David Gross Quotes

22 quotes in 332 categories

• I was born in Washington, D.C., on February 19, 1941, the eldest of four sons.
• My childhood in Arlington, Va., a middle class suburb of Washington, was uneventful. Ours was a very intellectual family, and we were encouraged to read…
• My father and mother treated us children as intellectual equals, thus greatly bolstering our self-confidence and our interest in ideas of all kinds.
• From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I…
• The progress of science is much more muddled than is depicted in most history books. This is especially true of theoretical physics, partly because history…
• Reading history, one rarely gets the feeling of the true nature of scientific development, in which the element of farce is as great as the…
• The early 1960s, when I started my graduate studies at UC Berkeley, were a period of experimental supremacy and theoretical impotence.
• Quantum field theory was originally developed for the treatment of electrodynamics, immediately after the completion of quantum mechanics and the discovery of the Dirac equation.
• Fortunately, nature is as generous with its problems as Nobel with his fortune. The more we know, the more aware we are of what we…
• Indeed, the most important product of knowledge is ignorance.
• Some wonder whether some day we will arrive at a theory of everything and run out of new problems to solve - much as the…
• Theorists can be wrong; only nature is always right.
• Theorists have wonderful ideas which take years and years to be verified.
• The advice I tell students is to think about the big problems. I mean, work on anything you can work on where you can make…
• Actually, I was more or less determined to be a theoretical physicist at the age of thirteen.
• To understand the universe in the state that it began in, the so-called Big Bang, we need laws of physics that work better than our…
• The Big Bang theory is the idea that if we go back early enough in the history of the universe - and we can do…
• In the lab, we could not see or physically describe the mathematical objects that we called quarks, which we suspected were the key to unlocking…
• When I was at Berkeley, the framework of quantum field theory could calculate the dynamics of electromagnetism. It could roughly describe the motion of the…
• Since the founding of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, theoretical physics had nurtured an extremely radical tradition.

Browse David Gross Quotes by Category