Princeton University Press quotes

View All Authors View Sources

The only way to have a scientific theory is if the laws of physics hold everywhere, including at the beginning of the universe.

— Stephen Hawking (1994)



Although there have been suggestions that spacetime may have a discrete structure, I see no reason to abandon the continuum theories that have been so successful.

— Stephen Hawking (1996)



If you calculated something roughly, it would give a reasonable answer. But if you tried to compute it more accurately, you would find that the correction you thought was going to be small … was in fact very large―in fact, it was infinity!

— Richard Feynman (1985)



So when some fool physicist gives a lecture at UCLA in 1983 and says, “This is the way it works, and look at how wonderfully similar the theories are,” it’s not because Nature is really similar; it’s because the physicists have only been able to think of the same damn thing, over and over again.

— Richard Feynman (1985)



The theory of gravitation … stands isolated from the other theories. Gravitation is, so far, not understandable in terms of other phenomena.

— Richard Feynman (1985)



Physics must be simple.

— Jean Eisenstaedt (2006)



It is clearly the first of the physical sciences because the whole of physics makes use of it; it is the science of the foundations of physics.

— Jean Eisenstaedt (2006)



Sometimes ignorance is a good thing.

— Jean Eisenstaedt (2006)



…continuum …should be banned from the theory as a supplementary construction not justified by the essence of the problem, which corresponds to nothing “real”.

— Albert Einstein (1916)