The world is just - it's wonderful when you look at all the detail. It's just amazing. Nothing is boring if you look at it carefully.

When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories.

As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so

Science and religion are, of course, two different ways of looking at the universe; and it's the same universe with two different windows.

There is nothing so big nor so crazy that one out of a million technological societies may not feel itself driven to do, provided it is physically possible.

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.

The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right architecture. It's like building a bridge. Once the main lines of the structure are right, then the details miraculously fit. The problem is the overall design.