National Medal of Science laureates

"The pioneer spirit is still vigorous within this nation. Science offers a largely unexplored hinterland for the pioneer who has the tools for his task. The rewards of such exploration both for the Nation and the individual are great. Scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress."

"As long as scientists are free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, there will be a flow of new scientific knowledge to those who can apply it to practical problems."

"This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end. What are the scientists to do next?"

"There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers — conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial."

"Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential."

"The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships."

"Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices, but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use, since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous."

"Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough, but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy. Had a Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza."

"Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great economy of effort. In spite of much complexity, they perform reliably. Witness the humble typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile."

"A spider web of metal, sealed in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short, the thermionic tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million, tossed about in packages, plugged into sockets — and it works! Its gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for months; now it is built for thirty cents. The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it."

"A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted."

"The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice."

"The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled by a few."

"To make the record, we now push a pencil or tap a typewriter. Then comes the process of digestion and correction, followed by an intricate process of typesetting, printing, and distribution. To consider the first stage of the procedure, will the author of the future cease writing by hand or typewriter and talk directly to the record?"

"Much needs to occur, however, between the collection of data and observations, the extraction of parallel material from the existing record, and the final insertion of new material into the general body of the common record. For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids."

"Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is sometimes controlled by the keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this is avoidable."

"The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more. Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later further manipulation."

"There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things."

"Every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed, and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machines."

"The needs of business, and the extensive market obviously waiting, assured the advent of mass-produced arithmetical machines just as soon as production methods were sufficiently advanced. With machines for advanced analysis no such situation existed; for there was and is no extensive market; the users of advanced methods of manipulating data are a very small part of the population."

"If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability. The abacus, with its beads strung on parallel wires, led the Arabs to positional numeration and the concept of zero many centuries before the rest of the world; and it was a useful tool — so useful that it still exists."

"It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting machine. It will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the future. But even this new machine will not take the scientist where he needs to go. Relief must be secured from laborious detailed manipulation of higher mathematics as well, if the users of it are to free their brains for something more than repetitive detailed transformations in accordance with established rules."

"A mathematician is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He is not even a man who can readily perform the transformation of equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs."

"Whenever logical processes of thought are employed — that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove — there is an opportunity for the machine. Formal logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his trying of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard adding machine."

"There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene."

"There is another form of selection best illustrated by the automatic telephone exchange. You dial a number and the machine selects and connects just one of a million possible stations. It does not run over them all. It pays attention only to a class given by a first digit, and so on; and thus proceeds rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station."

"To be able to key one sheet of a million before an operator in a second or two, with the possibility of then adding notes thereto, is suggestive in many ways. It might even be of use in libraries, but that is another story. At any rate, there are now some interesting combinations possible. One might, for example, speak to a microphone, in the manner described in connection with the speech-controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections. It would certainly beat the usual file clerk."

"Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path. The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature."

"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, memex will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk."

"Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely."

"Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry."

"There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions."

"A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another."

"All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing."

"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior."

"The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only at the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected."

"Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race. It might be striking to outline the instrumentalities of the future more spectacularly, rather than to stick closely to the methods and elements now known and undergoing rapid development, as has been done here. Technical difficulties of all sorts have been ignored, certainly, but also ignored are means as yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube."

"All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed through one of the senses — the tactile when we touch keys, the oral when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible that some day the path may be established more directly?"

"The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?"

"In the outside world, all forms of intelligence, whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and immediateness."

"Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important."

"The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to throw masses of people against another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome."

"Science can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world."

"The responsibility for the creation of new scientific knowledge — and for most of its application — rests on that small body of men and women who understand the fundamental laws of nature and are skilled in the techniques of scientific research. We shall have rapid or slow advance on any scientific frontier depending on the number of highly qualified and trained scientists exploring it."

"On the wisdom with which we bring science to bear in the war against disease, in the creation of new industries, and in the strengthening of our Armed Forces depends in large measure our future as a nation."

"Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for ages past. Advances in science will also bring higher standards of living, will lead to the prevention or cure of diseases, will promote conservation of our limited national resources, and will assure means of defense against aggression. But to achieve these objectives — to secure a high level of employment, to maintain a position of world leadership — the flow of new scientific knowledge must be both continuous and substantial."

"Science, by itself, provides no panacea for individual, social, and economic ills. It can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world."

"The publicly and privately supported colleges, universities, and research institutes are the centers of basic research. They are the wellsprings of knowledge and understanding. As long as they are vigorous and healthy and their scientists are free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, there will be a flow of new scientific knowledge to those who can apply it to practical problems in Government, in industry, or elsewhere."

"Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown. Freedom of inquiry must be preserved under any plan for Government support of science..."

"We puzzle as to whether the universe is bounded or extends forever; whether, indeed, it may only be one universe among many. We speculate as to whether our universe began in a vast explosion, whether it pulsates between utter compression and wide diffusion, whether it is self-renewing and thus unchanged forever. And we are humble. But science teaches more than this. It continually reminds us that we are still ignorant and there is much to learn. Time and space are interconnected in strange ways; there is no absolute simultaneity. Within the atom occur phenomena concerning which visualization is futile, to which common sense, the guidance from our everyday experience, has no application, which yield to studies by equations that have no meaning except that they work. Mass and energy transform one into another, Gravitation, the solid rock on which Newton built, may be merely a property of the geometry of the cosmos. Life, as its details unfold before us, becomes ever more intricate, emphasizing more and more our wonder that its marvelous functioning could have been produced by chance and time. The human mind, merely in its chemical and physical aspects, takes on new inspiring attributes. And what is the conclusion? He who follows science blindly, and who follows it alone, comes to a barrier beyond which he cannot see. He who would tell us with the authority of scholarship a complete story of why we exist, of our mission here, has a duty to speak convincingly in a world where men increasingly think for themselves. Exhortation needs to be revised, not to weaken its power, but to increase it, for men who are no longer in the third century. As this occurs, and on the essential and central core of faith, science will of necessity be silent. But its silence will be the silence of humility, not the silence of disdain. A belief may be larger than a fact. A faith that is overdefined is the very faith most likely to prove inadequate to the great moments of life."

"It is Earlier Than We Think."

"Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. Nearly all men of science, all men of learning for that matter, and men of simple ways too, have it in some form and in some degree. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries."

"That the threat is now intense is not a reason to abandon our quest for knowledge. It is a reason to hold it more tightly, in spite of the need for action to preserve our freedom, in spite of the distractions of living in turmoil, that it may not be lost or brushed aside by the demands of the hour. We would not neglect our duty to our country and our fellows to strive mightily to preserve our ways and our lives. There is an added duty, not inconsistent, not less. It is the duty to so live that there may be a reason for living, beyond the mere mechanisms of life. It is the duty to carry on, under stress, the search for understanding."

"Bush is responsible for the whole architecture of government support for science. Today, everyone thinks these terrific innovations came from the minds of bright kids, but they don't realize that these kids needed an environment to be in. It came from Bush. He said, "Give these people money, let them play, and they'll come up with something.""

"Vannevar Bush is a great name for playing six degrees of separation. Turn back the clock on any aspect of information technology — from the birth of Silicon Valley and the marriage of science and the military to the advent of the World Wide Web — and you find his footprints. As historian Michael Sherry says, "To understand the world of Bill Gates and Bill Clinton, start with understanding Vannevar Bush.""

"I came to realize that exaggerated concern about what others are doing can be foolish. It can paralyze effort, and stifle a good idea. One finds that in the history of science almost every problem has been worked out by someone else. This should not discourage anyone from pursuing his own path."

"Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month."

"A scientist studies what is, whereas an engineer creates what never was."

"Linear programming is viewed as a revolutionary development giving man the ability to state general objectives and to find, by means of the simplex method, optimal policy decisions for a broad class of practical decision problems of great complexity. In the real world, planning tends to be ad hoc because of the many special-interest groups with their multiple objectives."

"During my first year at Berkeley I arrived late one day to one of Neyman's classes. On the blackboard were two problems which I assumed had been assigned for homework. I copied them down. A few days later I apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do the homework - the problems seemed to be a little harder to do than usual. I asked him if he still wanted the work. He told me to throw it on his desk. I did so reluctantly because his desk was covered with such a heap of papers that I feared my homework would be lost there forever. About six weeks later, one Sunday morning about eight o'clock, Anne and I were awakened by someone banging on our front door. It was Neyman. He rushed in with papers in hand, all excited: "I've just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication." For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about. To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard which I had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics. That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them."

"In retrospect... it is interesting to note that the original problem that started my research is still outstanding -- namely the problem of planning or scheduling dynamically over time, particularly planning dynamically under uncertainty. If such a problem could be successfully solved it could eventually through better planning contribute to the well-being and stability of the world."

"Industrial production, the flow of resources in the economy, the exertion of military effort in a war, the management of finances --all require the coordination of interrelated activities. What these complex undertakings share in common is the task of constructing a statement of actions to be performed, their timing and quantity (called a program or schedule), that, if implemented, would move the system from a given initial status as much as possible towards some defined goal"

"All such problems can be formulated as mathematical programming problems. Naturally, we can propose many sophisticated algorithms and a theory but the final test of a theory is its capacity to solve the problems which originated it."

"Industrial production, the flow of resources in the economy, the exertion of military effort in a war theater-all are complexes of numerous interrelated activities. Differences may exist in the goals to be achieved, the particular processes involved, and the magnitude of effort. Nevertheless, it is possible to abstract the underlying essential similarities in the management of these seemingly disparate systems."

"If the system exhibits a structure which can be represented by a mathematical equivalent, called a mathematical model, and if the objective can be also so quantified, then some computational method may be evolved for choosing the best schedule of actions among alternatives. Such use of mathematical models is termed mathematical programming."

"One of the first applications of the simplex algorithm was to the determination of an adequate diet that was of least cost. In the fall of 1947, Jack Laderman of the Mathematical Tables Project of the National Bureau of Standards undertook, as a test of the newly proposed simplex method, the first large-scale computation in this field. It was a system with nine equations in seventy-seven unknowns. Using hand-operated desk calculators, approximately 120 man-days were required to obtain a solution. … The particular problem solved was one which had been studied earlier by George Stigler (who later became a Nobel Laureate) who proposed a solution based on the substitution of certain foods by others which gave more nutrition per dollar. He then examined a "handful" of the possible 510 ways to combine the selected foods. He did not claim the solution to be the cheapest but gave his reasons for believing that the cost per annum could not be reduced by more than a few dollars. Indeed, it turned out that Stigler's solution (expressed in 1945 dollars) was only 24 cents higher than the true minimum per year $39.69."

