Science should have no less lofty a goal. My ambition is to live to see all of physics reduced to a formula so elegant and simple that it will fit easily on the front of a T-shirt.

One of the major ingredients for professional success in science is luck. Without this, forget it.

Neutrinos ... win the minimalist contest: zero charge, zero radius, and very possibly zero mass.

Democritus's work on the void was revolutionary.

The aether: Invented by Isaac Newton, reinvented by James Clerk Maxwell. This is the stuff that fills up the empty space of the universe. Discredited and discarded by Einstein, the aether is now making a Nixonian comeback. It's really the vacuum, but burdened by theoretical, ghostly particles.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell said that philosophy went downhill after Democritus and did not recover until the Renaissance.

My children have often asked me why I never received a Nobel Prize. I used to tell them it was because the Nobel committee couldn’t make up its mind which of my projects to recognize.