If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems

The answer to the ancient question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.

QED [quantum electrodynamics] reduces ... "all of chemistry and most of physics," to one basic interaction, the fundamental coupling of a photon to electric charge. The strength of this coupling remains, however, as a pure number, the so-called fine-structure constant, which is a parameter of QED that QED itself is powerless to predict.