“Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren't equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it's just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four.”

— Stephen Hawking

As quoted in "Return of the time lord" in The Guardian http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/scienceandnature/story/0,6000,1579384,00.html (27 September 2005)

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Stephen Hawking 122

British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author 1942–2018

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“Boscovich said these particles had no size; that is, they were geometrical points … a point is just a place; it has no dimensions. And here's Boscovich putting forth the proposition that matter is composed of particles that have no dimensions!”

Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787) Croat-Italian physicist

Leon M. Lederman, p.103 The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, what is the Question? (1993) https://books.google.hr/books?id=-v84Bp-LNNIC
Context: The phrase "ahead of his time" is overused. I'm going to use it anyway. I'm not referring to Galileo or Newton. Both were definitely right on time, neither late or early. Gravity, experimentation, measurement, mathematical proofs … all these things were in the air. Galileo, Kepler, Brahe, and Newton were accepted - heralded! - in their own time, because they came up with ideas that scientific community was ready to accept. Not everyone is so fortunate. Roger Jospeh Boscovich … speculated that this classical law must break down altogether at the atomic scale, where the forces of attraction are replaced by an oscillation between attractive and repulsive forces. An amazing thought for a scientist in the eighteenth century. Boscovich also struggled with the old action-at-a-distance problem. Being a geometer more than anything else, he came up with the idea of "fields of force" to explain how forces exert control over objects at a distance. But wait, there's more! Boscovich had this other idea, one that was real crazy for the eighteenth century (or perhaps any century). Matter is composed of invisible, indivisible a-toms, he said. Nothing particularly new there. Leucippus, Democritus, Galileo, Newton, and other would have agreed with him. Here's the good part: Boscovich said these particles had no size; that is, they were geometrical points … a point is just a place; it has no dimensions. And here's Boscovich putting forth the proposition that matter is composed of particles that have no dimensions! We found a particle just a couple of decades ago that fits a description. It's called a quark.

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Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 19. How, Though the Sphere Showed Me Other Mysteries of Spaceland, I Still Desired More; and What Came of It
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