“Here the attention of the research workers is primarily directed to the problem of reconciling the claims of the special relativity theory with those of the quantum theory. The extraordinary advances made in this field by Dirac ... leave open the question whether it will be possible to satisfy the claims of the two theories without at the same time determining the Sommerfeld fine-structure constant.”

“One hundred thirty-seven is the inverse of something called the fine-structure constant. ...The most remarkable thing about this remarkable number is that it is dimension-free. ...Werner Heisenberg once proclaimed that all the quandaries of quantum mechanics would shrivel up when 137 was finally explained.”

“Whoever dedicates his life to searching out particular connections of nature will spontaneously be confronted with the question how they harmoniously fit into the whole.”

“Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves.”

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

“An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and how to avoid them.”

“Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.”

“An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.”

“The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.”

“There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.”

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”