The Cosmic Landscape Quotes

“Dick Feynman was a genius of visualization (he was also no slouch with equations): he made a mental picture of anything he was working on. While others were writing blackboard-filling formulas to express the laws of elementary particles, he would just draw a picture and figure out the answer.”
― Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design

“The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” — THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY”
― Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design

“We often say that the earth is a sphere, but to be precise, the term sphere refers only to the surface. The correct mathematical term for the solid earth is a ball.”
― Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design

“There is another way to determine the mass of a galaxy besides just measuring the light from it, a much more direct and reliable way. And that’s to use Newton’s laws. Let’s return to the asteroid and the stone. Now, instead of moving vertically, the stone is moving in a circular orbit around the asteroid. The gravity of the asteroid keeps the stone in orbit. The key observation, which goes back to Newton, is that by measuring the velocity of the stone and the radius of its orbit, you can determine the mass of the asteroid. In a similar fashion, by measuring the velocity of stars in the outermost parts of a rotating galaxy, astronomers can measure the galaxy’s mass. And what do they find? The galaxies are all heavier than the astronomers had thought. Roughly speaking, every galaxy is about ten times more massive than all the visible stars and interstellar gas that it contains. The remaining nine-tenths of the mass is a mystery. It is almost certainly not made of the things that comprise ordinary matter: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Cosmologists call it dark matter: dark because it gives off no light.6 Nor does this ghostly matter scatter light or allow itself to be visible in any form, except through its gravity. So strange is modern science. For all these years—since the time of John Dalton—all matter was thought to be the usual stuff of chemistry. But now it seems that 90 percent of all the matter in the universe is something we know nothing about. As astronomers were in the slow process of convincing themselves that dark matter is really there, theoretical physicists were busy postulating all sorts of new elementary particles for all kinds of reasons.”
― Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design

“The principles are exactly the same as those of QED: everything is built out of propagators, vertex diagrams, and coupling constants. But there are new actors and whole new plot lines, including one called QCD.”
― Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design