Best Quotes from The God Equation by Michio Kaku with Page Numbers

Is there a grand design to the universe?

How do we make sense of a seemingly senseless cosmos?

The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.

The essence of Newton’s idea was to propose a unified theory that encompassed the heavens and the Earth.

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! And all was light.

The concept of symmetry is simple, elegant, and intuitive.

All the known forces of the universe are expressed in the language of fields first introduced by Faraday.

Maxwell showed that a moving magnetic field created an electric current, and vice versa.

Each has a distinct wavelength.

In the end, Edison lost the battle and the considerable funds he invested in DC technology.

Can you outrace a light beam?

From there, he would launch a revolution that turned physics and the world upside down.

A storm broke loose in my mind.

I owe more to Maxwell than to anyone.

The key to understanding the universe is unification.

Beauty is symmetry.

Gravitational attraction is an illusion.

Space pushes.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because the opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

My boldest dreams have now come true.

Out of the chaos of chemistry suddenly came order and predictability.

The enormous power of shattering earthquakes, thundering volcanoes, and slow, grinding continental drift all originate from the nuclear force.

The atom was basically hollow, consisting of a swarm of electrons circling a tiny dense core, called the nucleus.

It was called quantum mechanics. But what is the quantum anyway, and why is it so important?

The answer was startling and incredible, and split the physics community right down the middle.

As improbable as the quantum theory appeared to be, it began to have spectacular success.

It meant that you could not accurately predict the future. You could only predict the odds that certain things will happen.

This idea was a bombshell.

The laws of physics were the same not just in the solar system but throughout the entire universe.

The arcane discussions that divided the physicists at the Solvay Conference became a question of life-and-death urgency.

“I believe that in order to make real progress, one must again ferret out some general principle from nature.”

“God is subtle, but not malicious.”

“What God has torn asunder, let no man put together.”

“All the easy, obvious theories had already been tried by Einstein and his associates, and they all failed.”

“The numerical agreement between theory and experiment here is perhaps the most impressive in all science.”

“This method is called renormalization theory.”

“You cannot argue with results.”

“Quantum mechanics was so powerful that one could determine the angle at which different atoms bond together to create molecules.”

“The universe was originally in a perfectly symmetrical state.”

“At the instant of the Big Bang, all the four forces were merged into a single superforce that obeyed the master symmetry.”

This mysterious object captured the public’s imagination and dominated the news.

To accomplish this stunning achievement, astronomers created a super telescope.

These calculations unleashed a wellspring of unexpected phenomena that test the limits of our imagination.

As it turns out, our guide through this uncharted territory was totally paralyzed.

He decided to dedicate the few remaining years of his life to doing something useful.

The very fact that we exist in the Milky Way galaxy... is due to these tiny quantum fluctuations in the original Big Bang.

This creates a multiverse of parallel universes.

The ultimate fate of the universe itself is hanging in the balance.

Although research in general relativity stagnated for decades, the recent application of the quantum to relativity has opened up new unexpected vistas.

We need something truly fresh and original.

The next great revolution, we hope, will be to unify these two pillars into one.

What is so powerful and interesting about the theory is that gravity is necessarily included.

String theory was like an oil well suddenly gushing forth a torrent of new equations.

Symmetry creates order out of disorder.

Symmetry helps fill in the gaps.

Symmetry unifies totally unexpected and seemingly unrelated objects.

The marriage between relativity and the quantum theory has dogged physicists for almost a century.

This may satisfy Dirac’s original objection.

Nothing makes me more hopeful that our generation of human beings may actually hold the key to the universe in our hands.

The correctness or incorrectness of a theory should rest on concrete results, not the subjective desires of physicists.

The mastery of the four fundamental forces has not only revealed many of the secrets of nature but has also unleashed the great scientific revolutions that have altered the destiny of civilization itself.

Einstein once said he felt like he was a child entering a vast library. All around him, there were stacks of books that contained answers to the mysteries of the universe.

The universe is a remarkably beautiful, ordered, and simple place.

Having the meaning of life given to us defeats the whole purpose of meaning.

Everything that has meaning is the result of struggle and sacrifice, and is worth fighting for.

We create our own meaning in the universe.

The theory of everything might have something to say about meaning in the universe.

The search for the theory of everything has led us into a quest to find the ultimate unifying symmetry of the universe.

If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists.

If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.