The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting--because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That's how it makes progress.

That's what I learned from World War II. Things are always more complicated than most people believe.

And somehow mother nature manages to create this incredible biosphere, to create this incredibly rich environment of animals and plants with this amazingly small amount of data.

The ground of science was littered with the corpses of dead unified theories.

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.

We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.

I mean science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly.