universe.

Now, what space ultimately is - I should confess, I think most physicists believe - we don't yet know.

I'm a person who's very interested in science and the universe and quantum physics and astrophysics.

I was already studying physics, but Sputnik steered me toward space, cosmology, the Big Bang, and elementary particles.

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

For most people, the major hurdle in grasping modern insights into the nature of the universe is that these developments are usually phrased using mathematics.

Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. 'Where did the totality of reality come from?' 'Did time have a beginning?'

No one knows who wrote the laws of physics or where they come from. Science is based on testable, reproducible evidence, and so far we cannot test the universe before the Big Bang.

We know there must be new physics. For example, we cannot explain what dark matter is.

With the discovery of the Higgs boson, one of the questions has been ticked off the list, but there are many others. We hope that we can find answers or hints for answers to at least some of them. But of course, this is in the hands of nature.

The main reason why people should care about research in fundamental physics is the same reason they care about astronomy and cosmology. People, children, want to know what we're made out of, how it works, and why the universe is the way it is.

String theory has the potential to show that all of the wondrous happenings in the universe - from the frantic dance of subatomic quarks to the stately waltz of orbiting binary stars; from the primordial fireball of the big bang to the majestic swirl of heavenly galaxies - are reflections of one, grand physical principle, one master equation.

Heisenberg, Max Plank and Einstein, they all agreed that science could not solve the mystery of the universe.

At the same time, new concepts and abstractions flow into the picture, taking up the task of describing the universe without reference to such time or space - abstractions for which our language lacks adequate terms.

In the history of physics, every time we've looked beyond the scales and energies we were familiar with, we've found things that we wouldn't have thought were there.

We ought to teach kids more about the Big Bang and entropy and particles. Every high school graduate should know that everything in the universe is made of a handful of particles. That's not a hard thing to know. But that's not what's emphasized.

I'm just interested in science, and I try to keep track of what's going on and get my head around it - inflation, the multiverse, whatever. It's very hard for me because I don't have a scientific background, and I wasn't any good at science at school, but all of that stuff I just find incredibly attractive and fascinating.

I think my proper response is complete amazement and awe at the universe that we are in, and how it works is just far more complicated than humans will ever properly understand.

Physicists must feel they are in the most exciting field in the world. Their minds must be afire.

The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level.

We can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don't know what banged and why it banged. That's a challenge for 21st-century science.

I think the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles would revolutionize our understanding of the universe.