Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Science and fun cannot be separated.
I was indeed very slow as a youngster.
Quantum mechanics makes absolutely no sense.
I'm pretty tenacious when it comes to problems.
Ambition, idly vain; revenge and malice swell her train.
Do not be afraid to skip equations (I do this frequently myself).
The basic theory in twistor theory is not to add extra dimensions.
Sometimes it's the detours which turn out to be the fruitful ideas.
My younger brother ended up the British chess champion 10 times, a record.
Quantum entanglement is a very intriguing issue, but it is not impossible.
As for morality, well that's all tied up with the question of consciousness.
I would say the universe has a purpose. It's not there just somehow by chance.
Consciousness ... is the phenomenon whereby the universe's very existence is made known.
My older brother is a distinguished theoretical physicist, a fellow of the Royal Society.
There is a certain sense in which I would say the universe has a purpose. It's not there by chance.
Intelligence cannot be present without understanding. No computer has any awareness of what it does.
Well I didn't actually see the Matrix but I've seen other movies where with similar sorts of themes.
With thought comprising a non-computational element, computers can never do what we human beings can.
A computational device is incapable of developing a mind. We got consciousness not just by being clever.
But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality.
It may well be there is something else going on in the brain that we don't have an inkling of at the moment.
Ordinary photons do have spin, they have a notion of helicity so they spin around their direction on motion.
Understanding is, after all, what science is all about — and science is a great deal more than mindless computation.
our present picture of physical reality, particularly in relation to the nature of time, is due for a grand shake up
I think I am intrigued by paradoxes. If something seems to be a paradox, it has something deeper, something worth exploring.
If you didn’t have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn’t be morality but with consciousness that you have it.
If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.
I used to make polyhedra with my father. There were no clear lines between games and toys for children and his professional work.
I have certainly enjoyed puzzles since an early age, and things that look like impossible things are often particularly intriguing.
My father came from a Quaker family. His father was a professional artist who did portraits - very traditional, a lot of religious subjects.
If you come from mathematics, as I do, you realize that there are many problems, even classical problems, which cannot be solved by computation alone.
Some people take the view that we happen by accident. I think that there is something much deeper, of which we have very little inkling at the moment.
People think of these eureka moments and my feeling is that they tend to be little things, a little realisation and then a little realisation built on that.
My own way of thinking is to ponder long and I hope deeply on problems and for a long time which I keep away for years and years and I never really let them go.
As you say, the way string theory requires all these extra dimensions and this comes from certain consistency requirements about how string should behave and so on.
In the book, I make the point that here we have string theory and here we have twistor theory and we don't know if either one of them is the right approach to nature.
And these little things may not seem like much but after a while they take you off on a direction where you may be a long way off from what other people have been thinking about.
My father himself was a human geneticist who was recognized for demonstrating that older mothers tend to get more Down syndrome children, but he had lots of scientific interests.
It is hard to see how one could begin to develop a quantum-theoretical description of brain action when one might well have to regard the brain as "observing itself" all the time!
It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.
Well, I don’t know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I’m no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.
The idea is if you use those two shapes and try to colour the plane with them so the colours match, then the only way that you can do this is to produce a pattern which never repeats itself.
Well, I don't know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I'm no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.
This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.
Well, gauge theory is very fundamental to our understanding of physical forces these days. But they are also dependent on a mathematical idea, which has been around for longer than gauge theory has.
So what I'm saying is why don't we think about changing Schrodinger's equation at some level when masses become too big at the level that you might have to worry about Einstein's general relativity.
A computer is a great device because it enables you to do anything which is automatic, anything that you don't need your understanding for. Understanding is outside a computer. It doesn't understand.
Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor’s New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations.
Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations.
If the computer-guided robots turn out to be our superiors in every respect, then will they not find that they can run the world better without the need of us at all? Humanity itself will then have become obsolete.