"The positive energy theorem was for half a century or more an open challenge to relativists. Many attempts were made to prove flat spacetime was stable, but none completely succeeded completely until a majestic tour de force of geometric reasoning of Shoen and Yau. This was followed two years later by a proof of Witten, which was as elegant as it was short. It is this proof of Witten’s that we take as a template here for the quantum theory."

“String theory seems to be incompatible with a world in which a cosmological constant has a positive sign, which is what the observations indicate.”

“We are the result of processes much more complicated than the small aspects of our lives and societies over which we have some control.”

“There is no meaning to space that is independent of the relationships among real things of the world. ...Space is nothing apart from the things that exist. ...If we take out all the words we are not left with an empty sentence, we are left with nothing.”

“Time is described only in terms of change in the network of relationships that describes space.”

“In quantum theory, distance is inverse to energy, because you need particles of very high energy to probe very short distances. The inverse of the Planck energy is the Planck length.”

“While most people... were seeking to modify the principles of either relativity or quantum theory, we surprised ourselves by succeeding in putting them together without modifying their principles.”