Max Tegmark Quotes

There's no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible...

[W]e've repeatedly underestimated not only the size of our cosmos, but also the power of our human mind to understand it.

We're all born with curiosity, but at some point, school usually manages to knock that out of us. ...[M]y main responsibility as a teacher isn't to convey facts, but to rekindle that lost enthusiasm for asking questions.

So this book... [is] my personal quest for the ultimate nature of reality.

[W]hat I had been missing... and what Feynman realized: physics is the ultimate intellectual adventure, the quest to understand the deepest mysteries of our Universe. ...[I]t makes us see more clearly, adding to the beauty and wonder of the world ...[T]he lens of physics adds more beauty to the world ...

I... ended up at the , focusing on environmental issues. I wanted to... make our planet a better place, and felt that the main problem... [was] that we didn't properly use... technology... I... was intrigued by... creating economic incentives that aligned... egoism with the common good. ...I soon grew disillusioned, concluding that economics was... intellectual prostitution... rewarded for saying what the powers that be wanted to hear. ...[T]he book that changed everything: ...[W]hat did Feynman see that I missed in high school? ...I sat down with... ... and started reading, "If... all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed... " ...I read on ...I felt like I was having a religious experience I finally got it!

Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. At low temperatures, can flow upward. At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity; to me, an electron colliding with a and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums... On astronomically large scales... weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes... put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… [also,] the leading theory for what happened [in the early universe] suggests that space isn’t merely really really big, but actually infinite, containing infinitely many exact copies of you, and even more near-copies living out every possible variant of your life in two different types of parallel universes.

We have to get away from this idea today with some fact-checking sites which might themselves have an agenda and you just trust it because of its reputation. You want to have these sort of systems [where] they earn your trust and that is completely transparent.

Imagine all the food you have eaten in your life and consider that you are simply some of that food, rearranged.

Yet the complexity of all this pales in comparison to the patterns of information processing in your brain. Your roughly 100 billion neurons are constantly generating electrical signals (“firing”), which involves shuffling around billions of trillions of atoms, notably sodium, potassium, and calcium ions. The trajectories of these atoms form an extremely elaborate braid through spacetime, whose complex intertwining corresponds to storing and processing information in a way that somehow gives rise to our familiar sensation of self-awareness. There’s broad consensus in the scientific community that we still don’t understand how this works, so it’s fair to say that we humans don’t yet fully understand what we are. However, in broad brush, we might say this: You’re a pattern in spacetime. A mathematical pattern. Specifically, you’re a braid in spacetime—indeed, one of the most elaborate braids known.

... I would rather have questions that I can't answer than answers that I can't question. (variation of a remark by Richard Feynman)

If I get a parking ticket, there is always a parallel universe where I didn't. On the other hand, there is yet another universe where my car was stolen.

So with each advance in understanding come new questions. So we need to be very humble. We shouldn't have hubris and think that we can understand everything. But history tells us that there is good reason to believe that we will continue making fantastic progress in the years ahead.

I believe that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed.

Some debaters have argued that designing an effective AWS treaty is hopelessly hard and that we therefore shouldn’t even try. On the other hand, John F. Kennedy emphasized when announcing the Moon missions that hard things are worth attempting when success will greatly benefit the future of humanity. Moreover, many experts argue that the bans on biological and chemical weapons were valuable even though enforcement proved hard, with significant cheating, because the bans caused severe stigmatization that limited their use.