The brain is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that ….

If you reject the infinite, you are stuck with the finite, and the finite is parochial... the best explanation of anything eventually involves univer….

No precautions, and no precautionary principle, can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. We need a stance of problem-fixing, not just problem-a….

If you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it..

Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes fo….

If we can't program it, we can't understand it..

The quantum theory of parallel universes is not the problem, it is the solution. It is not some troublesome, optional interpretation emerging from ar….

The most important application of quantum computing in the future is likely to be a computer simulation of quantum systems, because that's an applica….

The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which ….

Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense....

It is possible to build a virtual-reality generator whose repertoire includes every possible environment..

The theory that the biosphere was created without evolution, a few thousand years ago, is ruled out by overwhelming scientific evidence. To claim tha….

The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level….

I chop and change between what is called 'work' and what is called 'recreation.' There are no discontinuities in my day. I only play tennis with peop….

Is the human race a universal constructor?.

Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them..

Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity..

The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests..

Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars, and by intelligent beings who understand the processes that power stars, but by nothing else in the….

I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we us….

Quantum computation is a distinctively new way of harnessing nature. It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in coll….