Theory said one thing and the experiment said something different, so that was the stimulus that started me going, that there was something there to be explained, which wasn't understood and to try to see why that experiment gave the answer it did, so it was a big opportunity for a young student starting to have actually an experiment which contradicted the theory, so that's was my chance to understand that.

I'm prejudiced about education altogether. I think it's terribly overrated.

Do not imagine that you have to know everything before you can do anything. My own best work was done when I was most ignorant.

If you want to have a program for moving out into the universe, you have to think in centuries not in decades.

If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed, I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination.

The point of fact is, just in simple ways, you can see how much better things have gotten. I mean, when I was a child, I lived in England, and England was just amazingly polluted. We didn't use that word. We just said it was it all covered with soot.

You could say science also is an art.