Quotes by Leonard Susskind

“There is a philosophy that says that if something is unobservable -- unobservable in principle -- it is not part of science. If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs to the...”

“At some point we have to give up and say that's just the way it is. Or, not give up and push on.”

“Why is there space rather than no space? Why is space three-dimensional? Why is space big? We have a lot of room to move around in. How come it's not tiny? We have no consensus about these things. ...”

“Space can vibrate, space can fluctuate, space can be quantum mechanical, but what the devil is it? And, you know, everybody has their own idea about what it is, but there's no coherent final consen...”

“Unforeseen surprises are the rule in science, not the exception. Remember: Stuff happens.”

“Life is fragile: it thrives only in a narrow range of temperatures between freezing and boiling. How lucky that our planet is just the right distance from the sun: a little farther, and the death o...”

“I'm not going to argue with people about the existence of God. I have not the vaguest idea of whether the universe was created by an intelligence.”

“You are a victim of your own neural architecture which doesn't permit you to imagine anything outside of three dimensions. Even two dimensions. People know they can't visualise four or five dimensi...”

“I have a funny mental framework when I do physics. I create an imaginary audience in my head to explain things to - it is part of the way I think. For me, teaching and explaining, even to my imagin...”

“I'm afraid I am a bit of a technophobe - a nineteenth-century man caught in the twenty-first century. But there is one piece of technology that I would especially welcome: a device to automatically...”

“I did not come from an academic background. My father was a smart man, but he had a fifth-grade education. He and all his friends were plumbers. They were all born around 1905 in great poverty in N...”

“Extra dimensional theories are sometimes considered science fiction with equations. I think that's a wrong attitude. I think extra dimensions are with us, they are with us to stay, and they entered...”

“The standard SU(3)×SU(2)×U(1) theory of strong, electromagnetic, and weak interactions appears to correctly describe physics down to the smallest distance scales yet probed.”

“The problem with general relativity is that the principles are pretty simple and the computations are always ugly.”

“A straight line is a special case of a curve. It's a curve which is uncurved.”

“Elegance requires that the number of defining equations be small. Five is better than ten, and one is better than five. On this score, one might facetiously say that String Theory is the ultimate e...”

“Most constants are adjusted with a deviation of one percent, which means that if the value differs by one percent everything collapses. Physicists can certainly claim that this is a fluke, but it m...”

“My physics has been extremely mainstream, ... It's not true that I'm some sort of a [radical thinker], not at all.”

“... Lenny Susskind ... is very well known for his technical work, for his popular work, for his semi-technical books, The Theoretical Minimum, and, within the physics community, as a storyteller, a...”

“Dozens of other popular authors have written about black holes and string theory, but Gefter’s excitement makes even such overdone subjects seem fresh. And through the whole process, she and her fa...”