I love to think. I once considered taking drugs as an attempt to better understand an altered state of mind; however, I decided not to. I didn't want to chance ruining the machine.

Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?

That is the logical tight-rope on which we have to walk if we wish to interpret nature.

It is necessary for the very existence of science that minds exist which do not allow that nature must satisfy some preconceived conditions.

I am a successful lecturer in physics for popular audiences. The real entertainment gimmick is the excitement, drama and mystery of the subject matter. People love to learn something, they are 'entertained' enormously by being allowed to understand a little bit of something they never understood before. One must have faith in the subject and in people's interest in it.

We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.

Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong... As soon as you do that, you start sliding down an edge which is hard to recover from.