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.

I'm so old I can remember when the Dead Sea was only sick.

The sequence of theorist, experimenter, and discovery has occasionally been compared to the sequence of farmer, pig, truffle. The farmer leads the pig to an area where there might be truffles. The pig searches diligently for the truffles. Finally, he locates one, and just as he is about to devour it, the farmer snatches it away.

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

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.

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.

A theoretical physicist can spend his entire lifetime missing the intellectual challenge of experimental work, experiencing none of the thrills and dangers - the overhead crane with its ten-ton load, the flashing skull and crossbones and danger, radioactivity signs. A theorist's only real hazard is stabbing himself with a pencil while attacking a bug that crawls out of his calculations.