"The mathematician may be compared to a designer of garments, who is utterly oblivious of the creatures whom his garments may fit. To be sure, his art originated in the necessity for clothing such creatures, but this was long ago; to this day a shape will occasionally appear which will fit into the garment as if the garment had been made for it. Then there is no end of surprise and delight."

"I didn't add any new elements [to the modern synthetic theory] to speak of. I just modified things so that people could understand how things were in the plant world."

"Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman. What members of an academy of science have in common is a certain form of semiparasitic living."

"In 1945, therefore, I proved a sentimental fool; and Mr. Truman could safely have classified me among the whimpering idiots he did not wish admitted to the presidential office. For I felt that no man has the right to decree so much suffering, and that science, in providing and sharpening the knife and in upholding the ram, had incurred a guilt of which it will never get rid. It was at that time that the nexus between science and murder became clear to me. For several years after the somber event, between 1947 and 1952, I tried desperately to find a position in what then appeared to me as a bucolic Switzerland,—but I had no success."

"What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, a molecular Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth."

"Now one could say, at the risk of some superficiality, that there exist principally two types of scientists. The ones, and they are rare, wish to understand the world, to know nature; the others, far more frequent, wish to explain it. The first are searching for truth, often with knowledge that they will not attain it; the second strive for plausibility, for the achievement of an intellectually consistent, and hence successful, view of the world."

"We do not know what life is, and yet we manipulate it as if it were an inorganic salt solution..."

"Unangenehme Seher werden meistens als Narren abgeschrieben [Visionaries of uncomfortable truths are mostly dismissed as fools]"

"The evolution of life, and the evolutionary origin of mankind, are scientifically established as firmly and completely as any historical event not witnessed by human observers. Any concession to anti-evolutionists, suggesting that there are scientific reasons to doubt the facticity of evolution, would be propagating a plain untruth."

"According to Goldschmidt, all that evolution by the usual mutations—dubbed "micromutations"—can accomplish is to bring about "diversification strictly within species, usually, if not exclusively, for the sake of adaptation of the species to specific conditions within the area which it is able to occupy." New species, genera, and higher groups arise at once, by cataclysmic saltations—termed macromutations or systematic mutations—which bring about in one step a basic reconstruction of the whole organism. The role of natural selection in this process becomes "reduced to the simple alternative: immediate acceptance or rejection." A new form of life having been thus catapulted into being, the details of its structures and functions are subsequently adjusted by micromutation and selection. It is unnecessary to stress here that this theory virtually rejects evolution as this term is usually understood (to evolve means to unfold or to develop gradually), and that the systematic mutations it postulates have never been observed. It is possible to imagine a mutation so drastic that its product becomes a monster hurling itself beyond the confines of species, genus, family, or class. But in what Goldschmidt has called the "hopeful monster" the harmonious system, which any organism must necessarily possess, must be transformed at once into a radically different, but still sufficiently coherent, system to enable the monster to survive. The assumption that such a prodigy may, however rarely, walk the earth overtaxes one's credulity, even though it may be right that the existence of life in the cosmos is in itself an extremely improbable event."

"The living world is not a single array . . . connected by unbroken series of intergrades."

"My genes have indeed determined what I am, but only in the sense that, given the succession of environments and experiences that were mine, a carrier of a different set of genes might have become unlike myself."

"Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole."

"Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts. As pointed out above, the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness."

"No known human group . . . simply throw[s] out its dead without any ritual or ceremony. In stark contrast, no animal practices burial of dead individuals of its own species."

"Man is the only living being who has a developed self-awareness and death-awareness."

"The greatest evolutionist of our century."

"Between 1937 and 1941, Dobzhansky went from being able to allow for the possibility of evolutionary mechanisms other than those he favored to a position in which everything that did not fit his definition of evolution was rejected. In the midst of his outpouring of anger at and dismissal of Goldschmidt, Dobzhansky neglected to consider the fact that while Goldschmidt's systemic mutations may not have been observed, neither had the mechanisms of speculation that he, or anyone else, for that matter, had proposed. ...it was and still is the case that, with the exception of Dobzhansky's claim about a new species of fruit fly, the formation of a new species, by any mechanism, has never been observed."

"With the hubris common to physicists, I have always felt that I have known what good science is — it is theory cast in terms of mechanisms that describe how parts of the universe behave. With sometimes immense historical delay, these mechanisms always move towards being grounded in the larger mechanistic view of the universe. Theories always propose a view of how the universe is. They can never be effectively argued to be true, but only be brought before the bar of empirical evidence. All the modern concern for contextualism, hermeneutics and the social determination of meaning has its point, but is a mere footnote to the massive evidence for this view of science. The overwhelming success within this framework of modern biology over the last half century has provided another major confirmation, if one is needed. Someday we will get another striking confirmation from cognitive science. Though it can be argued that we are well on our way, we still have an immense distance to go. Arguments are no match for the evidence that cognitive science does not control its subject the way physics, chemistry and now biology do."

"Computer science is an empirical discipline. [...] Each new machine that is built is an experiment. Actually constructing the machine poses a question to nature; and we listen for the answer by observing the machine in operation and analyzing it by all analytical and measurement means available. Each new program that is built is an experiment. It poses a question to nature, and its behavior offers clues to an answer."

"The Physical Symbol System Hypothesis. A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action."

"Heuristic Search Hypothesis. The solutions to problems are represented as symbol structures. A physical symbol system exercises its intelligence in problem solving by search—that is, by generating and progressively modifying symbol structures until it produces a solution structure."

"If you think there is nothing problematic or mysterious about a symbol system solving problems, then you are a child of today, whose views have been formed since mid-century. Plato (and by his account, Socrates) found difficulty understanding even how problems could be entertained, much less how they could be solved. Let me remind you of how he posed the conundrum in the Meno:"

"[The] amount of search is not a measure of the amount of intelligence being exhibited. What makes a problem a problem is not that a large amount of search is required for its solution, but that a large amount would be required if a requisite level of intelligence were not applied."

"It has been a long road from Plato's Meno to the present, but it is perhaps encouraging that most of the progress along that road has been made since the turn of the twentieth century, and a large fraction of it since the midpoint of the century. Thought was still wholly intangible and ineffable until modern formal logic interpreted it as the manipulation of formal tokens. And it seemed still to inhabit mainly the heaven of Platonic ideals, or the equally obscure spaces of the human mind, until computers taught us how symbols could be processed by machines."

"In joint scientific efforts extending over twenty years, initially in collaboration with J. C. Shaw at the RAND Corporation, and subsequently with numerous faculty and student colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon University, they have made basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing."

"Although he was somewhat anti a lot of this stuff, he was very eclectic. He was very broadminded. He realized that sooner or later there was going to be a connection between what went on in the mind and what went on in the brain. Carnegie Mellon was a big place. Newell was in favor of having people do all sorts of things there, so he was basically in favor of having someone who worked on neural nets there. He could see it coming back into fashion. Even though it wasn't what he did, and he didn't really believe in it, he had enough insight to realize that it was going to come back into fashion again... That's how I ended up at CMU. I was very impressed by the fact that Newell was open to getting somebody in an area that he didn't believe in. It's very rare to see that in academics."

"I was a kind of a one-man army. I could solder circuits together, I could turn out things on the lathe, I could work with rockets and balloons. I'm a kind of a hybrid between an engineer and a physicist and astronomer."

"All this is very good in theory, but in practice, you take a piece of iron, wind a wire around it, then plug the wire in. The core gets hot, the wires smoke, and the fuse blows. So you see, there are practical limitations to theory."

"As soon as we started looking at them, we saw the most remarkable situation. My first thought was, "Great guns! Something's gone wrong with the apparatus!" But then we got later North American tapes and everything seemed normal again."

"Apparently, something happens on the sun. It sends out a burst of gases. The reservoirs above our earth shake like a bowl of jelly. The radiation droozles out at the ends and makes the auroral displays at the North and South Poles."

"After a vast research program, which depended very heavily upon the use of a number of highspeed computers, I am pleased to offer you the result: "Space is that in which everything else is." In other words, "Space is the hole that we are in.""

"A man is a fabulous nuisance in space right now. He's not worth all the cost of putting him up there and keeping him comfortable and working."

""This is John Lear, Science Editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, calling from New York". (Heavy emphasis on "calling from New York," then a long pause waiting for me to recover from the thrill of hearing from such an important person, in New York, no less.) Actually, I did know who he was and had often characterized him as the anti-science editor of the Saturday Review. He continued: "I read of your recent report of the discovery of radiation belts of the Earth and thought that I would do a piece on the subject. What I found remarkable was that such important work had been done at a midwestern state university." Well, I don't think that I responded with any profanity but I did manage to convey a suggestion as to what he could do with his piece and hung up. The next day, the president of my university, Virgil M. Hancher, called me to report that Mr. Lear had called him to complain about my discourtesy. I then gave a brief explanation of my reaction, at the end of which Hancher replied "I promised Lear that I would call you and you may now consider that I have done so. And, by the way, Van, my congratulations!" I never heard from the matter again. It's great to have a boss like that."

"There is also hope that even in these days of increasing specialization there is a unity in the human experience."

"my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, from which I learnt that a knowledge of mathematics and physics was essential to the pursuit of astronomy. This increased my fondness for those subjects."

"Since my first discussions of ecological problems with Professor John Day around 1950 and since reading Konrad Lorenz's “King Solomon's Ring,” I have become increasingly interested in the study of animals for what they might teach us about man, and the study of man as an animal. I have become increasingly disenchanted with what the thinkers of the so-called Age of Enlightenment tell us about the nature of man, and with what the formal religions and doctrinaire political theorists tell us about the same subject."

"Modern experimentation is often like driving an automobile. The details and theory of the instruments being used in the experiment are not known to the experimenter except in a very general way. (...) Experimenters are taught in an explicit way, often, how to write up reports of their experiments. But the tradition here is like sports reporting. Only the results of the experiment are reported in any serious detail. The procedures are not."

"Remember, Aristotle's De Anima is a seamless mixture of the science and philosophy of his time. We can aim at something similar, i.e. we should feel very comfortable using scientific results in philosophy. It does not mean philosophers must become scientists."

"Part of the strength of science is that it has tended to attract individuals who love knowledge and the creation of it. Just as important to the integrity of science have been the unwritten rules of the game. These provide recognition and approbation for work which is imaginative and accurate, and apathy or criticism for the trivial or inaccurate... Thus, it is the communication process which is at the core of the vitality and integrity of science..."

