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Organized religion and musicals present tenets to live by that don't entirely make sense but, on the whole, make people who believe them secure, thus giving an appearance of inclusiveness.
The standard model of particle physics describes forces and particles very well, but when you throw gravity into the equation, it all falls apart. You have to fudge the figures to make it work.
Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries - the arts and humanities.
When I came to Harvard, I was debating between math and science, and I guess I thought in the end I wanted something that could connect to the real world. I liked puzzle-solving and connections.
The thing I will say is that probably culturally, women are treated differently, which means, I think, you're criticized more, you have to listen a little bit more, you have to justify yourself.
I do try to do high-impact work, and I try to think of ideas people haven't thought about that have broad implications, but I don't restrict myself to that. I try to work on things that I find interesting.
Physicists are interested in measuring neutrino properties because they tell us about the structure of the Standard Model, the well-tested theory that describes matter's most basic elements and interactions.
The process of science is difficult and challenging. It involves always being aware that your ideas might be right or they might be wrong. I think it's that kind of balance that makes science so interesting.
The scientist is also a composer... You could think of science as discovering one particular thing - a supernova or whatever. You could also think of it as discovering this whole new way of seeing the world.
We have this very clean picture of science, you know, these well-established rules with which we make predictions. But when you're really doing science, when you're doing research, you're at the edge of what we know.
I actually like seeing how the world - trying to figure out how the world works, how it all fits together. Also, it makes me happy when I feel like things are consistent, when there's some sort of order to the universe.
If you are a responsible scientist, you are going to present your new results in a paper, and maybe if, over time, things are established, and it's prime time for the public to hear about it, then you include it in a book.
I do theoretical particle physics. We're trying to understand the most basic structure of matter. And the way you do that is you have to look at really small distances. And to get to small distances, you need high energies.
There can sometimes be this fear among laypeople: 'I don't understand everything in science perfectly, so I just can't say anything about it.' I think it's good to know that we scientists are also confused some of the time.
The universe has its secrets. Extra dimensions of space might be one of them. If so, the universe has been hiding those dimensions, protecting them, keeping them coyly under wraps. From a casual glance, you would never suspect a thing.
We should figure out how to do this so that some parents don't feel disenfranchised, angry and upset. It says a lot about the state of where we are in the city, the role of parents and the reality of small school and combining schools.
I don't think about a theory of everything when I do my research. And even if we knew the ultimate underlying theory, how are you going to explain the fact that we're sitting here? Solving string theory won't tell us how humanity was born.
People who dismiss science in favor of religion sometimes confuse the challenge of rigorously understanding the world with a deliberate intellectual exclusion that leads them to mistrust scientists and, to their detriment, what they discover.
An almost indispensable skill for any creative person is the ability to pose the right questions. Creative people identify promising, exciting, and, most important, accessible routes to progress - and eventually formulate the questions correctly.
You have to be careful when you use beauty as a guide. There are many theories people didn't think were beautiful at the time but did find beautiful laterand vice versa. I think simplicity is a good guide: The more economical a theory, the better.
There could be more to the universe than the three dimensions we are familiar with. They are hidden from us in some way, perhaps because they're tiny or warped. But even if they're invisible, they could affect what we actually observe in the universe.
What I do is very theoretical. It won't necessarily have implications for anything anyone is doing tomorrow, yet you know that there's a sense of progress in science, and as we understand more, it just turns out that, somehow, the world evolves with us.
In the history of physics, every time we've looked beyond the scales and energies we were familiar with, we've found things that we wouldn't have thought were there. You look inside the atom, and eventually you discover quarks. Who would have thought that?
In fairness, I don't think that everyone understands what I say, but I think they understand part of it and part of what the issues are... Just the same way that people like a good painting, I think people really like understanding, knowing about the world.
I don't necessarily make much art myself, but after I wrote 'Warped Passages,' I was fortunate to get involved a little in the art world. I got invited to write a libretto for what we called a projective opera, and I also got invited to curate an art exhibit.
A musical, like most religions, provides the audience or followers with a sense of belonging. Religious services, on the other hand, with their staged performances, invigorating songs, popular wisdom and shared experience, are almost a form of community theater.
It's not completely obvious what gravity is, fundamentally, or what dimensions are, fundamentally. One of these days we'll understand better what we mean, what is the fundamental thing that's given us space in the first place and dimensions of space in particular.
The best science frequently combines an awareness of broad and significant problems with focus on an apparently small issue or detail that someone very much wants to solve or understand. Sometimes these little problems or inconsistencies turn out to be the clues to big advances.
Scientific research involves going beyond the well-trodden and well-tested ideas and theories that form the core of scientific knowledge. During the time scientists are working things out, some results will be right, and others will be wrong. Over time, the right results will emerge.
When people try to use religion to address the natural world, science pushes back on it, and religion has to accommodate the results. Beliefs can be permanent, but beliefs can also be flexible. Personally, if I find out my belief is wrong, I change my mind. I think that's a good way to live.
I think it's a problem that people are considered immoral if they're not religious. That's just not true. If you do something for a religious reason, you do it because you'll be rewarded in an afterlife or in this world. That's not quite as good as something you do for purely generous reasons.
Scientists actively approach the door to knowledge—the boundary of the domain of what we know. We question and explore and we change our views when facts and logic force us to do so. We are confident only in what we can verify through experiments or in what we can deduce from experimentally confirmed hypotheses.
There are many aspects of time we just do not understand. That’s the thing about writing a popular book: You realize the things you understand because for those you can give a really simple explanation. But some things about time I just don’t know how to give simple explanations for, even though I can tell you mathematically what’s going on.
Faith just doesn't have anything to do with what I'm doing as a scientist. It's nice if you can believe in God, because then you see more of a purpose in things. Even if you don't, though, it doesn't mean that there's no purpose. It doesn't mean that there's no goodness. I think that there's a virtue in being good in and of itself. I think that one can work with the world we have.
If such external influences are intrinsic to religion, then logic and scientific thought dictate that there must be a mechanism by which this influence is transmitted. A religious or spiritual belief that involves an invisible undetectable force that nonetheless influences human actions and behavior or that of the world itself produces a situation in which a believer has no choice but to have faith and abandon logic--or simply not care.
Physics has entered a remarkable era. Ideas that were once the realm of science fiction are now entering our theoretical and maybe even experimental grasp. Brand-new theoretical discoveries about extra dimensions have irreversibly changed how particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists now think about the world. The sheer number and pace of discoveries tells us that we've most likely only scratched the surface of the wondrous possibilities that lie in store. Ideas have taken on a life of their own.