Possession of a program with unique analytic capabilities puts a scientist in as much of a priveleged position to make new discoveries as the possession of a powerful telescope.

A good simulation, be it a religious myth or scientific theory, gives us a sense of mastery over experience. To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it one's own. But with this appropriation comes the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion.

Information is just signs and numbers, while knowledge involves their meaning. What we want is knowledge, but what we get is information.

The words are strung together, with their own special grammar-the laws of quantum theory-to form sentences, which are molecules. Soon we have books, entire libraries, made out of molecular "sentences." The universe is like a library in which the words are atoms. Just look at what has been written with these hundred words! Our own bodies are books in that library, specified by the organization of molecules-but the universe and literature are organizations of identical, interchangeable objects; they are information systems.

We surely stand at the threshold of a great adventure of the human spiritó a new synthesis of knowledge, a potential integration of art and science, a deeper grasp of human psychology, a deepening of the symbolic representations of our existence and feelings as given in religion and culture, the formation of an international order based on cooperation and nonviolent competition. It seems not too much to hope for these things.

The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.

It is unlikely that we will ever see a star being born. Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the very young, but never their actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event. Stars are born inside thick clouds of dust and gas in the spiral arms of the galaxy, so thick that visible light cannot penetrate them.