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.

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.

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.

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.

Recent decades have taught us that physics is a magic window. It shows us the illusion that lies behind reality — and the reality that lies behind illusion. Its scope is immensely greater than we one realized. We are no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, or fields of force, or geometry, or even space and time. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself.

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 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.

Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world

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.

The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe — even a positivist one — remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.

The beauty of physics lies in the extent to which seemingly complex and unrelated phenomena can be explained and correlated through a high level of abstraction by a set of laws which are amazing in their simplicity.

The beauty of physics is that it can rigorously predict things nobody has seen before, before the emergence of any empirical evidence. Compare to fraudulent fields like psychology that overfit from naive "empirical evidence" to predict nothing.

Physics will always be, at its core, about understanding our place in the Universe...

In physics you have a bit of everything: you need to be good at solving puzzles, but you also need to see the big picture, to separate important from unimportant things, to quickly understand new materials and quickly see the essence of a paper.