What - Quotes
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
It has certainly been true in the past that what we call intelligence and scientific discovery have conveyed a survival advantage. It is not so clear that this is still the case: our scientific discoveries may well destroy us all, and even if they don't, a complete unified theory may not make much difference to our chances of survival.
Life is full of tough situations. It's how you react to them, that's what matters.
We cannot define anything precisely! If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each other, one saying to the other "You don't know what you are talking about!" The second one says "What do you mean by know? What do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you?", and so on.
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part - perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined!
The "paradox" is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality "ought to be".
People are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don't give us a chance to tell them anything about what we know pretty well. They always want to know things that we don't know.
What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school - and you think I'm going to explain it to you so you can understand it? No, you are not going to be able understand it. [...] You see my physics students don't understand it either. That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.