Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system
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Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system
“You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.”
Robert B. Leighton • Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
The physicist Stephen Hawking has been trapped in a shell of a body since his early twenties, when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Yet he went on to solve major problems in cosmology, win many prizes, and write the best-selling science book of all time. During a recent interview in the New York Times, he was asked how he keeps his spir
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As theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking
Anne-Laure Le Cunff • Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World
He had also been working out a new theory of economics that attempted to push back against the worst dehumanizing effects of industrialization.
Cal Newport • Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
So Everett’s story is indeed that of an innovative young researcher challenging a prevailing consensus and being largely ignored until, decades later, his view gradually becomes the new consensus. But the basis of Everett’s innovation was not a claim that the prevailing theory is false, but that it is true!
David Deutsch • The Fabric of Reality
Physicists come off looking particularly bad. After attending a Stephen Hawking lecture about fantastical ideas like wormholes and superstrings and “mini-superspace,” Horgan concludes that Hawking is “less a truth seeker than an artist, an illusionist, a cosmic joker” whose work “can keep us awestruck. But it is not science.”