"Is the earth affected by its cosmological setting in the universe? It is to be presumed that the solar system was molded at its birth by galactic conditions which in turn reflected the primordial chaos of the primitive galaxy. However, we are not concerned here with questions of this type, interesting though they are, but rather with a problem of even grander proportions: Is there an effect upon the earth, here and now, of the distribution of matter in the universe? As the universe expands, as distant matter moves away from us, are there effects upon the earth of this changing distribution of matter?"

"A for which the entrance area, covered with a very large number of randomly distributed pinholes, is 50 per cent open is shown to be a very effective way of forming images of a complex of s. A simple statistical trick is used to reduce the multitudinous overlapping images to a single image. Less than forty detected photons are needed to form an image of a single star."

"In Heisenberg's , the transferred to the particle by the scattered photon makse the particle's momentum uncertain. It is shown that momentum is also transferred when the lack of a scattered photon is used to discover that the particle is absent from the field of view of the microscope (i.e., located outside the light beam). This apparent paradox, a transfer of momentum and/or energy to a missing particle by a light beam (without the scattering of a photon), is discused and "resolved" using quantum measurement theory."

"I have long believed that an experimentalist should not be unduly inhibited by theoretical untidyness. If he insists in having every last theoretical T crossed before he starts his research the chances are that he will never do a significant experiment. And the more significant and fundamental the experiment the more theoretical uncertainty may be tolerated. By contrast, the more important and difficult the experiment the more that experimental care is warranted. There is no point in attempting a half-hearted experiment with an inadequate apparatus."

"But in the 1950s, many universities saw an advantage in building up all of the sciences and engineering with an eye toward obtaining federal grant money. No single institution did this better than Stanford University. And no one person was more attuned to using federal grants to build a university than its dean of engineering and eventual provost, Frederick Terman. Dr. Terman, trained as an electrical engineer, was an aggressive man with insight and boundless energy. When he began as dean, Stanford University was considered a good private regional school. When he retired as provost, it was arguably the best university for research in the nation."

"It is better to have one seven-foot jumper on your team than any number of six-foot jumpers."

"I most enjoy helping to build something up, taking an unformulated enterprise and making it into what it could become."

"If you can’t reduce a difficult engineering problem to just one 8-1/2 x 11-inch sheet of paper, you will probably never understand it."

"Simple calculations based on a range of variables are better than elaborate ones based on limited input."

"Indeed, in my judgment, the simplest measurements are always the best because they have the least possibility for error and the greatest likelihood of survival."

"The most fruitful research grows out of practical problems."

"Things that people learn purely out of curiosity can have a revolutionary effect on human affairs."

"The trouble is that you won't get the scientists to agree on a course of action. It is almost instinctive in science to accept contrary views, because disagreeing gives you guidance to experimental tests of ideas — your own and those offered by others…."

"Space tells matter how to move Matter tells space how to curve"

"Of all heroes, Spinoza was Einstein's greatest. No one expressed more strongly than he a belief in the harmony, the beauty, and most of all the ultimate comprehensibility of nature."

"Is the very mechanism for the universe to come into being meaningless or unworkable or both unless the universe is guaranteed to produce life, consciousness and observership somewhere and for some little time in its history-to-be? The quantum principle shows that there is a sense in which what the observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past—even in a past so remote that life did not then exist, and shows even more, that 'observership' is a prerequisite for any useful version of 'reality'."

"It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe."

"Of all obstacles to a thoroughly penetrating account of existence, none looms up more dismayingly than “time.” Explain time? Not without explaining existence. Explain existence? Not without explaining time. To uncover the deep and hidden connection between time and existence, to close on itself our quartet of questions, is a task for the future."

"We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."

"There are many modes of thinking about the world around us and our place in it. I like to consider all the angles from which we might gain perspective on our amazing universe and the nature of existence."

"We will first understand how simple the universe is when we realize how strange it is."

"The best way to learn something is to have to teach it."

"What we think of as smooth simple space is really a wiggly business."

"For all our everyday experience, the geometry of space is smooth and flat. But as we examine it more closely, it must show oscillations. And still more closely, it must show foam, a foam-like structure. And that means that down at the very smallest distances, this idea of before and after really lose their meaning."

"Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve."

"Today I think we are beginning to suspect that man is not a tiny cog that doesn’t really make much difference to the running of the huge machine, but rather that there is a much more intimate tie between man and the universe than we heretofore suspected…The physical world is in some deep sense tied to the human being."

"We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago. We are in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past and if we have one explanation for what's happening in the distant past why should we need more?"

"The question is—what is the question?"

"Therefore we can afford many mistakes in the search. The main thing is to make them as fast as possible."

"I had the good fortune of having my first and only heart attack last January ... I call it good fortune because it taught me that there's a limited amount of time left and I better concentrate on one thing: How come existence? How come the quantum? Maybe those questions sound too philosophical, but maybe philosophy is too important to be left to the philosophers."

"I like to think that someone will trace how the deepest thinking of India made its way to Greece and from there to the philosophy of our times."

"If I had to confess, under torture, right now, what I think the simple idea is, I would say it's that we ourselves generate the world; the world is self-generated. But it may well be absolutely wrong."

"Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once."

"The first time I met Wheeler was in 1961, I was an undergraduate... with a somewhat unorthodox academic record. ...The hope was that ...I would be admitted as a graduate student... At the time I was working as a plumber... I was completely enthralled. John was enthusiastically describing his vision of how space and time would become a wild, jittery, foamy world of s when viewed through a tremendously powerful microscope. He told me that the most profound and exciting problem of physics was to unify Einstein's two great theories—General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. He explained that only at the Planck distance would elementary particles reveal their true nature, and it would be all about geometry—. To a young aspiring physicist, the stuffy businessman exterior had morphed into an idealistic visionary. I wanted more than anything to follow this man into battle."

"Some people think Wheeler's gotten crazy in his later years, but he's always been crazy."

"The late, great astrophysicist, philosopher and black hole evangelist John Archibald Wheeler, of Princeton, used to say that the past and the future are fiction, that they only exist in the artifacts and the imaginations of the present."

"In his 1930 book, Dirac took for granted that measurements could be made, but was very vague about what was actually involved."

"Neither Dirac nor von Neumann discussed his measurements in physical terms."

"At the first of the 1960's Rochester Coherence Conferences, I suggested that a license be required for use of the word photon, and offered to give such license to properly qualified people."

"I liked quantum mechanics very much. The subject was hard to understand but easy to apply to a large number of interesting problems."

"In fact, there really is not a new law of nature. It was all in the theory to begin with but nobody worked it out."

"A rare theorist turned experimentalist."

"A gifted experimentalist, and theoretician, in the best Newtonian tradition... His contributions to quantum measurements, and elucidative teachings on quantum mechanics, have not yet received the attention they deserve."

"Science is competitive, aggressive, demanding. It is also imaginative, inspiring, uplifting."

"We have peered into a new world and have seen that it is more mysterious and more complex than we had imagined. Still more mysteries of the universe remain hidden. Their discovery awaits the adventurous scientists of the future. I like it this way."

"There is one alternative to dark matter, and that is the assumption that Newton's laws don't hold over distances as great as galaxies. But we know that Newton's laws hold over a very large domain. And virtually one hundred percent of the physics and astronomy community believes that there is matter in the universe that does not radiate."

"Science progresses best when observations force us to alter our preconceptions."

"It is well known that I am available twenty-four hours a day to women astronomers."

"How stars move tell us that most matter in the universe is dark. When we see stars in the sky, we're only seeing five or 10 percent of the matter that there is in the universe."

"I'm not a theologian, and I must say honestly that Vatican astronomers' views [on astronomy] are entirely in accord with ours. I'm not aware of any Church positions that contradict modern science. In my own life, my science and my religion are separate. I'm Jewish, and so religion to me is a kind of moral code and a kind of history. I try to do my science in a moral way, and, I believe that, ideally, science should be looked upon as something that helps us understand our role in the universe."

"I live and work with three basic assumptions, 1) There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that cannot be solved by a woman. 2) Worldwide, half of all brains are in women. 3) We all need permission to do science, but, for reasons that are deeply ingrained in history, this permission is more often given to men than to women."

"Each one of you can change the world, for you are made of star stuff, and you are connected to the universe."

"Rubin, in collaboration with Kent Ford, became the key figure in extending rotation curves based on optical-wavelength studies to large galactic radii, where their prevalent flatness dovetailed neatly with results from radio-wavelength observations. Rubin’s life story is one of perseverance in the face of occupational and societal obstacles. ... Rubin’s story illustrates the resistance of the scientific community to altering an established paradigm—that light is the essential gauge of mass in the universe."

"To my mind, what Vera discovered is both more specific and more profound than the dark matter paradigm it helped to create. What she discovered observationally is that rotation curves are very nearly flat, and continue to be so to indefinitely large radius. Over and over again, for every galaxy in the sky. It is a law of nature for galaxies, akin to Kepler’s laws for planets. Dark matter is an inference, a subsidiary result. It is just one possible interpretation, a subset of amazing and seemingly unlikely possibilities opened up by her discovery."

"I think of the time that Vera and I were spending in cold telescope domes, the wind blowing, coyotes howling off on the mesa, we would have been happy to have a warm room to sit in, whether it was in Flagstaff or a lab back home."

"It is very possible that a proper understanding of string theory will make the space-time continuum melt away.... String theory is a miracle through and through."

"Vibrating strings in 10 dimensions is just a weird fact... An explanation of that weird fact would tell you why there are 10 dimensions in the first place."

"I don't think that any physicist would have been clever enough to have invented string theory on purpose... Luckily, it was invented by accident."

"String theory is extremely attractive because gravity is forced upon us. All known consistent string theories include gravity, so while gravity is impossible in quantum field theory as we have known it, it is obligatory in string theory."

"Most people who haven't been trained in physics probably think of what physicists do as a question of incredibly complicated calculations, but that's not really the essence of it. The essence of it is that physics is about concepts, wanting to understand the concepts, the principles by which the world works."

"Quantum mechanics... developed through some rather messy, complicated processes stimulated by experiment. While it's a very rich and wonderful theory, it doesn't quite have the conceptual foundation of general relativity. Our problem in physics is that everything is based on these two different theories and when we put them together we get nonsense."

