If you start out with a tragic view of life, then anything since is just a bonus.
The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people.
We have no reason to think that climate change is harmful if you look at the world as a whole. Most places, in fact, are better off being warmer than being colder. And historically, the really bad times for the environment and for people have been the cold periods rather than the warm periods.
I’m a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas.
The total disorder in the universe, as measured by the quantity that physicists call entropy, increases steadily over time. Also, the total order in the universe, as measured by the complexity and permanence of organized structures, also increases steadily over time.
If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.
Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.
Life is nature’s way to give mind oportunities it wouldn’t otherwise had.
The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.
The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.
As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so.
Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox.
One factor that has remained constant through all the twists and turns of the history of physical science is the decisive importance of the mathematical imagination.
I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce.
For a physicist mathematics is not just a tool by means of which phenomena can be calculated, it is the main source of concepts and principles by means of which new theories can be created.
We simply don’t know yet what’s going to happen to the carbon in the atmosphere.
There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global.
It makes very little sense to believe the output of the climate models.
Climate change is part of the normal order of things, and we know it was happening before humans came.
When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories.