top of page
"There was a long history of speculation that in quantum gravity, unlike Einstein's classical theory, it might be possible for the topology of spacetime to change."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Change quotes

"Clever nations are the ones who keep changing their governments! Because power must change hands otherwise it will get spoiled and rot!"

"But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore."

"America was never designed to be fixed forever, but was meant to be fluid and evolving."

"Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing."

"A personality alters itself through a series of self-referential experiences. We are not the same as the day before. Much as a person can never set foot in exactly the same river on any given day, we are different each day. Yesterday made us, but the past cannot contain nor restrain us. We can never mentally scroll backward and be who we used to be. We must move forward in the stream of life until the day that our life force dries up and we return to dust."

"In your winter you deny your spring."

"What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain."

"It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes."
Explore more quotes by Edward Witten

"I wouldn't have thought that a wrong theory should lead us to understand better the ordinary quantum field theories or to have new insights about the quantum states of black holes."

"You have that one basic string, but it can vibrate in many ways. But we're trying to get a lot of particles because experimental physicists have discovered a lot of particles."

"Technically you need the extra dimensions. At first people didn't like them too much, but they've got a big benefit, which is that the ability of string theory to describe all the elementary particles and their forces along with gravity depends on using the extra dimensions."

"The theory has to be interpreted that extra dimensions beyond the ordinary four dimensions the three spatial dimensions plus time are sufficiently small that they haven't been observed yet."

"It's indeed surprising that replacing the elementary particle with a string leads to such a big change in things. I'm tempted to say that it has to do with the fuzziness it introduces."

"String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string."

"Having those extra dimensions and therefore many ways the string can vibrate in many different directions turns out to be the key to being able to describe all the particles that we see."

"If I take the theory as we have it now, literally, I would conclude that extra dimensions really exist. They're part of nature. We don't really know how big they are yet, but we hope to explore that in various ways."

"Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle."

"Spreading out the particle into a string is a step in the direction of making everything we're familiar with fuzzy. You enter a completely new world where things aren't at all what you're used to."
bottom of page