"In Newton's day the problem was to write something which was correct - he never had the problem of writing nonsense, but by the twentieth century we have a rich conceptual framework with relativity and quantum mechanics and so on. In this framework it's difficult to do things which are even internally coherent, much less correct. Actually, that's fortunate in the sense that it's one of the main tools we have in trying to make progress in physics. Physics has progressed to a domain where experiment is a little difficult... Nevertheless, the fact that we have a rich logical structure which constrains us a lot in terms of what is consistent, is one of the main reasons we are still able to make advances."

"String theory at its finest is, or should be, a new branch of geometry. ...I, myself, believe rather strongly that the proper setting for string theory will prove to be a suitable elaboration of the geometrical ideas upon which Einstein based general relativity."

"I think one has to regard it as a long term process. One has to remember that String theory, if you choose to date it from the Veneziano model, is already eighteen years old... that quantum electrodynamic theory towards which Planck was heading [in 1900], took fifty years to emerge."

"I would expect that a proper elucidation of what string theory really is all about would involve a revolution in our concepts of the basic laws of physics - similar in scope to any that occurred in the past."

"It's been said that string theory is part of the physics of the twenty-first century that fell by chance into the twentieth century. That's a remark that was made by a leading physicist about fifteen years ago. ...String theory was invented essentially by accident in a long series of events, starting with the Veneziano model... No one invented it on purpose, it was invented in a lucky accident. ...By rights, string theory shouldn't have been invented until our knowledge of some of the areas that are prerequisite... had developed to the point that it was possible for us to have the right concept of what it is all about."

"It was clear that if I didn't spend the rest of my life concentrating on string theory, I would simply be missing my life's calling."

"Even though it is, properly speaking, a postprediction, in the sense that the experiment was made before the theory, the fact that gravity is a consequence of string theory, to me, is one of the greatest theoretical insights ever."

"Good wrong ideas are extremely scarce... and good wrong ideas that even remotely rival the majesty of string theory have never been seen."

"Generally speaking, all the really great ideas of physics are really spin-offs of string theory... Some of them were discovered first, but I consider that a mere accident of the development on planet earth. On planet earth, they were discovered in this order [general relativity, quantum field theory, superstrings, and supersymmetry]... But I don't believe, if there are many civilizations in the universe, that those four ideas were discovered in that order in each civilization."

"If supersymmetry plays the role in physics that we suspect it does, then it is very likely to be discovered by the next generation of particle accelerators, either at Fermilab... or at CERN... Discovery of supersymmetry would be one of the real milestones in physics, made even more exciting by its close links to still more ambitious theoretical ideas. Indeed, supersymmetry is one of the basic requirements of "string theory," which is the framework in which theoretical physicists have had some success in unifying gravity with the rest of the elementary particle forces. Discovery of supersymmetry would would certainly give string theory an enormous boost."

"Just around the same time that the string picture was formed, asymptotic freedom was discovered and made possible, in QCD, a more precise and successful theory of the strong interactions. Yet there has always been a striking analogy between QCD and string theory. If the hypothesis of quark confinement in QCD is true in its usual form, than a widely separated quark and antiquark are joined by a “color flux tube.” This has an obvious analogy to the notion of a meson as a string with charges at its ends, as assumed in string theory. Explaining this analogy would mean understanding quark confinement. This would be quite a nice achievement, since it is a longstanding sore point in theoretical physics that despite real experiments and computer simulations supporting the quark confinement hypothesis and despite a lot of ingenious work explaining qualitative criteria for quark confinement and why this notion is natural, there is no convincing, pencil and paper demonstration of quark confinement in QCD."

"Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle."

"It was found [in the 1970s], unexpectedly and without anyone really having a concept for it, that the rules of perturbation theory can be changed in a way that makes relativistic quantum gravity inevitable rather than impossible. The change is made by replacing point particles by strings. Then Feynman graphs are replaced by Riemann surfaces, which are smooth - unlike the graphs, which have singularities at interaction vertices. The Riemann surfaces can degenerate to graphs in many different ways. In field theory, the interactions occur at the vertices of a Feynman graph. By contrast, in string theory, the interaction is encoded globally, in the topology of a Riemann surface, any small piece of which is like any other. This is reminiscent of how non-linearities are encoded globally in twistor theory."

"Replacing particles by strings is a naive-sounding step, from which many other things follow. In fact, replacing Feynman graphs by Riemann surfaces has numerous consequences: 1. It eliminates the infinities from the theory. ...2. It greatly reduces the number of possible theories. ...3. It gives the first hint that string theory will change our notions of spacetime. Just as in QCD, so also in gravity, many of the interesting questions cannot be answered in perturbation theory. In string theory, to understand the nature of the Big Bang, or the quantum fate of a black hole, or the nature of the vacuum state that determines the properties of the elementary particles, requires information beyond perturbation theory... Perturbation theory is not everything. It is just the way the [string] theory was discovered."

"We know a lot of things, but what we don't know is a lot more."

"... one thing that's worth mentioning, though, it that apart from the dream of understanding physics at a deeper level involving gravity, work in string theory has been useful in shedding lights on more conventional problems in quantum field theory and even in and as well with applications to mathematics. Apart from its intrinsic interest, those successes are one of the things that tend to give us confidence that we're on the right track. Because, speaking personally, I find it implausible that a completely wrong new physics theory would give rise to useful insights about so many different areas."

"The past decade has seen a remarkable renaissance in the interaction between mathematics and physics. This has been mainly due to the increasingly sophisticated mathematical models employed by elementary particle physicists, and the consequent need to use the appropriate mathematical machinery. In particular, because of the strongly non-linear nature of the theories involved, topological ideas and methods have played a prominent part. ... In all this large and exciting field, which involves many of the leading physicists and mathematicians in the world, Edward Witten stands out clearly as the most influential and dominating figure. Although he is clearly a physicist (as his list of publications clearly shows) his command of mathematics is rivalled by few mathematicians, and his ability to interpret physical ideas in mathematical form is quite unique. Time and again he has suprised the mathematical community by a brilliant application of physical insight leading to new and deep mathematical ideas."

"For example, Ed Witten recently derived a formula for Donaldson invariants on Kähler manifolds using a twisted version of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory in four dimensions. His argument depends on the existence of a mass gap, cluster decomposition, spontaneous symmetry breaking, asymptotic freedom, and gluino condensation."

"In the spring of 1985 Ed Witten, one of the most brilliant of young physicists at Princeton University, announced that he would give a talk. ...it was clear that this talk would be an extraordinary occasion. ...our seminar room was packed with people, some old and famous, some young, all eager with expectations. Witten spoke very fast for an hour and a half without stopping. It was a dazzling display of virtuosity. It was also, as Witten remarked quietly at the end, a new theory of the universe. ...When Witten came to the end... The listeners sat silent. ...There were no questions. Not one of us was brave enough to stand up and reveal the depths of our ignorance. ...I describe this scene because it gives a picture of what it means to explore the universe at the highest level of abstraction. Ed Witten is taking a big chance. He has moved so far into abstraction that few even of his friends know what he is talking about. ...He did not invent superstrings. ...Ed Witten's role is to build superstrings into a mathematical structure which reflects to an impressive extent the observed structure of particles and fields in the universe. After they heard him speak, many members of his audience went back to their desks and did the homework they should have done before, reading his papers and learning his language. The next time he talks, we shall understand him better. Next time, we shall perhaps be brave enough to ask questions."

"Witten's excitement arose from the fact that the theory passed several crucial tests which other theories had failed. To have found a theory of the universe which is not mathematically self-contradictory is already a considerable achievement."

"Our Witten, which art in Princeton, Hallowed be thy name. Thy Nobel come, Thy will be done, In CERN as it is in the US. Give us this day our daily string, And forgive us our theory, As we forgive those who do phenomenology. Lead us not into experiment, And deliver us from tests. For thine is the arXiv, Hep-th and math-AG, For ever and ever, Amen"

"Enter superstring theory. The concept that particles are really tiny strings dates from the 1960s, but it took on wings in 1974, when John Schwarz... and Joel Scherk... came to terms with what had been an ugly blemish in their calculations. String theory kept predicting the existence of a particle with zero mass and a spin of two. Schwarz and Scherk realized that this unwelcome particle was nothing other than the graviton, the quantum carrier of gravitational force (Although there is no quantum theory of gravity yet, it is possible to specify some of the characteristics of the quantum particle thought to convey it.) This was liberating: The calculations were saying not only that string theory might be the way to a fully unified account of all particles and forces but that one could not write a string theory without incorporating gravity. Ed Witten... recalled that this new constituted "the greatest intellectual thrill of my life.""

"In the high carrels of theoretical physics, where intelligence is taken for granted, Witten is regarded as preternaturally, almost forbiddingly, smart. ...he wears the habitual small smile of the theoretician for whom sustained mathematical thinking has something like the emotional qualities that mystics associate with meditation. He speaks in a soft, high-pitched voice, floating short, precise sentences punctuated by witty little silences—the speech pattern of a man who has learned that he thinks too fast to otherwise be understood. Though he is the son of a theoretical physicist, he came to science in a roundabout fashion."

"The Theory of Everything, if you dare be bold, Might be something more than a string orbifold. While some of your leaders have got old and sclerotic, Not to be trusted alone with things heterotic, Please heed our advice that you are not smitten— The Book is not finished, the last word is not Witten."

"A crucial observation, central to the second superstring revolution initiated by Witten and others in 1995, is that string theory actually includes ingredients with a variety of different dimensions: two-dimensional Frisbee-like constituents, three-dimensional blob-like constituents, and even more exotic possibilities to boot."

"In the mid-1990s, Witten, based on his own insights and previous work by Michael Duff... and Chris Hull and Paul Townsend... gave convincing evidence that... String theory... to most string theorists' amazement, actually requires ten space dimensions and one time dimension, for a total of eleven dimensions."

"Edward Witten is fond of declaring that string theory had already made a dramatic and experimentally confirmed prediction: "String theory had the remarkable property of predicting gravity." What Witten means by this is that both Newton and Einstein developed theories of gravity because their observations of the world clearly showed them that gravity exists, and that, therefore, it required an accurate and consistent explanation. On the contrary, a physicist studying string theory—even if he or she was completely unaware of general relativity—would be inexorably led to it by the string framework."

