The reconciliation of gravitation and quantization is still one of the most intractable problems in contemporary theoretical physics.

The very distinction between spacetime and matter is likely to be ill-founded….

I think that the responsibility for the search for the new synthesis is not for physicists alone.

I believe that we are going through a period of profound confusion, in which we lack a coherent general picture of the physical world capable of embracing what, or at least most of what, we have learned about it.

Physics always deals with two distinct temporalities, which I may denote as the system’s time and the observer’s time.

I believe that the essential discovery about nature encoded into general relativity is … that position with respect to a “background” spacetime is a meaningless concept.

The “fundamental scientific view of the world” of the present time is characterized by an astonishing amount of perplexity, and disagreement, about what time, space, matter and causality are.

The problem seems to me how one can formulate statements about a discontinuum without calling upon a continuum (space-time) as an aid; the latter should be banned from the theory ….