Think of a field of daisies: they bloom, they wither, and in the spring they grow again. Who wants to see the same stupid daisy year after year, especially with a bunch of crappy iron-lung-type equipment bolted to it?

Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.

The simple process of eating and breathing weave all of us together into a vast four-dimensional array. No matter how isolated you may sometimes feel, no matter how lonely, you are never really cut off from the whole.

Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.

It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable.

A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.

In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I'm still absorbing its teachings.