I was born in Belgium on 6 November 1932. I am married to Mira Nikomarow and have five children: Michele, Anne, Georges, from a first marriage with Esther Dujardin, and Sarah, Helene from a second one with Danielle Vindal.
Indeed science alone may perhaps be sterile when pursued without an understanding of the world in which scientific knowledge is created and in which the fruits of science are used.
One of my greatest times of inspiration is when I'm traveling or living in a new country - there's a tremendous freedom that comes from being unfettered by your own, familiar culture, and by seeing the world from a different point of view.
Being at NASA and having the access to both computing capability and satellite observation capability is kind of the ideal research situation to try to understand global climate change.
With this in mind, for some twenty years I have set myself as my particular task the experimental investigation of the connexion between change in the structure and change in the spectra of chemical atoms.
I used to love, and I still do, Lee Ann Womack. And Alison Krauss. I mean, how many Grammys does she have? She's just remained solid and true and great, and I respect that.
No evidence compels the conclusion that the minimum required intake of any vitamin comes close to the optimum intake that sustains good health.
The cosmical importance of this conclusion is profound and the possibilities it opens for the future very remarkable, greater in fact than any suggested before by science in the whole history of the human race.
Mountains aren't eternal: even the most imposing massifs are smoothed away by weathering in a few hundred million years or less. Plate tectonics makes new ones, and without it, our future would be flat.
Since the founding of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, theoretical physics had nurtured an extremely radical tradition.
The United States did not sign Kyoto, yet its emissions are not that different from the countries that did sign it.
Shall we ever see the 10 million things of the universe simultaneously in order to be the all? I am convinced that to live is to travel towards the world's end.
I am disabled, so I can't travel, and I have not been to any development meetings, but Gary and the others affiliated with the film keep me updated on everything.
We travel to learn; and I have never been in any country where they did not do something better than we do it, think some thoughts better than we think, catch some inspiration from heights above our own.
In 1948 I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undecided between studies of chemistry and physics, but my first year convinced me that physics was more interesting to me.
The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous.
In the context of general relativity, space almost is a substance. It can bend and twist and stretch, and probably the best way to think about space is to just kind of imagine a big piece of rubber that you can pull and twist and bend.
While a lab Director can get done the things that he regards as important, he has the more important job of bringing out the best ideas of the broader scientific community.
Public discourse has been polluted now for decades by corporate-funded disinformation - not just with climate change but with a host of health, environmental and societal threats. The implications for the planet are grim.
However, I had a chance encounter with an admissions officer of Stevens Institute of Technology, who so impressed me by his erudition and enthusiasm for the school that I changed course and entered Stevens Institute.
My understanding is that Exxon, in particular, did fund a variety of small think tanks to generate what amounts to propaganda against understanding of what climate change was doing, the human role in causing it.
