Henne

“Many other physicists get a little blasé about the vastness of the cosmos and forces too powerful to comprehend. You can reduce it all to mathematics, tweak some equations, and get on with your day. But the shock and vertigo of the recognition of the fragility of everything, and my own powerlessness in it, has left its mark on me. There’s something about taking the opportunity to wade into that cosmic perspective that is both terrifying and hopeful, like holding a newborn infant and feeling the delicate balance of the tenuousness of life and the potential for not-yet-imagined greatness. It is said that astronauts returning from space carry with them a changed perspective on the world, the “overview effect,” in which, having seen the Earth from above, they can fully perceive how fragile our little oasis is and how unified we ought to be as a species, as perhaps the only thinking beings in the cosmos.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. ”
― Steven Weinberg

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“I want you to frame a question, as sharp and clear as possible—one to which you do not yet know the answer, but desperately want to know, and expect someday to know. Pretend to be David Hilbert. The Millennium is approaching. Issue a challenge to the quantum theorists of the 21st century. List the key questions they should seek to answer. Hard questions, but not hopelessly hard, questions whose answers could transform our understanding of how the physical world works. I need to know what the question is. Then, perhaps, I can be more engaged in the search for the answer.”
― John Preskill