In the preface to his treat of a book, Black Holes and Time Warps, Kip Thorne (a Caltech theoretical physicist) writes the following:
“John Wheeler, my principal mentor and teacher during my formative years as a physicist (and a central character in this book[, Black Holes and Time Warps,], delights in asking his friends, ‘What is the single most important thing you have learned about thus and so?’ Few questions focus the mind so clearly. In the spirit of John’s question, I ask myself, as I come to the end of fifteen years of on-and-off writing (mostly off), ‘What is the single most important thing that you want your readers to learn?’
My answer: the amazing power of the human mind—by fits and starts, blind alleys, and leaps of insight—to unravel the complexities of our Universe, and reveal the ultimate simplicity, elegance, and the glorious beauty of the fundamental laws that govern it.”
I have had this book for a while but am only now getting around to reading it. And what a reward to see that Kip’s motivating thought is the very same thought that fuels the expanse of my own intellectual curiosity! It is the “quantum thought” after which this site is named (see “the quantum thought” tab to see my explanation of what I regard it to represent.
Of course, Kip has taken after contributing to the physics component of this remarkable thought: his academic (and, surely, a sizable portion of his personal life) is devoted to understanding the elegance of the universe’s fundamental physical patterns. On the other hand, it is my dream to contribute to the neuroscience component: to devote my life to understanding the very brain that lets us go on to understand the universe. What an excitingly intimate yet complex challenge.
The Quantum Thought 