Leonard Susskind quotes

Leonard Susskind is an American theoretical physicist and professor, recognized as one of the founding fathers of string theory. His research has contributed significantly to quantum field theory, black hole physics, and the concept of the holographic principle. He has also written several popular science books, inspiring countless students and science enthusiasts. Here are 41 of his quotes:

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Leonard Susskind

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

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

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

Leonard Susskind

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

(Jokingly) Sex in ten dimensions is impossible... topologically.

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

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

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

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

Leonard Susskind