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.

In religion, you're supposed to be somehow in touch with something deep and full of mysteries.

It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true

The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would stop growing.

The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.

Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.

We won't really understand the brain until we can make models of it which are analog rather than digital, which nobody seems to be trying very much.