“Our universe is mind-bogglingly vast, complex, and subtle. It is also fantastically, indisputably knowable.”
“I don’t want to be complacent about it, however. The fact that Einstein’s prediction has turned out to be right is an enormously strong testimony to the power of science in general, and physics in particular, to describe our natural world. Einstein didn’t know about black holes; he didn’t even know about lasers, although it was his work that laid the theoretical foundations for both ideas.”
“He was working at a level of abstraction that reached as far as he could (at the time) to the fundamental basis of things, how our universe works at the deepest of levels. And his theoretical insights were sufficiently powerful and predictive that we could be confident in testing them a century later. This seemingly effortless insight that physics gives us into the behavior of the universe far away and under utterly unfamiliar conditions should never cease to be a source of wonder.”
“For me, the decade of the 2010’s opened with five big targets in particle physics/gravitation/cosmology:
Discover the Higgs boson.
Directly detect gravitational waves.
Directly observe dark matter.
Find evidence of inflation (e.g. tensor modes) in the CMB.
Discover a particle not in the Standard Model.”
“The decade is about half over, and we’ve done two of them! Keep up the good work, observers and experimentalists, and the 2010’s will go down as a truly historic decade in physics.”