You ask: what is the meaning or purpose of life? I can only answer with another question: do you think we are wise enough to read God’s mind?
The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.
It is better to be wrong than to be vague.
I think it’s much better to have your eyes open, but on the other hand, of course it can do harm if you tell people look, there’s all these terrible things you can do and then some idiot may go ahead and do it.
I don’t know, but I think it’s quite possible that the more science you teach kids in school the more it turns them off, so I don’t know. I mean you never can tell which way it will go.
It’s better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.
So long as you have courage and a sense of humor, it is never too late to start life afresh.
I mean science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it’s blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly.
Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.
The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm.
The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.
Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
No matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory.
The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don’t have PhDs.
Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century.
A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.
As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.
In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.