Mostly I’m just writing books for the public, and so I try to describe for the public what the choices are, what they might have to expect in the future and so by warning people ahead of time maybe you have an effect.
We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.
It’s not going to be just humans colonizing space, it’s going to be life moving out from the Earth, moving it into its kingdom. And the kingdom of life, of course, is going to be the universe.
Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.
Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes.
Do not imagine that you have to know everything before you can do anything. My own best work was done when I was most ignorant.
Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny.
Humanity looks to me like a magnificent beginning but not the final word.
Our thinking is permeated by our historical myths.
The universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.
New directions in science are launched by new tools much more often than by new concepts. The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of a tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explained.
The ground of science was littered with the corpses of dead unified theories.
The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines.
The analogies between science and art are very good as long as you are talking about the creation and the performance. The creation is certainly very analogous. The aesthetic pleasure of the craftsmanship of performance is also very strong in science.
To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body into which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough.
We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!
All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control. Describing John von Neumann’s aspiration for the application of computers sufficiently large to solve the problems of meteorology, despite the sensitivity of the weather to small perturbations.
And somehow mother nature manages to create this incredible biosphere, to create this incredibly rich environment of animals and plants with this amazingly small amount of data.
Younger people have so many opportunities. I don’t see any pessimism among them.
In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.