The Perfect Theory Quotes

“Every time I give a public lecture about what I do, I am asked the same thing: “What was there before the Big Bang?” I resort to the various explanations. There is the “There was no before, no time, before the Big Bang” answer. Or there is my colleague Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s more Zen-like answer: “That is like asking what is north of the North Pole.”
― Pedro G. Ferreira, The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity

“To look at black holes directly is a bit of a paradox. There is nothing there to see—black holes are invisible behind the Schwarzschild shroud. Just because we can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t worth looking at. In fact, we have a gigantic black hole sitting right in the middle of our galaxy, the Milky Way. It weighs about a hundred million times more than the sun and has a radius of about 10 million kilometers.”
― Pedro G. Ferreira, The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity

“The maverick in him had guided the field toward the bizarre model of the universe that had taken root: a universe in which 96 percent of its energy was in some dark substances, a combination of dark matter and the cosmological constant.”
― Pedro G. Ferreira, The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity

“When Yakov Zel’dovich switched fields, he did so fearlessly. One of his students recalls Zel’dovich’s advice: “It is difficult, but interesting to master ten percent of . . . any field. . . . The path from ten to ninety percent is pure pleasure and genuine creativity. . . . To go through the next nine percent is infinitely difficult, and far from everyone’s ability. . . . The last percent is hopeless,” from which Zel’dovich concluded, “It is more reasonable to switch to a new problem before it is too late.”
― Pedro G. Ferreira, The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity

“You know, once you start calculating you shit yourself up before you know it.”
― Pedro G. Ferreira, The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity