If we can't program it, we can't understand it.

The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy - but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.

If you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it.

Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.

Every problem that is interesting is also soluble.

Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them.

Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense...