Nothing Found or Unavailable, but at least you tried!

Or like Albert Einstein said - "If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?".
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Or read some selected quotes (latest first)

While physicists rely heavily on math for calculations in their work, they don’t work towards a fundamental understanding of abstract mathematical ideas in the way that mathematicians do. Physicists “want answers, and the way they get answers is by doing computations,” says mathematician Tony Pantev. “But in mathematics, the computations are just a decoration on top of the cake. You have to understand everything completely, then you do a computation.”

- Excerpt from the blogpost "Where math meets physics" by Math/Physics Research Group at the University of Pennsylvania."

... in standard physics lectures on QFTs, often the experimentally verified end is used to justify the mathematical means, with a mathematical argumentation that either appears inconsistent or otherwise at least arbitrarily ad-hoc.

- Excerpt from the book Mathematical Aspects of Quantum Field Theories; Preface by Damien Calaque & Thomas Strobl")

Few developments of modern science have had a more profound impact on mathematical thinking than the advent of quantum field theory. Wrenched out of old thought patterns, mathematicians have found themselves compelled to embrace a new way of formal reasoning. The distress which this reorientation has caused in some circles of the mathematical community continues to the present day. Basically, mathematicians using arguments inspired by quantum field theory have gained access to wonderful new insights, but suffered a severe loss: their hold on mathematical rigor.

― Bryce S. DeWitt and Neill Graham: Resource Letter on the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, American Journal of Physics, July 1971 (Excerpt from the book Mathematical Aspects of Quantum Field Theories; Foreword II by Jürg Fröhlich")

No development of modern science has had a more profound impact on human thinking than the advent of quantum theory. Wrenched out of centuries-old thought patterns, physicists of a generation ago found themselves compelled to embrace a new metaphysics. The distress, which this reorientation caused, continues to the present day. Basically, physicists have suffered a severe loss: their hold on reality.

― Bryce S. DeWitt and Neill Graham: Resource Letter on the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, American Journal of Physics, July 1971 (Excerpt from the book Mathematical Aspects of Quantum Field Theories; Foreword II by Jürg Fröhlich ")

Half of life is knowing what you want. The other half is knowing how to get it.

― Keenan Crane (Excerpt from the note "Discrete Differential Geometry: An Applied Introduction ")

Unfortunately there often exist prejudices in the physics community against introducing unfamiliar (mathematical) terminology.

― Jürgen Fuchs , Christoph Schweigert
Taken from page xviii in Preface of the book "2003 - Symmetries, Lie Algebras and Representations "

In our rush to make sense of things, as infants, we learn to misunderstand the world, and ourselves. There’s a lot to unlearn, as well as a lot to learn, on the voyage to deep understanding.

― Frank Wilczek (Excerpt from the book "Fundamentals")

Only one who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.

― Miguel de Unamuno

We do not teach physics, nor do we teach students... What we do - if we are successful - is to stir interest in the matter at hand, awaken enthusiasm for it, arouse a curiosity, kindle a feeling, fire up the imagination.

― Julius Summer Miller

Not only God knows, I know, and by the end of the semester, you will know.

― Sidney Coleman

A professor keeps improving his PhD thesis for the rest of his career.

― Franz J. Himpsel

If you want to be creative, then you will have to get used to spending most of your time not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientific knowledge.

― Steven Weinberg

Try, and try again, boy, you will succeed at last.

― James H. Fassett

Quantum gravity is notoriously a subject where problems vastly outnumber results.

― Sidney Coleman

Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.

― Warren Buffett

It is possible to choose a discrete approximation of a problem and a discrete approximation to solutions of that problem which are incompatible. There is, in other words, a degeneracy of discretizations.

― Jonah Maxwell Miller

Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it.

― Albert Einstein

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

― Warren Buffett

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature? Perhaps a thing is simple if you can describe it fully in several different ways without immediately knowing that you are describing the same thing.

― Richard Feynman, Nobel Lecture, 1965

I think equation guessing might be the best method to proceed to obtain the laws for the part of physics which is presently unknown. Yet, when I was much younger, I tried this equation guessing and I have seen many students try this, but it is very easy to go off in wildly incorrect and impossible directions. I think the problem is not to find the best or most efficient method to proceed to a discovery, but to find any method at all. Physical reasoning does help some people to generate suggestions as to how the unknown may be related to the known. Theories of the known, which are described by different physical ideas may be equivalent in all their predictions and are hence scientifically indistinguishable. However, they are not psychologically identical when trying to move from that base into the unknown. For different views suggest different kinds of modifications which might be made and hence are not equivalent in the hypotheses one generates from them in ones attempt to understand what is not yet understood. I, therefore, think that a good theoretical physicist today might find it useful to have a wide range of physical viewpoints and mathematical expressions of the same theory available to him.

― Richard Feynman, Nobel Lecture, 1965

The best investment you can make is an investment in yourself. The more you learn, the more you'll earn.

― Warren Buffett

Modern education is like being taken to the world’s greatest restaurant & being forced to eat the menu.

― Murray Gell-Mann

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.

― Henri Poincaré

We must form our minds by reading deep rather than wide.

― Quintilian

I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

― Richard P. Feynman

Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?

― Richard Dawkins

See you again!
Phe·ri Bhe·tau·la! / फे·रि भे·टौ·ला!, फेरि भेटौला!

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Last Updated on 17 Dec 2023