Sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.

Sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.

I don't need to argue here that the evil in the world proves that the universe is not designed, but only that there are no signs of benevolence that might have shown the hand of a designer.

I now want to tell three stories about advances in twentieth-century physics. A curious fact emerges in these tales: time and again physicists have been guided by their sense of beauty not only in developing new theories but even in judging the validity of physical theories once they are developed. Simplicity is part of what I mean by beauty, but it is a simplicity of ideas, not simplicity of a mechanical sort that can be measured by counting equations or symbols.

If (the antiproton) had not been discovered, the foundations of physics really would have crumbled.