David Lindley (physicist) Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

But by tradition the physicist, having found one level of order in nature, invariably wants to know, like the archaeologist digging down into the remains of Troy, whether there is another, more primitive layer underneath.

David Lindley
Ultimately, theories must be useful and accurate, and in that sense it does not matter whether they were arrived at through piercing insight or blind luck.

David Lindley
The lure of mathematics is hard to resist. When, by dint of great effort and ingenuity, a previously vague, ill-formed idea is encapsulated in a neat mathematical formulation, it is impossible to suppress the feeling that some profound truth has been discovered.

David Lindley
There is no guarantee that any simple model will be able to explain everything.

David Lindley
Physicists, however, are scavengers of mathematics; they take what they need, adapt it to their purposes, and discard the rest.

David Lindley
As philosophers have frequently found, the real world seems to messy, too stubbornly arbitrary, to be found out by the power of thought alone, no matter how fine the guiding sense of aesthetics.

David Lindley
The microworld is not a simple place, and physicists have therefore not been able to keep their theories of it simple.

David Lindley
If particle physics is a mess, it is because that is the way the world appears to work.

David Lindley
When scientists begin to wonder... how science is possible at all, which is ultimately what their questioning of the mathematical basis of science is about, they are searching for reassurance, for some proof that there really is a fundamental theory out there in the dark waiting to be hunted down.

David Lindley