Scientific Diary
More than half a century ago, Prof. Hermann Weyl pursued the unification of
Nowadays, I believe that the authentic ingredients of unification should be
“Spacetime, Matter, Information”.
"細推物理須行樂，何用浮名絆此身" —— 杜甫
"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy." —— Steven Weinberg
"Mathematics itself is never the explanation of anything—it is only the means by which we use one set of facts to explain another, and the language in which we express our explanations." —— Steven Weinberg
"Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man." —— Francis Bacon
“What I cannot create, I do not understand. Know how to solve every problem that has been solved." —— Richard Feynman
"The sciences are like a tree -- metaphysics is the roots, physics is the trunk, and everything else is the branches." —— René Descartes
"Complete disorder is impossible." —— Theodore Motzkin
"In practice no physical system can be studied without approximation; the physicist’s art consists precisely in determining the relative importance of the different effects and adopting in each case the appropriate approximation method." —— Albert Messiah
"All the fuss about a “mystery” seems almost a fiction providing gainful employment for theorists." —— Philip W. Anderson
"When you prove a theorem, you've really done something that has substance to it,
to which no business venture can compare for reality." —— Jim Simons
"Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books." —— G. H. Hardy
"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
"It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong." —— J.M. Keynes
"A problem well stated is a problem half solved." —— C. F. Kettering
"All things physical are information-theoretic in origin." —— John Wheeler
"Never run after a bus or woman or cosmological theory, because there'll always be another one in a few minutes." —— John Wheeler
"All of us younger mathematicians stood by Boltzmann’s side." —— Arnold Sommerfeld
"The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers." —— Richard W. Hamming
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code." —— Linus Torvalds
"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." —— Oscar Wilde
“Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination." —— Max Planck
“What is physics? Physics is what physicists do late at night." —— Jay Orear
“I saw that mathematics was split up into numerous specialities, each of which could easily absorb the short life granted to us." —— Albert Einstein
“During troubled times in your life, doing science can be good therapy." —— Michael Berry (from An interview with Sir Michael Berry)
“Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural science. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap." —— Vladimir Arnold
“If I feel unhappy, I do mathematics to become happy. If I am happy, I do mathematics to keep happy." —— Alfréd Rényi
“The true logic for this world is the calculus of Probabilities." —— James Clerk Maxwell
“We must bear in mind that the goal of mathematical physics is not to rigorously prove what physicists already know, but rather through mathematics to get new insights about the physics, and from physics to identify new mathematical problems." —— Cédric Villani