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Leonard Susskind Quotes

Leonard Susskind is an American physicist, who is professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, and director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research interests include string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics and quantum cosmology. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an associate member of the faculty of Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a distinguished professor of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study.

Susskind is widely regarded as one of the fathers of string theory, having, with Yoichiro Nambu and Holger Bech Nielsen, independently introduced the idea that particles could in fact be states of excitation of a relativistic string. He was the first to give a precise string-theory interpretation of the holographic principle in 1995 and the first to introduce the idea of the string theory landscape in 2003.

Susskind was awarded the 1998 J. J. Sakurai Prize.

✵ 1940
Leonard Susskind photo

Works

The Cosmic Landscape
The Cosmic Landscape
Leonard Susskind
Leonard Susskind: 5   quotes 0   likes

Famous Leonard Susskind Quotes

“(Jokingly) Sex in ten dimensions is impossible… topologically.”

Leonard Susskind

Lecture "Cosmic landscape and illusion of intelligent design", DESY Hamburg (28 September, 2006).

“The problem with general relativity is that the principles are pretty simple and the computations are always ugly.”

Leonard Susskind

General Relativity Lecture 5, YouTube, published 30 October 2012 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quWN1V9jOf0 (quote at 1:21:46 of 1:39:06)

“The standard SU(3)×SU(2)×U(1) theory of strong, electromagnetic, and weak interactions appears to correctly describe physics down to the smallest distance scales yet probed.”

Leonard Susskind

[1984, The gauge hierarchy problem, technicolor, supersymmetry, and all that, Physics Reports, 104, 2–4, 181–193, 10.1016/0370-1573(84)90208-4]

“Elegance requires that the number of defining equations be small. Five is better than ten, and one is better than five. On this score, one might facetiously say that String Theory is the ultimate epitome of elegance. With all the years that String Theory has been studied, no one has found even a single defining equation! The number at present count is zero. We know neither what the fundamental equations of the theory are nor even if it has any.”

Leonard Susskind book The Cosmic Landscape

[The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, 2008, Little, Brown, https://books.google.com/books?id=RIW9E1sOyxUC&q=epitome#v=snippet&q=epitome&f=false]

“My physics has been extremely mainstream, ... It's not true that I'm some sort of a [radical thinker], not at all.”

Leonard Susskind

Source: During an interview with Y Combinator - Published on Dec 6, 2018.

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