"Work by Strominger and Witten showed that the masses of the particles in each family depend upon... the way in which the boundaries of the various multidimensional holes in the Calabi-Yau shape intersect and overlap with one another. ...as strings vibrate through the extra curled-up dimensions, the precise arrangement of the various holes and the way in which the Calabi-Yau shape folds around them has a direct impact on the possible resonant patterns of vibration. ...as with the number of families, string theory can provide us with a framework for answering questions—such as why the electron and other particles have the masses they do—on which previous theories are completely silent. ...carrying through with such calculations requires that we know which Calabi-Yau space to take for the extra dimensions."

"In the mid-1980s Philip Candelas, Gary Horowitz, Andrew Strominger, and Edward Witten... discovered that each hole—the term used in a precisely defined mathematical sense—contained within the Calabi-Yau shape gives rise to a family of lowest-energy string vibrational patterns. ...among these preferred Calabi-Yau shapes are ones that also yield just the right number of messenger particles as well as just the right electric charges and nuclear force properties to match the particles [listed in the book] ..."

"In the spring of 1995... Drawing on the work of a number of string theorists (including Chris Hull, Paul Townsend, Ashoke Sen, Michael Duff, John Schwarz and many others), Edward Witten—who for decades has been the world's most renowned string theorist—uncovered a hidden unity that tied all five string theories together. Witten showed that rather than being distinct, the five theories are actually just five different ways of mathematically analyzing a single theory. ...The unifying master theory has tentatively been called M-theory."

"Much as Kaluza found that a universe with five spacetime dimensions provided a framework for unifying electromagnetism and gravity, and much as string theorists found that a universe with ten spacetime dimensions provided a framework for unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity, Witten found that a universe with eleven spacetime dimensions provided a framework for unifying all string theories."

"Between sessions at a physics conference, I asked a number of attendees: Who is the smartest physicist of them all? ...the name mentioned most often was Witten's. He seemed to evoke a special kind of awe, as though he belonged to a category unto himself. He is often likened to Einstein; one colleague reached even further back for a comparison, suggesting that Witten possessed the greatest mathematical mind since Newton."

"Edward Witten... dominates the world of theoretical physics. Witten is currently the "leader of the pack," the most brilliant high-energy physicist, who sets trends in the physics community the way Picasso would set trends in the art world. Hundreds of physicists follow his work religiously to get a glimmer of his path-breaking ideas."

"The boundaries of physics have been changing. Now scientists ask not only how the world works (a question the Standard Model answers) but why it works that way (a question the Standard Model cannot answer). Einstein asked "why" earlier in the century, but only in the past decade or so have the "why" questions become normal scientific research in particle physics, rather than philosophical afterthoughts. One ambitious approach to "why" is known as string theory, which is formulated in an eleven-dimensional world. Work on string theory has proceeded so far by study of the theory itself, rather than via the historical fruitful interplay of experiment and theory. As Edward Witten remarks... string theory predicts that nature should be supersymmetric. Supersymmetry is a surprising and subtle idea—the idea that the equations representing basic laws of nature don't change if certain particles in the equations are interchanged with one another."

"He never does calculations except in his mind. I will fill pages with calculations before I understand what I'm doing. But Edward will sit down only to calculate a minus sign, or a factor of two."

"The positive energy theorem was for half a century or more an open challenge to relativists. Many attempts were made to prove flat spacetime was stable, but none completely succeeded completely until a majestic tour de force of geometric reasoning of Shoen and Yau. This was followed two years later by a proof of Witten, which was as elegant as it was short. It is this proof of Witten’s that we take as a template... for the quantum theory."

"We shouldn't toss comparisons to Einstein around too frequently, but when it comes to Witten... He's head and shoulder above the rest. He's started whole groups of people on new paths. He produces elegant, breathtaking proofs which people gasp at, which leave them in awe."

"My stay was nearly over when one day Ed Witten said to me, "I just learnt a new way to find exact S-matrices in two dimensions invented by Zamolodchikov and I want to extend the ideas to supersymmetric models. You are the S-matrix expert, aren't you? Why don't we work together?" I was delighted. All my years of training in Berkeley gave me a tremendous advantage over Ed—for an entire week."

"The MacArthur Foundation chose Witten in 1982 for one of its earliest “genius” grants, and he is probably the only person that virtually everyone in the theoretical physics community would agree deserves the genius label. He has received a wide array of honors, including the most prestigious award in mathematics, the Fields Medal, in 1990. The strange situation of the most talented person in theoretical physics having received the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel Prize, but no actual Nobel Prize in physics, indicates both how unusual a figure Witten is, and also how unusual the relationship between mathematics and physics has become in recent years. When I was a graduate student at Princeton, one day I was leaving the library perhaps thirty feet or so behind Witten. The library was underneath a large plaza separating the mathematics and physics buildings, and he went up the stairs to the plaza ahead of me, disappearing from view. When I reached the plaza he was nowhere to be seen, and it is quite a bit more than thirty feet to the nearest building entrance. While presumably he was just moving a lot faster than I was, it crossed my mind at the time that a consistent explanation for everything was that Witten was an extraterrestrial being from a superior race who, since he thought no one was watching, had teleported back to his office. More seriously, Witten’s accomplishments are very much a product of the combination of a huge talent and a lot of hard work. His papers are uniformly models of clarity and of deep thinking about a problem, of a sort that very few people can match. Anyone who has taken the time to try to understand even a fraction of his work finds it a humbling experience to see just how much he has been able to achieve. He is also a refreshing change from some of the earlier generations of famous particle theorists, who could be very entertaining, but at the same time were often rather insecure and not known always to treat others well."

"After Einstein’s dramatic success with general relativity in 1915, he devoted most of the rest of his career to a fruitless attempt to unify electromagnetism and gravity using the sorts of geometric techniques that had worked in the case of general relativity. We now can see that this research program was seriously misguided, because Einstein was ignoring the lessons of quantum mechanics. To understand electromagnetism fully one must deal with quantum field theory and QED in one way or another, and Einstein steadfastly refused to do this, continuing to believe that a theory of classical fields could somehow be made to do everything. Einstein chose to ignore quantum mechanics despite its great successes, hoping that it could somehow be made to go away. If Witten had been in Einstein’s place, I doubt that he would have made this mistake, since he is someone who has always remained very involved in whatever lines of research are popular in the rest of the theoretical community. On the other hand, this example does show that genius is no protection against making the mistake of devoting decades of one’s life to an idea that has no chance of success."

"Science knows no boundaries, and efforts to create barriers – whether to keep new ideas within or to prevent new ones from entering from the outside – have universally proved harmful to progress."

"Origami helps in the study of mathematics and science in many ways. … Using origami anyone can become a scientific experimenter with no fuss."

"Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise."

"The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data."

"The tool that is so dull that you cannot cut yourself on it is not likely to be sharp enough to be either useful or helpful."

"It is electromagnetism (EM) in all its many forms that has been so basic, that haunts us and guides us."

"This fact, that all charges are integral multiples of a fundamental unit, is still one of the unexplained puzzles of fundamental physics. It does not in any way contradict electromagnetic theory, but it is not predicted by it, and until we have a more fundamental theory that explains it, we shall not feel that we really understand electromagnetic phenomena thoroughly. Presumably its explanation will not come until we understand quantum theory more thoroughly than we do at present."

"The earth’s atmosphere is an imperfect window on the universe. Electromagnetic waves in the optical part of the spectrum (that is waves longer than X rays and shorter than radio waves) penetrate to the surface of the earth only in a few narrow spectral bands The widest of the transmitted bands corresponds roughly to the colors of visible light waves in the flanking ultraviolet and infrared regions of the optical spectrum are almost totally absorbed by the atmosphere. In addition atmospheric turbulence blurs the images of celestial objects even when they are viewed through the most powerful ground-based telescopes in an article promoting the construction of the Hubble Space Telescope."

"Every time we get slapped down, we can say, Thank you Mother Nature, because it means we're about to learn something important."

"We often frame our understanding of what the space telescope will do in terms of what we expect to find, and actually it would be terribly anticlimactic if in fact we find what we expect to find. … The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined."

"The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects that we can not yet imagine."

"John Bahcall, an astronomer on the Institute of Advanced Study faculty since 1970 likes to tell the story of his first faculty dinner when he found himself seated across from Kurt Gödel a man dedicated to logic and the clean certainties of mathematical abstraction Bahcall introduced himself and mentioned that he was a physicist Gödel replied“I don’t believe in natural science."

"A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library."

", to Frank Westheimer on presenting an idea: (Harvard Gazette)"

"Moving forward in science is as much unwinding the distorted thinking of the past as it is putting a clearer idea on the table."

"I think from my experience in war and life and science, it all has made me believe that we have one life on this planet. We have one chance to live it and to contribute to the future of society and the future of life. The only "afterlife" is what other people remember of you."

"I could trace own EST brainwave to a flight back from a trip to Japan. But, of course, great ideas are often simultaneously conceived by several people who have responded in a similar way to the climate of thinking, and it can be hard to pin down when and precisely how a flash of inspiration is born. Kaplan had taught me that good ideas are a dime of dozen for a smart person, and the only thing that distinguishes good from great is in how an idea is executed—how it becomes reality. Scientific history is littered with stories of one person having an idea but not following through on it only to see another have a similar inspiration and then prove it to be valid."

"At the hearing I not only described the EST method and the rapid rate of human gene discovery but also voiced by concerns about NIH's patent efforts, a subject I was glad to get out in the open. The room went quiet as many were startled by this discovery and then Watson suddenly shouted that it was "sheer lunacy" to file such patents, adding that "virtually any monkey" could use the EST method and that he was "horrified." As Cook-Deegan, a Duke University genome discussant, described the event, "Watson was lying in wait and took aim with heavy artillery." Cook-Deegan, who was Watson's assistant at the time, told me later that Watson had practiced the lines for a week prior to the hearing."

"Tenure actually delivers a doubly whammy to the organizations that endure this outmoded arrangement. The second-rate people who thrive in a tenured environment like nothing more than to surround themselves with more mediocrity and drive out those who might excel and reveal the shortcomings of the entrenched."

"Self-belief does not necessarily ensure success, but self-disbelief assuredly spawns failure."

"If self-efficacy is lacking, people tend to behave ineffectually, even though they know what to do."

"Persons who have a strong sense of efficacy deploy their attention and effort to the demands of the situation and are spurred by obstacles to greater effort."

"Bandura’s findings were particularly important in 1960s America, when lawmakers, broadcasters, and the general public were engaged in serious debate regarding the effects of television violence on the behavior of children."

"Discovery in mathematics is not a matter of logic. It is rather the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and in which unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs, a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty's sake and pulls it down to earth."

"The creative scientist lives in a 'wildness of logic,' where reason is the handmaiden and not the master."

