Antony Garrett Lisi

“I've gotten e-mails asking, 'Are you taking students?' Well, come visit and I'll be happy to talk to you. But I'm not a degree-granting institution.”

“As with any large investment, it can be emotionally difficult to abandon a line of research when it isn't working out. But in science, if something isn't working, you have to toss it out and try something else.”

“What physics tells us is that everything comes down to geometry and the interactions of elementary particles. And things can happen only if these interactions are perfectly balanced.”

“Surfing is simply the most fun I know how to have on this planet.”

“There are a lot of good things about string theory, and it's great that some people want to work on it.”

“Ninety-five per cent of my time is virtually wasted.”

“I'm afraid the workings of J.J. Abrams' mind falls outside the predictive capacity of any coherent theory.”

“Being poor sucks... It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month.”

“Science is our last and greatest frontier.”

“Deep down, everybody wants to do what they want to be doing. They just feel that they can't.”

“I think the universe is pure geometry - basically, a beautiful shape twisting around and dancing over space-time.”

“Coral is a very beautiful and unusual animal. Each coral head consists of thousand of individual polyps. These polyps are continually budding and branching into genetically identical neighbors.”

“Yeah, I am a guy working on physics outside of academia. But I'm nowhere near Einstein's caliber.”

“I always found it satisfying that gravity was described by Einstein's geometric theory of general relativity.”

“If you share an office next to a guy for twenty years, and you like him and you're friends with him, it's hard to tell him that you think that his whole idea of how the universe works is completely wrong.”

“My father raised me to think independently and follow my own path in life.”

“You cannot think when you're ecstatic.”

“My friends are all geeks. And many of them are scientists who love playing outside as much as I do.”

“Math does come easily to me, but I was always much more interested in what theorems imply about the world than in proving them.”

“It is extraordinarily difficult, even in academia, to find a job that will let you do whatever you want with your time. If you are determined to spend your time following your own interests, you pretty much have to do it on your own.”