Fundamentals Quotes

“To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ’Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“Science tells us many important things about how things are, but it does not pronounce how things should be, nor forbid us from imagining things that are not.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“The work will teach you how to do it. —Anonymous (quoted in a fortune cookie)”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“Science tells us many important things about how things are, but it does not pronounce how things should be, nor forbid us from imagining things that are not. Science contains beautiful ideas, but it does not exhaust beauty. It offers a uniquely fruitful way to understand the physical world, but it is not a complete guide to life.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“The number of stars visible to unaided human vision, in clear air on a moonless night, is at best a few thousand. Ten octillion, on the other hand, the number of atoms within us, is about a million times the number of stars in the entire visible universe. In that very concrete sense, a universe dwells within us.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“In the spirit of complementarity, we accept them both. We recognize that neither falsifies the other. Facts can’t falsify other facts. Rather, they reflect different ways of processing reality.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. —Albert Einstein”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“That undermining process can go much further, beyond merely discrediting absurdities. Scientific understanding bears such abundant and delightful fruit that eating from its Tree of Knowledge can spoil one’s taste for other foods.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“The graviton is the particle from which gravitational fields are made. Photons bind together atoms and molecules; gluons bind together quarks, protons, and atomic nuclei; gravitons bind planets, stars, galaxies, and big things in general.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“The universe is a strange place, and we're all in it together.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“Each of our human bodies contains far more atoms than there are stars in the visible universe, and our brains contain about as many as neurons as there are stars in our galaxy. The universe within is a worthy compliment to the universe beyond.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead—his eyes are closed. —Albert Einstein”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

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― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“The first successful detection of gravitational waves took place on September 18, 2015. This detection matched predictions for the burst of radiation from a merger of two black holes, with masses roughly twenty to thirty times that of our Sun, about 1.3 billion light-years away.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“The discovery of the Higgs particle was announced on July 4, 2012. The signal was an excess of high-energy photon pairs. Such pairs were predicted to arise from Higgs particle decays, and the excess swamped any other plausible source.* Since then, several other signals, arising out of other ways that Higgs particles can decay, have been detected as well. So far, the rates at which all these signals have occurred agree with theoretical predictions.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“The lingering glow of photons present when the fireball first cooled enough to become transparent was first detected in 1964, by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“Electrons were the first elementary particles to be discovered, and in many ways they are the most important. Electrons were first clearly identified by J. J. Thomson in 1897.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“According to our present best understanding, the primary properties of matter, from which all its other properties can be derived, are these three: Mass Charge Spin”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“The universe commenced forming stars and planets quite early in its history, about thirteen billion years ago. New stars continue to form, though at a diminishing rate.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“Using essentially the same techniques, we can use them to measure much longer times than carbon dating reaches. For example, isotopes of uranium and lead have been used to obtain the age of mineral samples (gneiss) from western Greenland. They give concordant ages in the neighborhood of 3.6 billion years. Thus, we infer that those rocks formed 3.6 billion years ago, and have undergone little chemical processing since. In this way, we learn that Earth has existed as a solid planet for a significant fraction—more than a quarter—of the lifetime of the visible universe.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“We can also date bones and artifacts of early modern humans (Homo sapiens). From those remains, we infer that our species has been around for about three hundred thousand years. The early record is sparse, indicating that populations were small: Homo sapiens was not a particularly successful species early on.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“The Neanderthals didn’t keep records, but thanks to carbon dating we know that they flourished in Europe for several hundred thousand years, and as recently as forty thousand years ago.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“The interpretation relies on a simple but striking effect, first described by Christian Doppler in 1842. Doppler pointed out that if a source of waves is moving away from us, then successive peaks in the wave pattern it emits will come from farther away, so that the waves will arrive stretched out.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“When the Jesuit priest Georges Lemaître first proposed that interpretation of Hubble’s observations, his “big bang” was a bold and beautiful idea, but the evidence for it was skimpy, and it lacked a firm basis in physics.* (Lemaître himself spoke of “the primeval atom” or “the cosmic egg.” The less poetic name “big bang” came later.)”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“An overarching message from our fundamentals is that there’s plenty of space, plenty of time, and plenty of matter and energy. The physical world offers us humans a future much bigger, longer, and richer than what we’ve achieved so far—if we don’t blow it.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“It has been a transcendent gift to experience each step on a path leading from vague aspirations and puzzlement through disciplined exploration, glimmers of enlightenment, calculations, testable predictions, and finally, at journey’s end, to shared truths about physical reality.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“Accepting the lessons of Heisenberg and Bohr, we come to realize that there is no such strict separation. By observing the world, we participate in making it.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“The two principles we mentioned above—that observation is an active process and that observation is invasive—were bedrock foundations of Heisenberg’s analysis.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

“Femtochemistry constructs those timelines, in steps as small as 10−15 seconds (one femtosecond). With understanding, increasingly, comes control. Lasik eye surgery exploits femtosecond laser pulses to remodel patients’ corneas.”
― Frank Wilczek, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality