Max Tegmark quotes:

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  • We're all born with curiosity, but at some point, school usually manages to knock that out of us.

  • All too often, schools resemble museums, reflecting the past rather than shaping the future

  • For me, [John Wheeler] was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.

  • If I get a parking ticket, there is always a parallel universe where I didn't. On the other hand, there is yet another universe where my car was stolen.

  • In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere.

  • So with each advance in understanding come new questions. So we need to be very humble. We shouldn't have hubris and think that we can understand everything. But history tells us that there is good reason to believe that we will continue making fantastic progress in the years ahead.

  • The core of a scientific lifestyle is to change your mind when faced with information that disagrees with your views, avoiding intellectual inertia, yet many of us praise leaders who stubbornly stick to their views as "strong."

  • The various approximations that constitute our current physics theories are successful because simple mathematical structures can provide good approximations of how a self-aware substructure will perceive more complex mathematical structures. In other words, our successful theories are not mathematics approximating physics, but mathematics approximating mathematics!

  • I believe that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed.

  • If life were a movie, physical reality would be the entire DVD: Future and past frames exist just as much as the present one.

  • In 2056, I think you'll be able to buy T-shirts on which are printed equations describing the unified laws of our universe.

  • Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.

  • The hallmark of a deep explanation is that it answers more than you ask

  • There's no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible, and therefore never even trying.

  • This brief century of ours is arguably the most significant one in the history of our universe. We'll have the technology either to self-destruct, or [to] seed our cosmos with life. The situation is so unstable that I doubt we can dwell at this fork in the road for more than another hundred years. But if we end up going the life route instead of the death route, then in a distant future our cosmos will be teaming with life, all of which can be traced back to what we do-here and now. I don't know how we'll be thought of, but I'm sure that we won't be remembered as insignificant.

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