"Number theory swarms with bugs, waiting to bite the tempted flower-lovers who, once bitten, are inspired to excesses of effort!"

"Sometimes the mathematical anti-Platonist believes that headway is made by showing Platonism to be unsupportable by rational means, and that it is an incoherent position to take when formulated in a propositional vocabulary. It is easy enough to throw together propositional sentences. But it is a good deal more difficult to capture a Platonic disposition in a propositional formulation that is a full and honest expression of some flesh-and-blood mathematician’s view of things. There is, of course, no harm in trying—and maybe its a good exercise. But even if we cleverly came up with a proposition that is up to the task of expressing Platonism formally, the mere fact that the proposition cannot be demonstrated to be true won’t necessarily make it vanish. There are many things—some true, some false— unsupportable by rational means."

"Hodge cohomology, algebraic de Rham cohomology, crystalline cohomology, the étale ℓ-adic cohomology theories for each prime number ℓ ... A strategy to encapsulate all the different cohomology theories in algebraic geometry was formulated initially by Alexandre Grothendieck, who is responsible for setting up much of this marvelous cohomological machinery in the first place. Grothendieck sought a single theory that is cohomological in nature that acts as a gateway between algebraic geometry and the assortment of special cohomological theories, such as the ones listed above—that acts as the motive behind all this cohomological apparatus. ..."

"Vladimir Voevodsky and his collaborators have provided us with a very interesting candidate-category of motives: a category (of sheaves relative to an extraordinarily fine Grothendieck-style topology on the category of schemes) which in some intuitive sense “softens algebraic geometry” so as to allow for a good notion of homotopy in an algebro-geometric setup and is sufficiently directly connected to concrete algebraic geometry to have already yielded some extraordinary applications. The quest for a full theory of motives is a potent driving force in complex analysis, algebraic geometry, automorphic representation theory, the study of L functions, and arithmetic. It will continue to be so throughout the current century."

"Mazur suggests that it’s possible to glimpse the essence of Grothendieck’s approach to mathematics by looking at two concepts—categories and functors. A category can be thought of almost as a grammar: take triangles, perhaps, and understand them in terms of their relationship to all other triangles. The category consists of objects, and relationships between objects. The objects are nouns and the relationships are verbs, and the category is all the ways in which they can interact. Grothendieck’s discoveries opened up mathematics in a way that was analogous to how Wittgenstein (and Saussure) changed our views of language."

"The Cooperation Theory that is presented in this book is based upon an investigation of individuals who pursue their own self-interest without the aid of a central authority to force them to cooperate with each other. The reason for assuming self-interest is that it allows an examination of the difficult case in which cooperation is not completely based upon a concern for others or upon the welfare of the group as a whole. It must, however, be stressed that this assumption is actually much less restrictive than it appears."

"What makes it possible for cooperation to emerge is the fact that the players might meet again. This possibility means that the choices made today not only determine the outcome of this move, but can also influence the later choices of the players. The future can therefore cast a shadow back upon the present and thereby affect the current strategic situation. But the future is less important than the present-for two reasons. The first is that players tend to value payoffs less as the time of their obtainment recedes into the future. The second is that there is always some chance that the players will not meet again. An ongoing relationship may end when one or the other player moves away, changes jobs, dies, or goes bankrupt. For these reasons, the payoff of the next move always counts less than the payoff of the current move."

"In fact, in the Prisoner's Dilemma, the strategy that works best depends directly on what strategy the other player is using and, in particular, on whether this strategy leaves room for the development of mutual cooperation. This principle is based on the weight of the next move relative to the current move being sufHciently large to make the future important."

"Proposition 1. If the discount parameter, w, is sufficiently high, there is no best strategy independent of the strategy used by the other player."

"In addition, TIT FOR TAT was known to be a powerful competitor. In a preliminary tournament, TIT FOR TAT scored second place; and in a variant of that preliminary tournament, TIT FOR TAT won first place. All of these facts were known to most of the people designing programs for the Computer Prisoner's Dilemma Tournament, because they were sent copies of a description of the preliminary tournament. Not surprisingly, many of them used the TIT FOR TAT principle and tried to improve upon it. The striking fact is that none of the more complex programs submitted was able to perform as well as the original, simple TIT FOR TAT."

"What accounts for TIT FOR TAT's robust success is its combination of being nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear. Its niceness prevents it from getting into unnecessary trouble. Its retaliation discourages the other side from persisting whenever defection is tried. Its forgiveness helps restore mutual cooperation. And its clarity makes it intelligible to the other player, thereby eliciting long-term cooperation."

"Proposition 2. TIT FOR TAT is collectively stable if and only if, w is large enough. This critical value of w is a function of the four payoff parameters, T; R, P, and S."

"Proposition 3. Any strategy which may be the first to cooperate can be collectively stable only when w is sufficiently large."

"Proposition 4. For a nice strategy to be collectively stable, it must be provoked by the very first defection of the other player."

"Proposition 5. ALL D is always collectively stable."

"Proposition 6. The strategies which can invade ALL D in a cluster with the smallest value of p are those which are maximally discriminating, such as TIT FOR TAT."

"Proposition 7. If a nice strategy cannot be invaded by a single individual, it cannot be invaded by any cluster of individuals either."

"Thus cooperation can emerge even in a world of unconditional defection. The development cannot take place if it is tried only by scattered individuals who have no chance to interact with each other. But cooperation can emerge from small clusters of discriminating individuals, as long as these individuals have even a small proportion of their interactions with each other. Moreover, if nice strategies (those which are never the first to defect) come to be adopted by virtually everyone, then those individuals can afford to be generous in dealing with any others. By doing so well with each other, a population of nice rules can protect themselves against clusters of individuals using any other strategy just as well as they can protect themselves against single individuals. But for a nice strategy to be stable in the collective sense, it must be provocable. So mutual cooperation can emerge in a world of egoists without central control by starting with a cluster of individuals who rely on reciprocity."

"Just as important as getting cooperation started were the conditions that allowed it to be sustainable. The strategies that could sustain mutual cooperation were the ones which were provocable."

"The cooperative exchanges of mutual restraint actually changed the nature of the interaction. They tended to make the two sides care about each other's welfare. This change can be interpreted in terms of the Prisoner's Dilemma by saying' that the very experience of sustained mutual cooperation altered the payoffs of the players, making mutual cooperation even more valued than it was before."

"The live-and-let-live system that emerged in the bitter trench warfare of World War I demonstrates that friendship is hardly necessary for cooperation based upon reciprocity to get started. Under suitable circumstances, cooperation can develop even between antagonists."

"The theory of biological evolution is based on the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest. Yet cooperation is common between members of the same species and even between members of different species. Before about 1960, accounts of the evolutionary process largely dismissed cooperative phenomena as not requiring special attention. This dismissal followed from a misreading of theory that assigned most adaptation to selection at the level of populations or whole species. As a result of such misreading, cooperation was always considered adaptive. Recent reviews of the evolutionary process, however, have shown no sound basis for viewing selection as being based upon benefits to whole groups. Quite the contrary. At the level of a species or a population, the processes of selection are weak. The original individualistic emphasis of Darwin's theory is more valid."

"In this chapter Darwin's emphasis on individual advantage has been formalized in terms of game theory. This formulation establishes conditions under which cooperation in biological systems based on reciprocity can evolve even without foresight by the participants."

"The advice takes the form of four simple suggestions for how to do well in a durable iterated Prisoner's Dilemma:1. Don't be envious. 2. Don't be the first to defect. 3. Reciprocate both cooperation and defection. 4. Don't be too clever."

"So in a non-zero-sum world you do not have to do better than the other player to do well for yourself. This is especially true when you are interacting with many different players. Letting each of them do the same or a little better than you is fine, as long as you tend to do well yourself. There is no point in being envious of the success of the other player, since in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma of long duration the other's success is virtually a prerequisite of your doing well for yourself."

"Will there be anyone out there to reciprocate one's own initial cooperation? In some circumstances this will be hard to tell in advance. But if there has been enough time for many different strategies to be tried, and for some way of making the more successful strategies become more common, then one can be fairly confident that there will be individuals out there who will reciprocate cooperation. The reason is that even a relatively small cluster of discriminating nice rules can invade a population of meanies, and then thrive on their good scores with each other. And once nice rules get a foothold they can protect themselves from reinvasion by meanies."

"The extraordinary success of TIT FOR TAT leads to some simple, but powerful advice: practice reciprocity. After cooperating on the first move, TIT FOR TAT simply reciprocates whatever the other player did on the previous move. This simple rule is amazingly robust. It won the first round of the Computer Tournament for the Prisoner's Dilemma by attaining a higher average score than any other entry submitted by professional game theorists. And when this result was publicized for the contestants in the second round, TIT FOR TAT won again. The victory was obviously a surprise, since anyone could have submitted it to the second round after seeing its success in the first round. But obviously people hoped they could do better-and they were wrong."

"The tournament results show that in a Prisoner's Dilemma situation it is easy to be too clever. The very sophisticated rules did not do better than the simple ones. In fact, the so-called maximizing rules often did poorly because they got into a rut of mutual defection. A common problem with these rules is that they used complex methods of making inferences about the other player-and these inferences were wrong. Part of the problem was that a trial defection by the other player was often taken to imply that the other player could not be enticed into cooperation. But the heart of the problem was that these maximizing rules did not take into account that their own behavior would lead the other player to change."

"Once again, there is an important contrast between a zero-sum game like chess and a non-zero-sum game like the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. In chess, it is useful to keep the other player guessing about your intentions. The more the other player is in doubt, the less efficient will be his or her strategy. Keeping one's intentions hidden is useful in a zero-sum setting where any inefficiency in the other player's behavior will be to your benefit. But in a non-zero-sum setting it does not always pay to be so clever. In the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, you benefit from the other player's cooperation. The trick is to encourage that cooperation. A good way to do it is to make it clear that you will reciprocate. Words can help here, but as everyone knows, actions speak louder than words. That is why the easily understood actions of TIT FOR TAT are so effective."

"1. Enlarge the shadow of the future Mutual cooperation can be stable if the future is sufficiently important relative to the present. This is because the players can each use an implicit threat of retaliation against the other's defection-if the interaction will last long enough to make the threat effective. Seeing how this works in a numerical example will allow the formulation of the alternative methods that can enlarge the shadow of the future."

