Gordon L. Kane Quotes (1937-)

“Science makes progress by combining imagination with experimental results—by insisting on evidence.”

“... when non-perturbative phenomena are included, there is no problem from the string theory point of view in effecting continuous transitions between Calabi-Yau spaces of different topology. This shows that stringy ideas about geometry are really more general than those found in classical Riemannian geometry. The moduli space of Calabi-Yau manifolds should thus be regarded as a continuously connected whole, rather than a series of different ones individually associated with different topological objects ... Thus, questions about the topology of Calabi-Yau spaces must be treated on the same footing as questions about the metric on the spaces. That is, the issue of topology is another aspect of the the moduli fields. These considerations are relevant to understanding the ground state of the universe.”

“... when non-perturbative phenomena are included, there is no problem from the string theory point of view in effecting continuous transitions between Calabi-Yau spaces of different topology. This shows that stringy ideas about geometry are really more general than those found in classical Riemannian geometry. The moduli space of Calabi-Yau manifolds should thus be regarded as a continuously connected whole, rather than a series of different ones individually associated with different topological objects ... Thus, questions about the topology of Calabi-Yau spaces must be treated on the same footing as questions about the metric on the spaces. That is, the issue of topology is another aspect of the the moduli fields. These considerations are relevant to understanding the ground state of the universe.”

“If the Standard Model describes the world successfully, how can there be physics beyond it, such as supersymmetry? There are two reasons. First, the Standard Model does not explain aspects of the study of the large-scale universe, cosmology. For example, the Standard Model cannot explain why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, nor can it explain what constitutes the dark matter of the universe. Supersymmetry suggests explanations for both of these mysteries. Second, the boundaries of physics have been changing. Now scientists ask not only how the world works (which the Standard Model answers) but why it works that way (which the Standard Model cannot answer). Einstein asked "why" earlier in the twentieth century, but only in the past decade or so have the "why" questions become normal scientific research in particle physics rather than philosophical afterthoughts.”