anecdote

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, perhaps the greatest astrophysicist of the twentieth century, loved to tell the story of a visit to Princeton in the mid 1980s, where he was feted in honor of his recent Nobel Prize. At the dinner, he found himself seated next to an earnest young man. As physicists often do to make conversation, he asked his dinner companion, "What are you working on these days?" The reply was, "I work on string theory, which is the most important advance in physics in the twentieth century." The young string theorist went on to advise Chandra to drop what he was doing and switch to string theory or risk becoming as obsolete as those in the 1920s who did not immediately take up quantum theory.

"Young man," Chandra replied, "I knew Werner Heisenberg. I can promise you that Heisenberg would never have been so rude as to tell someone to stop what they were doing and work on quantum theory. And he certainly would not have been so disrespectful as to tell someone who got his PhD fifty years ago that he was about to become obsolete."

- From "The trouble with physics" by Lee Smolin