"2. Change the payoffs A common reaction of someone caught in a Prisoner's Dilemma is that "there ought to be a law against this sort of thing." In fact, getting out of Prisoner's Dilemmas is one of the primary functions of government: to make sure that when individuals do not have private incentives to cooperate, they will be required to do the socially useful thing anyway. Laws are passed to cause people to pay their taxes, not to steal, and to honor contracts with strangers. Each of these activities could be regarded as a giant Prisoner's Dilemma game with many players."

"3. Teach people to care about each other An excellent way to promote cooperation in a society is to teach people to care about the welfare of others. Parents and schools devote a tremendous effort to teaching the young to value the happiness of others."

"4. Teach reciprocity TIT FOR TAT may be an effective strategy for an egoist to use, but is it a moral strategy for a person or a country to follow? The answer depends, of course, on one's standard for morality. Perhaps the most widely accepted moral standard is the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Golden Rule would seem to imply that you should always cooperate, since cooperation is what you want from the other player. This interpretation suggests that the best strategy from the point of view of morality is the strategy of unconditional cooperation rather than TIT FOR TAT. The problem with this view is that turning the other cheek provides an incentive for the other player to exploit you. Unconditional cooperation can not only hurt you, but it can hurt other innocent bystanders with whom the successful exploiters will interact later. Unconditional cooperation tends to spoil the other player; it leaves a burden on the rest of the community to reform the spoiled player, suggesting that reciprocity is a better foundation for morality than is unconditional cooperation."

"5. Improve recognition abilities The ability to recognize the other player from past interactions, and to remember the relevant features of those interactions, is necessary to sustain cooperation. Without these abilities, a player could not use any form of reciprocity and hence could not encourage the other to cooperate."

"Four factors are examined which can give rise to interesting types of social structure: labels, reputation, regulation, and territoriality. A label is a fixed characteristic of a player, such as sex or skin color, which can be observed by the other player. It can give rise to stable forms of stereotyping and status hierarchies. The reputation of a player is malleable and comes into being when another player has information about the strategy that the first one has employed with other players. Reputations give rise to a variety of phenomena. including incentives to establish a reputation as a bully, and incentives to deter others from being bullies. Regulation is a relationship between a government and the governed. Governments cannot rule only through deterrence, but must instead achieve the voluntary compliance of the majority of the governed. Therefore regulation gives rise to the problems of just how stringent the rules and the enforcement procedures should be. Finally, territoriality occurs when players interact with their neighbors rather than with just anyone. It can give rise to fascinating patterns of behavior as strategies spread through a population."

"The advice in chapter 6 to players of the Prisoner's Dilemma might serve as good advice to national leaders as well: don't be envious, don't be the first to defect, reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and don't be too clever. Likewise, the techniques discussed in chapter 7 for promoting cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma might also be useful in promoting cooperation in international politics. The core of the problem of how to achieve rewards from cooperation is that trial and error in learning is slow and painful. The conditions may all be favorable for long-run developments. but we may not have the time to wait for blind processes to move us slowly toward mutually rewarding strategies based upon reciprocity. Perhaps if we understand the process better, we can use our foresight to speed up the evolution of cooperation."

"The two-person iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is the E. coli of the social sciences, allowing a very large variety of studies to be undertaken in a common framework."

"Throughout the social sciences today, the dominant form of modeling is based upon the rational-choice paradigm. Game theory, in particular, is typically based upon the assumption of rational choice. In my view, the reason for the dominance of the rational-choice approach is not that scholars think it is realistic. Nor is game theory used solely because it offers good advice to a decision maker, because its unrealistic assumptions undermine much of its value as a basis for advice."

"A moral of the story is that models that aim to explore fundamental processes should be judged by their fruitfulness, not by their accuracy. For this purpose, realistic representation of many details is unnecessary and even counterproductive."

"In complex environments, individuals are not fully able to analyze the situation and calculate their optimal strategy. Instead they can be expected to adapt their strategy over time based upon what has been effective and what has not."

"Tournament studies, ecological simulation, and theoretical analysis demonstrate: (1) A generous version of tit for tat is a highly effective strategy when the players it meets have not adapted to noise; (2) If the other players have adapted to noise, a contrite version of tit for tat is even more effective at quickly restoring mutual cooperation without the risk of exploitation; (3) Pavlov is not robust."

"A major goal of investigating how cooperative norms in societal settings have been established is a better understanding of how to promote cooperative norms in international settings. This is not as utopian as it might seem because international norms against slavery and colonialism are already strong, while international norms are partly effective against racial discrimination, chemical warfare, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Because norms sometimes become established surprisingly quickly, there may be some useful cooperative norms that could be hurried along with relatively modest interventions."

"Aggregation means the organization of elements of a system into patterns that tend to put highly compatible elements together and less compatible elements apart. Landscape theory predicts how aggregation will lead to alignments among actors (such as nations), whose leaders are myopic in their assessments and incremental in their actions. The predicted configurations are based upon the attempts of actors to minimize their frustration based upon their pairwise propensities to align with some actors and oppose others. These attempts lead to a local minimum in the energy landscape of the entire system. The theory is supported by the results of the alignment of seventeen European nations in the Second World War. The theory has potential for application to coalitions of business firms, political parties in parliaments, social networks, social cleavages in democracies, and organizational structures."

"In this essay, we have developed and illustrated an approach for predicting the membership of alliances among firms developing and sponsoring products requiring technical standardization. We started with two simple and plausible assumptions, that a firm prefers (1) to join a large standardsetting alliance in order to increase the probability of successfully sponsoring a compatibility standard, and (2) to avoid allying with rivals in order to benefit individually from compatibility standards that emerge from the alliance’s efforts. We then defined the concept of utility as an approximation to profit maximization in terms of size and rivalry, and discussed the influences on incentives to ally in order to develop and sponsor standards. We showed that the Nash equilibria are the local minima of an energy function with this type of utility function."

"In the future it would be good to use these conceptual and statistical developments to answer some new questions suggested by the model. For example, the dynamics we have seen in the tribute model suggest the following interesting questions: a. What are the minimal conditions for a new actor to emerge? b. What tends to promote such emergence? c. How are the dynamics affected by the number of elementary actors? d. What can lead to collapse of an aggregate actor? e. How can new actors grow in the shadow of established actors?"

"The social influence model illustrates three fundamental points: 1. Local convergence can lead to global polarization. 2. The interplay between different features of culture can shape the process of social influence. 3. Even simple mechanisms of change can give counterintuitive results, as shown by the present model, in which large territories generate surprisingly little polarization."

"To be believable, an optimism must first acknowledge fundamental reality, including the reality of human nature, but also the nature of all life. Life as we know it, and probably throughout the universe if there is life elsewhere, means Darwinian life. In a Darwinian world, that which survives survives, and the world becomes full of whatever qualities it takes to survive. As Darwinians, we start pessimistically by assuming deep selfishness at the level of natural selection, pitiless indifference to suffering, ruthless attention to individual success at the expense of others. And yet from such warped beginnings, something can come that is in effect, if not necessarily in intention, dose to amicable brotherhood and sisterhood. This is the uplifting message of Robert Axelrod's remarkable book."

"The first American edition of The Evolution of Cooperation was published in 1984. I read it as soon as it appeared, with mounting excitement, and took to recommending it with evangelical zeal, to almost everyone I met. Everyone of the Oxford undergraduates I tutored in the years following its publication was required to write an essay on Axelrod's book, and it was one of the essays they most enjoyed writing."

"Robert Axelrod's 1980 tournaments of iterated prisoner's dilemma strategies have been condensed into the slogan, Don't be too clever, don't be unfair. Press and Dyson have shown that cleverness and unfairness triumph after all."

"His mathematical prose is simple, spare, and exceedingly beautiful. His prose style is to mathematics what Hemingway's is to English or Simenon's to French."

"Love is a wondrous state, deep, tender, and rewarding. Because of its intimate and personal nature it is regarded by some as an improper topic for experimental research. But, whatever our personal feelings may be, our assigned missions as psychologists is to analyze all facets of human and animal behavior into their component variables. So far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in this mission. The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written better by poets and novelists."

"In our study of psychopathology, we began as sadists trying to produce abnormality. Today, we are psychiatrists trying to achieve normality and equanimity."

"In the first place I have an enormous regard for common sense. Any time we discover some great thing and it contradicts common sense, we better go back to the laboratory and check it."

"The only thing I care about is whether a monkey will turn out a property I can publish. I don't have any love for them. Never have. I don't really like animals. I despise cats. I hate dogs. How could you like monkeys?"

"The effects of 6 months of total social isolation were so devastating and debilitating that we had assumed initially that 12 months of isolation would not produce any additional decrement. This assumption proved to be false; 12 months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially."

"Not even in our most devious dreams could we have designed a surrogate as evil as these real monkey mothers were."

"Because that's how it feels when you're depressed."

"Apathetic Annie was complacent and serene Though suffering from , and But Annie did not really care Though life was nearly gone For Annie had a tumor of the ."

"[Harlow] kept this going to the point where it was clear to many people that the work was really violating ordinary sensibilities, that anybody with respect for life or people would find this offensive. It's as if he sat down and said, 'I'm only going to be around another ten years. What I'd like to do, then, is leave a great big mess behind.' If that was his aim, he did a perfect job."

"Harry Harlow and his colleagues go on torturing their nonhuman primates decade after decade, invariably proving what we all knew in advance: that social creatures can be destroyed by destroying their social ties."

"(W)hereas Milgram’s findings need constant reiteration in every generation, Harlow’s research no longer surprises us. One might say that its very success has made teaching it unnecessary: No one would argue against Harlow’s findings, as many students always want to do with Milgram’s."

"It is well known that in three-dimensional elliptic or spherical geometry the so-called Clifford's parallelism or parataxy has many interesting properties. A group-theoretical reason for the most important of these properties is the fact that the universal covering group of the proper orthogonal group in four variables is the direct product of the universal covering groups of two proper orthogonal groups in three variables. This last-mentioned property has no analogue for orthogonal groups in n (>4) variables. On the other hand, a knowledge of three-dimensional elliptic or spherical geometry is useful for the study of orientable Riemannian manifols of four dimensions, because their tangent spaces possess a geometry of this kind."

"In 1917 Levi-Civita discovered his celebrated parallelism which is an infinitesimal transportation of tangent vectors preserving the scalar product and is the first example of a connection. The salient fact about the Levi-Civita parallelism is the result that it is the parallelism, and not the Riemannian metric, which accounts for most of the properties concerning curvature."

