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.
We cannot hope to either understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.
Most of what we see in the universe is dust.
I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.
I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonizing carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence.
The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe.
Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious, it ceases to be of absorbing concern to scientists. Almost all the things scientists think and dream about are mysterious.
For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.
The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all.
There is no way to find the best design except to try out as many designs as possible and discard the failures.
Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is impotent.
If you don’t have a nasty obituary you probably didn’t matter.
I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized.
Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.
If the tools are bad, nature’s voice is muffled. If the tools are good, nature will give us a clear answer to a clear question.
Science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.
Committees do harm merely by existing.
As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.
Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague.
Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.
That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover.