When you come up with a theory, you fall in love with the beauty the simplicity and elegance of it. But then you have to get a sheet of paper and pencil and crack out all the details. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. Because you have to prove it.

In fact, all of us have a piece of Chernobyl in our bodies going back to 1986.

I got a four year scholarship to Harvard, and while I was there they wanted to groom me for work in the Star Wars program designing weapons ignited by hydrogen bombs. I didn't want to do that. I thought about how many scientists had died in World War II.

What differentiates human from lower-animal consciousness is time. You can't explain the concept of "tomorrow" to your dog. Our consciousness is dominated by time - We're constantly running simulations of the future. Our brain is a prediction machine. The hallmark of intelligence, indeed of genius, is the number and complexity of the feedback loops we use in predicting the future.

I am a figure skater, which helps me appreciate Newton's theory of mechanics.

For most of human history, we could only watch, like bystanders, the beautiful dance of Nature. But today, we are on the cusp of an epoch-making transition, from being passive observers of Nature to being active choreographers of Nature. The Age of Discovery in science is coming to a close, opening up an Age of Mastery.

Scientists who have dedicated their lives to building machines that think, feel that it's only a matter of time before some form of consciousness is captured in the laboratory.