About - Quotes
Sometimes I felt that there were too many painful things in this world, and if I thought about them all, my heart might break in two.
We cannot define anything precisely! If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each other, one saying to the other "You don't know what you are talking about!" The second one says "What do you mean by know? What do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you?", and so on.
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part - perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined!
People are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don't give us a chance to tell them anything about what we know pretty well. They always want to know things that we don't know.
What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school - and you think I'm going to explain it to you so you can understand it? No, you are not going to be able understand it. [...] You see my physics students don't understand it either. That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.
Evolution is all about processes that almost never happen. Every birth in every lineage is a potential speciation event, but speciation almost never happens, not once in a million births. Mutation in DNA almost never happens - not once in a trillion copyings - but evolution depends on it. Take the set of infrequent accidents - things that almost never happen - and sort them into the happy accidents, the neutral accidents, and the fatal accidents; amplify the effects of the happy accidents - which happens automatically when you have replication and competition - and you get evolution.