Plutonium has a quite extraordinary relationship with people. They made it, and it kills them.

Thers is this wonderful iconoclast at Rutgers, Doron Zeilberger, who says that our mathematics is the result of a random walk, by which he means what WE call mathematics. Likewise, I think, for the sciences.

Why should there be the method of science? There is not just one way to build a house, or even to grow tomatoes. We should not expect something as motley as the growth of knowledge to be strapped to one methodology.

The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.

The bad player is the one who tries to calculate and play with the odds, as if his game, his life, were one of a large number of games. To do so is at best to succumb to another necessity, the necessity of large numbers. The good player does not fool himself, and accepts that there is exactly one chance, which produces by chance the necessity and even the purpose that he experiences.

Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.

Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption.