Science should have no less lofty a goal. My ambition is to live to see all of physics reduced to a formula so elegant and simple that it will fit easily on the front of a T-shirt.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell said that philosophy went downhill after Democritus and did not recover until the Renaissance.

Where do we stand today compared to Greece circa 400 B.C.? Today's experiment-driven 'standard model' is not all that dissimilar to Democritus's speculative [sic] atomic theory.

Those who do not stop asking silly questions become scientists.

Science should have no less lofty a goal. My ambition is to live to see all of physics reduced to a formula so elegant and simple that it will fit easily on the front of a T-shirt.

The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects.

Theorists tend to peak at an early age; the creative juices tend to gush very early and start drying up past the age of fifteen-or so it seems. They need to know just enough; when they're young they haven't accumulated the intellectual baggage.