One person’s data is another person’s noise.

To be sure, physicists have faith in string theory because, in some important sense, at least, it seems to work - just as people fly in airplanes because they work. The difference is, somebody understands how jets work. And no one, as yet, understands what underlies string theory.

All these dualities suggest that string theorists have been looking at the same animal, only some have discovered the tail, while others have found the ears or glimpsed a snout. The problem is, they still don't know what kind of animal they're dealing with.

. . . [I]t's very difficult to ask questions of nature that aren't somehow already colored by our very human preconceptions. Even the simplest, most objective, questions may play into preexisting prejudices.

The truth is, almost every solid idea that comes from science is in some sense an abstraction rather than a 'real' thing.

The earth doesn't move backward (very much) when you walk only because it's much more massive than you are.

This way of thinking suggests that nothing is perfection - or at least, perfect symmetry, which to many physicists is the same thing. Nothing is perfect, but not very interesting.

There are, as always, social and political aspects to seeing nothing as well. Pythagoras in the sixth century B.C. found it perfectly natural to count slaves as 'nothing,' . . . Slaves, like machines today, were simply taken for granted. These days, we take for granted everything from homeless people sleeping in the street to telephones and computers. We have learned to renormalize these things as part of 'nothing.' Whatever is standard becomes effectively invisible.

One person's data is another person's noise.

The universe is just one big happy tapestry of tangled relationships that can never be unraveled. There is no chair here, butterfly there; particle here, void there; time here, gravity there. There is only the picture that emerges from all pulling together, a great mosaic that seems unrecognizable close up, but comes into focus as we stand back and observe from a more distant, and broader, perspective.