Leonard Susskind Quotes & Sayings

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. — 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. — Leonard Susskind

Physics is perceived as a lonesome, nerdy kind of enterprise that has very little to do with human feelings and the things that excite people day-to-day about each other. Yet physicists in their own working environment are very social creatures. — 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. — Leonard Susskind

Unforeseen surprises are the rule in science, not the exception. Remember: Stuff happens. — Leonard Susskind

I was going to engineering school but fell in love with physics. — Leonard Susskind

I'm a great believer in our ability to come up with the ideas necessary to solve the big questions. I have less confidence that we'll be able to find a consensus about which ones are right without experiment. — Leonard Susskind

I went to college because my father thought that I should learn engineering, because he wanted to go into the heating business with me. There, I realized I wanted to be a physicist. I had to tell him, which was a somewhat traumatic experience. — Leonard Susskind

[Richard Feynman] truly believed that if you couldn't explain something simply, you didn't understand it. — 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. — 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. — Leonard Susskind

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. — Leonard Susskind

world seems filled with people who are genuinely, deeply interested in physics but whose lives have taken them in different directions. This book is for all of us. — Leonard Susskind

There is so much to groak; So little to groak from. — Leonard Susskind

It seems hopelessly improbable that any particular rules accidentally led to the miracle of intelligent life. Nevertheless, this is exactly what most physicists have believed: intelligent life is a purely serendipitous consequence of physical principles that have nothing to do with our own existence. — Leonard Susskind

The most important single thing about string theory is that it's a highly mathematical theory, and the mathematics holds together in a very tight and consistent way. It contains in its basic structure both quantum mechanics and the theory of gravity. That's big news. — Leonard Susskind

I have always enjoyed explaining physics. In fact it's more than just enjoyment: I need to explain physics. — Leonard Susskind

I would guess that there are limits to what we can understand. But old people always think there are limits to what we can understand. It's the young people who push past those limits. — Leonard Susskind

Einstein, in the special theory of relativity, proved that different observers, in different states of motion, see different realities. — Leonard Susskind

I'm a great believer that scientists should spend as much time as possible explaining, and you do explain in the process of teaching. — Leonard Susskind

Dick Feynman was a genius of visualization (he was also no slouch with equations): he made a mental picture of anything he was working on. While others were writing blackboard-filling formulas to express the laws of elementary particles, he would just draw a picture and figure out the answer. — Leonard Susskind

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 imaginary audience, is part of the process. — Leonard Susskind

Science blogs bore me. When everyone is an expert, no one is an expert. — Leonard Susskind

Is the universe 'elegant,' as Brian Greene tells us? Not as far as I can tell, not the usual laws of particle physics, anyway. I think I might find the universal principles of String Theory most elegant - if I only knew what they were. — 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. — 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. — Leonard Susskind

At 5 years old, I saw 'Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,' and I was so scared when Costello sat himself down in the lap of the monster, not realizing where he was. My friends teased me. They were older, 8 years old. And my goal was to become a mad scientist and get back at them. And here I am, mad as hell! — Leonard Susskind

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

If a system is chaotic (most are), then it implies that however good the resolving power may be, the time over which the system is predictable is limited. Perfect predictability is not achievable, simply because we are limited in our resolving power. — 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. — Leonard Susskind

Whether or not evolution is compatible with faith, science and religion represent two extremely different worldviews, which, if they coexist at all, do so most uncomfortably. — Leonard Susskind

By itself, the Holographic Principle was not enough to win the Black Hole War. It was too imprecise, and it lacked a firm mathematical foundation. The reaction to it was skepticism: The universe a hologram? Sounds like science fiction. The fictitious future physicist Steve passing to the "other side" while the emperor and the count watch him being immolated? Sounds like spiritualism. — 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. — Leonard Susskind

Eventually, when the universe expands enough, all that will be left is the dark energy. — Leonard Susskind

I'm doing physics because I'm curious about how it works - full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, don't worry about whether somebody is going to be able to do an experiment next week, just figure it out. — 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? — Leonard Susskind

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. We're still exploring them. — Leonard Susskind

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 dimensions, but they think they can close their eyes and see two dimensions. But they can't. — Leonard Susskind

The dark energy is not exactly zero, but the first 122 decimal points are zero. That's crazy. That is really one of the craziest things we've ever discovered. — Leonard Susskind

The principles are exactly the same as those of QED: everything is built out of propagators, vertex diagrams, and coupling constants. But there are new actors and whole new plot lines, including one called QCD. — 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

Man - life in general - seems irrelevant to the workings of the universe: a mere smudge of water, grease, and carbon on a pinpoint planet circling a star of no special consequence. — Leonard Susskind

The success of ordinary cosmology speaks against the idea that the universe was created in a random fluctuation. — Leonard Susskind

I'm not an historian but I'll venture an opinion: Modern cosmology really began with Darwin and Wallace. Unlike anyone before them, they provided explanations of our existence that completely rejected supernatural agents ... Darwin and Wallace set a standard not only for the life sciences but for cosmology as well. — Leonard Susskind

Science to me is sufficiently weird and interesting, and stranger than fiction. — Leonard Susskind

The word 'universe' is obviously not intended to have a plural, but science has evolved in such a way that we need a plural noun for something similar to what we ordinarily call our universe. — 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. — Leonard Susskind

the three-dimensional world of ordinary experience - the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people - is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional surface. This new law of physics, known as the Holographic Principle, asserts that everything inside a region of space can be described by bits of information restricted to the boundary. — 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. — Leonard Susskind