The phrase ‘popular science’ has in itself a touch of absurdity. That knowledge which is popular is not scientific.
All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.
Ego is the immediate dictate of human consciousness.
We enjoy sailing small boats, two of which I have designed and built myself.
I think my primary audience is in some sense an adult audience, because I think that will then have a knock-on effect for children.
You know, I'm not terribly fast at my times tables, because that's not what I think mathematics is about.
Do not suffer any man to baptize or minister unto you, unless God has spoken unto him by the voice of his servants, and authorized him to minister in his name.
For the greater beauty of the instrument, the balls representing the planets are to be of considerable bigness; but so contrived, that they may be taken off at pleasure, and others, much smaller, and fitter for some purposes, put in their places.
But the beauty of Einstein's equations, for example, is just as real to anyone who's experienced it as the beauty of music. We've learned in the 20th century that the equations that work have inner harmony.
But my most favourite pursuit, after my daily exertions at the Foundry, was Astronomy. There were frequently clear nights when the glorious objects in the Heavens were seen in most attractive beauty and brilliancy.
It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.
All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.
The discovery and investigation of life on other planets is likely to change many of our ideas about how life arose on the Earth and even what is life and its natural development.
Sensorial perception, for example, certainly occurs with greater or less accuracy according to the degree of interest; it is constantly given other directions by the change of external stimuli and by ideas.
I think I've learned that if you want to be successful, you have to tell your story honestly and from your heart - and I think a healthy sense of humor doesn't hurt either.
My father was an electrical engineer who worked at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh. When I was growing up, my mother wrote humor columns for the local paper. She was the Erma Bombeck of Murrysville, Pa.
My legacy would be that you don't have to give up anything. You can be chic but have a sense of humor, you can be sexy but comfortable, you can be timeless but fresh.
It felt as if things were literally slipping through my fingers. Things were just streaming away from me. I lost my sense of humor. I'm still looking for that.
My humor is channeling everything through my brain. For example, when I talk about something, it's how Richard Lewis feels about it. I'm a storyteller. I do a lot of free association.
Conservative humor is frankly harder than liberal humor. You get points for just being liberal. You can get more points if you make fun of your own side sometimes.
Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.
