Occupation: Physicist Birth: 1953
Every problem that is interesting is also soluble..
Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes fo….
Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity..
Humans may or may not have cosmic significance, and if they do, it will be by hitching a ride on the objective centrality of knowledge in the cosmic ….
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….
Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow..
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….
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….
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….
The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests..
If you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it..
Despite the unrivaled empirical success of quantum theory, the very suggestion that it may be literally true as a description of nature is still gree….
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….
Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them..
Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense....
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 ….
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….
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 we can't program it, we can't understand it..
Is the human race a universal constructor?.