The page of my notebook was filled with many messy integrals, but all of a sudden I saw emerge a formula for counting. I had begun to calculate a quantity on the assumption that the result was a real number, but found instead that, in certain units, all the possible answers would be integers. This meant that areas and volumes cannot take any value, but come in multiples of fixed units.
Lee SmolinOn the way, I shared the backseat of Feyerabend's little sports car with the inflatable raft he kept there in case an 8-point earthquake came while he was on the Bay Bridge.
Lee SmolinJust like an ordinary guitar string, a fundamental string can vibrate in different modes. And it is these different modes of vibration of the string that are understood in string theory as being the different elementary particles.
Lee SmolinSome string theorists prefer to believe that string theory is too arcane to be understood by human beings, rather than consider the possibility that it might just be wrong.
Lee Smolin