When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise….

Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality..

I can wear a baseball cap; I am entitled to wear a baseball cap. I am genetically pre-disposed to wear a baseball cap, whereas most English people lo….

In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the f….

He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor..

Clearly, some time ago makers and consumers of American junk food passed jointly through some kind of sensibility barrier in the endless quest for ne….

It isn't easy to become a fossil. ... Only about one bone in a billion, it is thought, becomes fossilized. If that is so, it means that the complete ….

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which i….

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls..

Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground..

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights..

Anyone who has read my books will know that I don't tend to use guides when I am travelling. It's not a pride thing, but it is certainly a fact..

It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously..

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to..

Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back ….

I sat on a toilet watching the water run thinking what an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of….

The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn’t get much better than this..

I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city..

In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe.

Every living thing is an elaboration of a single original plan. As humans we are mere increments - each of us a musty archive of adjustments, adaptat….

Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains..