It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature.

At its most fundamental level, physics tells us about what there is, about the categories of being. And modern physics tells us that what there is ain't nothing like what we thought there is.

Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.

Most people who haven't been trained in physics probably think of what physicists do as a question of incredibly complicated calculations, but that's not really the essence of it. The essence of it is that physics is about concepts, wanting to understand the concepts, the principles by which the world works.

I think that physics is about escaping the prison of the received thoughts and searching for novel ways of thinking the world, about trying to clear a bit the misty lake of insubstantial dreams, which reflect reality like the lake reflects the mountains.

... now I know that physics is about uncovering the reality behind appearances. It's about glimpsing this deep and hidden architecture of existence itself. It's about embracing that the world is not what it seems and that everything is stranger and simpler than we can imagine, and yet comprehensible.

Physics, my friend, is a narrow path drawn across a gulf that the human imagination cannot grasp. It is a set of answers to certain questions that we put to the world, and the world supplies the answers on the condition that we will not then ask it other questions, questions shouted out by common sense. And common sense? It is that which is understood by an intelligence using senses no different from those of a baboon. Such an intelligence wishes to know the world in terms that apply to its terrestrial, biological niche. But the world — outside that niche, that incubator of sapient apes — has properties that one cannot take in hand, see, sniff, gnaw, listen to, and in this way appropriate.

Physics is the ultimate intellectual adventure, the quest to understand the deepest mysteries of our Universe. Physics doesn’t take something fascinating and make it boring. Rather, it helps us see more clearly, adding to the beauty and wonder of the world around us. When I bike to work in the fall, I see beauty in the trees tinged with red, orange and gold. But seeing these trees through the lens of physics reveals even more beauty.

Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.

There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.

Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

: - I dont know what that means. Physics tries to draw a numerical picture of the world. I dont know that it actually explains anything. You cant illustrate the unknown. Whatever that might mean.

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.