Leonard Susskind Quotes

I'm afraid I am a bit of a technophobe - a nineteenth-century man caught in the twenty-first century. But there is one piece of technology that I would especially welcome: a device to automatically balance restaurant tables on all four legs so that they don't rock back and forth.

Physics is perceived as a lonesome, nerdy kind of enterprise that has very little to do with human feelings and the things that excite people day-to-day about each other. Yet physicists in their own working environment are very social creatures.

A lot of my research time is spent daydreaming - telling an imaginary admiring audience of laymen how to understand some difficult scientific idea.

The principles are exactly the same as those of QED: everything is built out of propagators, vertex diagrams, and coupling constants. But there are new actors and whole new plot lines, including one called QCD.

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.

If a system is chaotic (most are), then it implies that however good the resolving power may be, the time over which the system is predictable is limited. Perfect predictability is not achievable, simply because we are limited in our resolving power.

Every time a bit of information is erased, we know it doesn't disappear. It goes out into the environment. It may be horribly scrambled and confused, but it never really gets lost. It's just converted into a different form.

Einstein, in the special theory of relativity, proved that different observers, in different states of motion, see different realities.

world seems filled with people who are genuinely, deeply interested in physics but whose lives have taken them in different directions. This book is for all of us.

There is a philosophy that says that if something is unobservable
unobservable in principle
it is not part of science. If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs to the realm of metaphysical speculation, together with astrology and spiritualism. By that standard, most of the universe has no scientific reality
it's just a figment of our imaginations.

You have to say now that space is something. Space can vibrate, space can fluctuate, space can be quantum mechanical, but what the devil is it?

I went to college because my father thought that I should learn engineering, because he wanted to go into the heating business with me. There, I realized I wanted to be a physicist. I had to tell him, which was a somewhat traumatic experience.

At 5 years old, I saw 'Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,' and I was so scared when Costello sat himself down in the lap of the monster, not realizing where he was. My friends teased me. They were older, 8 years old. And my goal was to become a mad scientist and get back at them. And here I am, mad as hell!

Science to me is sufficiently weird and interesting, and stranger than fiction.

By itself, the Holographic Principle was not enough to win the Black Hole War. It was too imprecise, and it lacked a firm mathematical foundation. The reaction to it was skepticism: The universe a hologram? Sounds like science fiction. The fictitious future physicist Steve passing to the "other side" while the emperor and the count watch him being immolated? Sounds like spiritualism.

I was from a poor Jewish family in the South Bronx. My father was a plumber, but when I was 16, he got sick and I had to take over. Being a plumber in the South Bronx wasn't fun.

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.

We often say that the earth is a sphere, but to be precise, the term sphere refers only to the surface. The correct mathematical term for the solid earth is a ball.

At some point we have to give up and say that's just the way it is. Or, not give up and push on.

Life is fragile: it thrives only in a narrow range of temperatures between freezing and boiling. How lucky that our planet is just the right distance from the sun: a little farther, and the death of the perpetual Antarctic winter - or worse - would prevail; a little closer, and the surface would truly fry anything that touched it.

Space can vibrate, space can fluctuate, space can be quantum mechanical, but what the devil is it? And, you know, everybody has their own idea about what it is, but there's no coherent final consensus on why there is space.

Is the universe 'elegant,' as Brian Greene tells us? Not as far as I can tell, not the usual laws of particle physics, anyway. I think I might find the universal principles of String Theory most elegant - if I only knew what they were.

There is so much to groak; So little to groak from.

The dark energy is not exactly zero, but the first 122 decimal points are zero. That's crazy. That is really one of the craziest things we've ever discovered.

I have a funny mental framework when I do physics. I create an imaginary audience in my head to explain things to - it is part of the way I think. For me, teaching and explaining, even to my imaginary audience, is part of the process.

Unforeseen surprises are the rule in science, not the exception. Remember: Stuff happens.

I'm a great believer that scientists should spend as much time as possible explaining, and you do explain in the process of teaching.

the three-dimensional world of ordinary experience - the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people - is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional surface. This new law of physics, known as the Holographic Principle, asserts that everything inside a region of space can be described by bits of information restricted to the boundary.

I'm not going to argue with people about the existence of God. I have not the vaguest idea of whether the universe was created by an intelligence.

Over the years, I began to understand that there were a lot of people out there reading physics in popular literature that they could not understand - not because it was too advanced, but because it wasn't advanced enough.

I'm doing physics because I'm curious about how it works - full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, don't worry about whether somebody is going to be able to do an experiment next week, just figure it out.