Leonard Susskind quotes

Unforeseen surprises are the rule in science, not the exception. Remember: Stuff happens. (Leonard Susskind)
You have to say now that space is something. Space can vibrate, space can fluctuate, space can be quantum mechanical, but what the devil is it? View quote
Leonard Susskind
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 New York City and had to go to work when they were 12 or 13 years old. View quote
Leonard Susskind
I was going to engineering school but fell in love with physics. View quote
Leonard Susskind
A lot of my research time is spent daydreaming - telling an imaginary admiring audience of laymen how to understand some difficult scientific idea. View quote
Leonard Susskind
The problem with general relativity is that the principles are pretty simple and the computations are always ugly. View quote
Leonard Susskind
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 epitome of elegance. With all the years that String Theory has been studied, no one has found even a single defining equation! The number at present count is zero. We know neither what the fundamental equations of the theory are nor even if it has any. View quote
Leonard Susskind
My physics has been extremely mainstream, ... It's not true that I'm some sort of a [radical thinker], not at all. View quote
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 realm of metaphysical speculation, together with astrology and spiritualism. By that standard, most of the universe has no scientific reality -- it's just a figment of our imaginations. View quote
Leonard Susskind
Einstein, in the special theory of relativity, proved that different observers, in different states of motion, see different realities. View quote
Leonard Susskind
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 balance restaurant tables on all four legs so that they don't rock back and forth. (Leonard Susskind)
Science blogs bore me. When everyone is an expert, no one is an expert. View quote
Leonard Susskind
I often feel a discomfort, a kind of embarrassment, when I explain elementary-particle physics to laypeople. It all seems so arbitrary - the ridiculous collection of fundamental particles, the lack of pattern to their masses. View quote
Leonard Susskind
Science to me is sufficiently weird and interesting, and stranger than fiction. View quote
Leonard Susskind
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. View quote
Leonard Susskind
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 consensus on why there is space. View quote
Leonard Susskind
Every time a bit of information is erased, we know it doesn't disappear. It goes out into the environment. It may be horribly scrambled and confused, but it never really gets lost. It's just converted into a different form. View quote
Leonard Susskind
I was from a poor Jewish family in the South Bronx. My father was a plumber, but when I was 16, he got sick and I had to take over. Being a plumber in the South Bronx wasn't fun. View quote
Leonard Susskind
Over the years, I began to understand that there were a lot of people out there reading physics in popular literature that they could not understand - not because it was too advanced, but because it wasn't advanced enough. View quote
Leonard Susskind
(Jokingly) Sex in ten dimensions is impossible... topologically. View quote
Leonard Susskind
[Richard Feynman] truly believed that if you couldn't explain something simply, you didn't understand it. (Leonard Susskind)
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. View quote
Leonard Susskind
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 of the perpetual Antarctic winter - or worse - would prevail; a little closer, and the surface would truly fry anything that touched it. View quote
Leonard Susskind
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 physics a long time ago. They are not going to go away. View quote
Leonard Susskind
Eventually, when the universe expands enough, all that will be left is the dark energy. View quote
Leonard Susskind