Quotes

Theories of the known, which are described by different physical ideas, may be equivalent in all their predictions and hence scientifically indistinguishable. However, they are not psychologically identical when trying to move from that base into the unknown. For different views suggest different kinds of modifications which might be made and hence are not equivalent in the hypotheses one generates from them in one’s attempt to understand what is not yet understood.

Richard Feynmann, 1966

Nobel Prize Speech

Today we can point out problems in the theories of previous generations which went unrecognized at the time but were present within that historical body of theory and practice nonetheless. Such a view does not reify problems as eternal Platonic entitites existing independently of human knowledge and aspirations. The Greeks did not fail to solve the mind-body problem or problems of nuclear structure, for in the context of their intellectual traditions and goals, these problems did not exist.

Thomas Nickles, 1981

"What is a Problem that we solve it?"

In 1975, impressed with the fact that gauge fields are connections on fiber bundles, I drove to the house of Shiing-Shen Chern in El Cerrito, near Berkeley. (I had taken courses with him in the early 1940s when he was a young professor and I an undergraduate student at the National Southwest Associated University in Kunming, China. That was before fiber bundles had become important in differential geometry and before Chern had made history with his contributions to the generalized Gauss–Bonnet theorem and the Chern classes.) We had much to talk about: friends, relatives, China. When our conversation turned to fiber bundles, I told him that I had finally learned from Jim Simons the beauty of fiber-bundle theory and the profound Chern–Weil theorem. I said I found it amazing that gauge fields are exactly connections on fiber bundles, which the mathematicians developed without reference to the physical world. I added ‘this is both thrilling and puzzling, since you mathematicians dreamed up these concepts out of nowhere.’ He immediately protested, ‘No, no. These concepts were not dreamed up. They were natural and real.’

Chen-Ning Yang (楊振寧), 1979