Fundamental Understanding Quotes

I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know God's thoughts, the rest are details.

I think I always wanted to go into physics. What always fascinated me about science was the desire to understand what underlies it all, and I think physics is basically the study of that.

Radical simply means grasping things at the root.

Those early steps are very important in understanding the evolution. But in themselves, maybe now you need the later records to understand the significance of the earlier records!

What we are after is the root and not the branches. The root is the real knowledge; the branches are surface knowledge. Real knowledge breeds 'body feel' and personal expression; surface knowledge breeds mechanical conditioning and imposing limitation and squelches creativity.

Well, gauge theory is very fundamental to our understanding of physical forces these days. But they are also dependent on a mathematical idea, which has been around for longer than gauge theory has.

People always talk about the implication and applications of a process, but for me, the goal is purely about knowledge. Knowledge can become practical today, in 20 years, or in 500 years. Ask Newton. He didn't know there would be space research based on his accident with the apple.

Even getting a college degree does not guarantee a minimal knowledge of U.S. history.

Education is what remains when what is learned has been taken away.

I sometimes get accused of being 'faux-naive,' but for me, it's really just about getting down to the basics of something.

The technology at the leading edge changes so rapidly that you have to keep current after you get out of school. I think probably the most important thing is having good fundamentals.

Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium - we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid?

The tradition of always looking for the answer in the most fundamental way available - that is a great tradition, and it saves a lot of time in this world.

I just have never seen anyone build anything significant in any field without having a deep and detailed sense of what they are building on.

When I was at school you got an overall general education on many things, even just basic facts.

despite its apparent impracticality, the Administration values discovery-oriented science, and aims to continue to support the grand quest for knowledge about the universe at the largest and smallest scales.

You can never really get away from the fundamentals of anything that you're doing.

Deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its thought in a thing.

The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.

I think technology is such that we can reach new heights but we need some of the basics of the pre-technological age. It's counter-productive to be able to type a hundred words a minute but not know what the words mean.

Perhaps more than English or history, STEM subjects require an enormous amount of foundational learning before students can become competent.