It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true

It's not going to be just humans colonizing space, it's going to be life moving out from the Earth, moving it into its kingdom. And the kingdom of life, of course, is going to be the universe.

I think that the artificial-intelligence people are making a lot of noise recently, claiming that artificial intelligence is making huge progress and we're going to be outstripped by the machines.

You have this world of mathematics, which is very real and which contains all kinds of wonderful stuff. And then we also have the world of nature, which is real, too. And that, by some miracle, the language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That's just an amazing piece of luck, which we don't understand.

Science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly. I mean World War I was a horrible war and it was mostly the fault of science, so that was in a way a very bad time for science, but on the other hand we were winning all these Nobel Prizes.

Some of my friends like to keep science and religion together, but I certainly like to keep them separate.

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