The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would stop growing.

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. ... It was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.

I think the biggest misconception is that everybody has to learn mathematics. That seems to be a complete mistake.

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 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.

There is no way to find the best design except to try out as many designs as possible and discard the failures.

The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A reductionist philosophy, arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go only in one direction, makes no scientific sense. Indeed, dogmatic philosophical beliefs of any kind have no place in science.