Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious it ceases to be of absorbing interest to scientists. Almost all things scientists think and dream about are mysterious.

One factor that has remained constant through all the twists and turns of the history of physical science is the decisive importance of the mathematical imagination.

The world is just - it's wonderful when you look at all the detail. It's just amazing.

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 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.

As far as I can see, our concentration of different abilities in one species - there's nothing I can see that in this Darwinian evolution that could've done that. So it seems to be a miracle of some sort.

It's clear the media, of course, always gives you the bad news. And people who rely on the media, like Mr. Trump, think that everything is a disaster. The media always tries to make everything into a disaster, but it's mostly rubbish. It's a point of fact that we're doing extremely well.