If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed. I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination.
There is nothing so big nor so crazy that one out of a million technological societies may not feel itself driven to do, provided it is physically possible.
A model is done when nothing else can be taken out.
Sometimes we talked about the nature of the human soul and about the Cosmic Unity of souls that I had believed in so firmly when I was 15 years old. My mother did not like the phrase Cosmic Unity. It was too pretentious. She preferred to call it a world soul.
I like people who are working on practical things and who are working in teams. It’s not so important to get the glory. It’s much more important to get something that works. It’s a better way to live.
Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.
The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same; contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before.
It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.
The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.
One of the memorable moments of my life was when Willard Libby came to Princeton with a little jar full of crystals of barium xenate. A stable compound, looking like common salt, but much heavier. This was the magic of chemistry, to see xenon trapped into a crystal.
Just because you see pictures of glaciers falling into the ocean doesn’t mean anything bad is happening. This is something that happens all the time. It’s part of the natural cycle of things. We know from measurements that glaciers have been melting for 200 years at least.
It’s as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn’t a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There’s been lots more like him, and it’s a shame they don’t get Nobel Prizes.
Successful technologies often begin as hobbies. Jacques Cousteau invented scuba diving because he enjoyed exploring caves. The Wright brothers invented flying as a relief from the monotony of their normal business of selling and repairing bicycles.
What the world needs is a small, compact, flexible fusion technology that could make electricity where and when it is needed. The existing fusion program is leading to a huge source of centralized power, at a price that nobody except a government can afford.
It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.
The public knows that human beings are fallible. Only people blinded by ideology fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility.
I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain.
If you start out with a tragic view of life, then anything since is just a bonus.
The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do.
The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people.