The Ph.D. system was designed for a job in academics. And it works really well if you really want to be an academic, and the system actually works quite well. So for people who have the gift and like to go spend their lives as scholars, it's fine. But the trouble is that it's become a kind of a meal ticket - you can't get a job if you don't have a Ph.D.

...the computer models are very good at solving equations of fluid dynamics but very bad at describing the real world. The real world is full of things like clouds and vegetation and soil and dust which the models describe very poorly.

The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.

We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.

Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.

The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.

The universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.