Leonard Susskind Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“Science blogs bore me. When everyone is an expert, no one is an expert.”

“I'm a great believer in our ability to come up with the ideas necessary to solve the big questions. I have less confidence that we'll be able to find a consensus about which ones are right without experiment.”

“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.”

“Eventually, when the universe expands enough, all that will be left is the dark energy.”

“The success of ordinary cosmology speaks against the idea that the universe was created in a random fluctuation.”

“All it takes is a small change in Newton's laws, or the rules of atomic physics, and poof - life would either be instantly extinguished or would never have formed. It seems that our guardian angel not only provided us with a very benign planet to live on but also made the rules of existence - the laws of physics and cosmology - just right for us.”

“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!”

“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.”

“I often feel a discomfort, a kind of embarrassment, when I explain elementary-particle physics to laypeople. It all seems so arbitrary - the ridiculous collection of fundamental particles, the lack of pattern to their masses.”

“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.”