Working out another system to replace Newton's laws took a long time because phenomena at the atomic level were quite strange. One had to lose one's common sense in order to perceive what was happening at the atomic level.

Chance alone is at the source of every innovaton, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, only chance, absolute but blind liberty is at the root of the prodigious edifice that is evolution... It today is the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. Stating life began by the chance collision of particles of nucleic acid in the "prebiotic soup."

I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me.

The universe is almost like a huge magic trick and scientists are trying to figure out how it does what it does.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform... But it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself.

The central idea of string theory is quite straightforward. If you examine any piece of matter ever more finely, at first you'll find molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles. Probe the smaller particles, you'll find something else, a tiny vibrating filament of energy, a little tiny vibrating string.