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.

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

Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be.

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

I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social 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 final arbitrator in philosophy is not how we think but what we do.