The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe.
Calculating does not equal mathematics. It's a subsection of it. In years gone by it was the limiting factor, but computers now allow you to make the whole of mathematics more intellectual.
Nanotechnology will let us build computers that are incredibly powerful. We'll have more power in the volume of a sugar cube than exists in the entire world today.
Lighter computers and lighter sensors would let you have more function in a given weight, which is very important if you are launching things into space, and you have to pay by the pound to put things there.
Computers let people avoid people, going out to explore. It's so different to just open a website instead of looking at a Picasso in a museum in Paris.
One of the biggest challenges we had in the first decade was not that many people had personal computers. There weren't that many people to sell to, and it was hard to identify them.
The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis.
Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society.
Ask, 'How are we different from the great apes?' We have culture, we have civilisation, and we have language to be celebrated as part of being human.
It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.
People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.
I'm the one who made many of the bold comments that we'd seen the technologies from AMD as pretty good. Their technology in many areas was leading. But those are transient.
The point is with good maths skills you have just wonderful opportunities and if you don't have good maths skills, there are just so many things that you won't be able to do.
Of course you can use the products of science to do bad things, but you can use them to do good things, too.
At present, however, I don't think the Net is a very good medium for books, books should really be inexpensive lightweight paperbacks you can bang around.
We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions.
One thing about being famous is the people around you, you pay all their bills so they very rarely disagree with you because they want you to pick up the check.
I think the driving thing was curiosity about the universe. That fascinated me. I didn't think anything about being famous or anything like that, I was just interested in the concepts involved.
I had a very famous trainer tell me once, 'You can usually train a wild animal but never tame a wild animal, ever.' They are always going to be wild, no matter what anybody says.
I just cannot imagine why anyone would want to be really famous. You go to a restaurant and people are pointing at you and they talk about you and they whisper and it is very disconcerting; it is a very odd feeling.
Being famous has changed a lot, because now there's so many outlets, between magazines, TV shows, and the Internet, for people to stalk and follow you. We created the monster.
