It's us that's really amazing.

Plasma seems to have the kinds of properties one would like for life. It's somewhat like liquid water--unpredictable and thus able to behave in an enormously complex fashion. It could probably carry as much information as DNA does. It has at least the potential for organizing itself in interesting ways.

That's, of course, the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.

One of the memorable moments of my life was when Willard Libby came to Princeton with a little jar full of crystals of barium xenate. A stable compound, looking like common salt, but much heavier. This was the magic of chemistry, to see xenon trapped into a crystal.

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.

The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.

Most of what we see in the universe is dust.