"Integral geometry, started by the English geometer M. W. Crofton, has received recently important developments through the works of W. Blaschke, L. A. Santaló, and others. Generally speaking, its principal aim is to study the relations between the measures which can be attached to a given variety."

"Not all the geometrical structures are "equal". It would seem that the riemannian and complex structures, with their contacts with other fields of mathematics and with their richness in results, should occupy a central position in differential geometry. A unifying idea is the notion of a G-structure, which is the modern version of an equivalence problem first emphasized and exploited in its various special cases by Elie Cartan."

"The main object of study in differential geometry is, at least for the moment, the differential manifolds, structures on the manifolds (Riemannian, complex, or other), and their admissible mappings. On a manifold the coordinates are valid only locally and do not have a geometric meaning themselves."

"The treatises of Darboux (1842–1917) and Bianchi (1856–1928) on surface theory are among the great works in the mathematical literature. They are: G. Darboux, Théorie générale des surfaces, Tome 1 (1887), 2 (1888), 3 (1894), 4 (1896), and later editions and reprints. L. Bianchi. Lezioni di Geometria Differenziale, Pisa 1894; German translation by Lukat, Lehrbuch der Differentialgeometrie, 1899. The subject is basically local surface theory."

"I have no doubt that future historians of differential geometry will rank Chern as the worthly successor of Elie Cartan in that field."

"Recently, having refreshed my understanding of the mathematics of relativity theory, I called one of my old Berkeley professors to ask him some questions about the geometry of general relativity. S. S. Chern is arguably the greatest living geometer. We spoke on the phone for a long time, and he patiently answered all my questions. When I told him I was contemplating writing a book about relativity, cosmology, and geometry and how they interconnect to explain the universe, he said, "It's a wonderful idea for a book, but writing it will surely take too many years of your life ... I wouldn't do it." Then he hung up."

"S. S. Chern revolutionized differential geometry with the use of moving frames, the invention of characteristic classes, the modern concept of a connection and so much more, but he’ll probably always be most remembered for the yellowing University of Chicago mimeographed lecture notes from the 1950s. An entire generation of geometers learned the elements of differentiable manifolds from those notes."

"Don’t be afraid of hard work. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Don’t let others discourage you or tell you that you can’t do it. In my day I was told women didn’t go into chemistry. I saw no reason why we couldn’t."

"People ask me often (was) the Nobel Prize the thing you were aiming for all your life? And I say that would be crazy. Nobody would aim for a Nobel Prize because, if you didn’t get it, your whole life would be wasted. What we were aiming at was getting people well, and the satisfaction of that is much greater than any prize you can get."

"I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of stomach cancer. I decided that nobody should suffer that much."

"This is material that is quite formidable, that is infecting people with inhalation anthrax, infecting them in the absence of direct contact. You can call it whatever you want to call it with regard to grade and size or weaponized or not weaponized. The fact is, it is acting like a highly efficient bioterrorist agent."

"You've got to balance the compassionate-use aspect with trying to figure out whether it works."

"I'd say we have a couple of people who've recovered, they've gotten excellent medical care and the specific therapy, ZMapp … may have had a role in it but we don't know."

"There is no doubt they [Trump administration] will be faced with the challenges their predecessors were faced with ... we will definitely get surprised in the next few years"

"As experience has taught us more often than not the thing that is gonna hit us is something that we did not anticipate. Just the way we didn't anticipate , we didn't think there would be an Ebola that would hit cities. [...] If you develop an understanding of the commonalities of those, you can respond more rapidly."

": Bottom line. We don't have to worry about this one, right?"

"It’s a very, very low risk to the United States, but it’s something that we as public health officials need to take very seriously... It isn’t something the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about. Because we have ways of preparing and screening of people coming in [from China]. And we have ways of responding - like we did with this one case in Seattle, Washington, who had traveled to China and brought back the infection. [...] We’ve just got to make sure that we are totally prepared [since] infectious diseases will continue to emerge on the human species. And we’ve got to be essentially perpetually prepared."

"The only people who need masks are those who are already infected to keep from exposing others. The masks sold at drugstores aren't even good enough to truly protect anyone. If you look at the masks that you buy in a drug store, the leakage around that doesn't really do much to protect you. People start saying, 'Should I start wearing a mask?' Now, in the United States, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask."

"You don't want to go to war with a president [...] There's a temptation that you have to fight to tell the president what you think he wants to hear. I’ve seen really good people do that."

"I don't think that we are going to get out of this completely unscathed, I think that this is going to be one of those things we look back on and say boy, that was bad."

"It could be really, really bad. I don't think it's gonna be, because I think we'd be able to do the kind of mitigation. It could be mild. I don't think it's going to be that mild either. It's really going to depend on how we mobilize."

"It's really, really tough because you have to be honest with the American public and you don't want to scare the hell out of them. And then other times, in attempts to calm people down, [leaders] have had people be complacent about it. This is particularly problematic in a ‘gotcha” town like Washington."

"I feel like I'm 45. And I act like I'm 35. When I start to feel like I don't have the energy to do the job, whatever my age, I’ll walk away and write my book"

"Even before we knew it was a coronavirus, I said it certainly sounds like a coronavirus-SARS type thing. As soon as it was identified, I called a meeting of top-level people and said, 'Let's start working on a vaccine right now.'"

": There’s a lot of confusion among people, and misinformation, surrounding face masks. Can you discuss that?"

"I can't jump in front of the microphone and push him down. OK, he said it. Let's try and get it corrected for the next time."

"One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are -- for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable -- they just don't believe science and they don't believe authority. So when they see someone up in the White House, which has an air of authority to it, who's talking about science, that there are some people who just don't believe that -- and that's unfortunate because, you know, science is truth. It's amazing sometimes the denial there is. It's the same thing that gets people who are anti-vaxxers, who don't want people to get vaccinated, even though the data clearly indicate the safety of vaccines. That's really a problem."

"We have to admit it, that that mixed message in the beginning, even though it was well meant to allow masks to be available for health workers, that was detrimental in getting the message across. No doubt about it."

"I don't regret that. At that time, there was a paucity of equipment that our health care providers needed -- who put themselves daily in harm's way of taking care of people who are ill. We did not want to divert masks and PPE away from them, to be used by the people."

"Getting death threats for me and my family and harassing my daughters to the point where I have to get security is just, I mean, it's amazing"

"It may be something that becomes endemic that we have to just be careful about. Certainly it's not going to be a pandemic for a lot longer because I believe the vaccines are going to turn that around."

"It’s almost like passing a baton in a race. You don’t want to stop, and then give it to somebody, you want to just essentially keep going"

"The answer is yes, a few, but one in particular. My youngest daughter’s boyfriend’s brother is a 32-year-old young man, athletic, healthy, who got COVID-19 and had one of the unusual complications of cardiomyopathy with an arrhythmia and died."

"I really feel strongly that we should get them vaccinated as soon as we possibly can. You want him fully protected as he enters into the presidency in January. So that would be my strong recommendation."

"...record numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, the sweetness is the light at the end of the tunnel, which I can tell you — as we get into January, February, March and April — that light is going to get brighter and brighter, and the bitterness is going to be replaced by the sweetness"

"And the reason I'm concerned and my colleagues in public health are concerned also is that we very well might see a post-seasonal, in the sense of Christmas, New Year's, surge, and, as I have described it, as a surge upon a surge, because, if you look at the slope, the incline of cases that we have experienced as we have gone into the late fall and soon-to-be-early winter, it is really quite troubling. We are really at a very critical point. ... So I share the concern of President-elect Biden that as we get into the next few weeks, it might actually get worse."

"I was trying to let science guide our policy, but he was putting as much stock in anecdotal things that turned out not to be true as he was in what scientists like myself were saying. That caused unnecessary and uncomfortable conflict where I had to essentially correct what he was saying, and put me at great odds with his people."

"There's all of this concern about what's gain-of-function or what's not, with the implication that that research led to SARS-CoV-2, and COVID-19, which, George, unequivocally anybody that knows anything about viral biology and phylogeny of viruses know that it is molecularly impossible for those viruses that were worked on to turn into SARS-CoV-2 because they were distant enough molecularly that no matter what you did to them, they could never, ever become SARS-CoV-2"

"This would not be the first time, if it happened, that a vaccine that looked good in initial safety actually made people worse. There was the history of the respiratory syncytial vaccine in children, which paradoxically made the children worse. One of the HIV vaccines that we tested some years ago actually made individuals more likely to get infected."

"We have immunological data and you have now clinical efficacy data. Everybody was asking the question: Where’s the clinical efficacy data? Now it has come out with the CDC MMWR this morning. So, we know it’s safe. We know that it is effective. So, my message and my final message — maybe the final message I give you from this podium — is that: Please, for your own safety, for that of your family, get your updated COVID-19 shot as soon as you’re eligible to protect yourself, your family, and your community. I urge you to visit Vaccines.gov to find a location where you can easily get an updated vaccine. And please do it as soon as possible."

"Fauci says 'we need to keep the politics out of' investigating COVID origins"

"Fauci suppressed off-label use of hydroxychloroquine by encouraging discussions of it to be pulled from social media, by sabotaging its clinical trials by testing doses six times the recommended levels (p. 26), and by pulling sixty-three million doses of the medicine off the market, safely away from covid sufferers they could have helped (p. 28). Fauci also provided cover for those who threatened doctors and pharmacists with loss of licenses and jobs for prescribing and dispensing hydroxychloroquine for covid (pp. 31–32). The story of ivermectin is similar."

"Neither Anthony Fauci, the CDC, WHO nor any medical governmental establishment has ever offered any early treatment other than Tylenol, hydration and call an ambulance once you have difficulty breathing. This is unprecedented in the entire history of medical care as early treatment of infections is critical to saving lives and preventing severe complications. Not only have these medical organizations and federal lapdogs not even suggested early treatment, they attacked anyone who attempted to initiate such treatment with all the weapons at their disposal—loss of license, removal of hospital privileges, shaming, destruction of reputations and even arrest."

"The real Anthony Fauci was a greedy egomaniac hell bent on creating an image of himself as the savior of the world during the AIDS crisis while generating billions in profits for his pharmaceutical industry “partners.” The “partners” would then share some of the loot with Fauci and others in various ways, including sharing in patent rights, the “revolving door” of very highly paid jobs for former government bureaucrats, paying multimillion dollar “user fees” to the NIAID, distributing shares of stock, etc."

"Then there was the 2005 “bird flu” hysteria where Fauci once again predicted “unprecedented carnage.” This time he partnered with Bill Gates and hired the now disgraced and discredited British conman statistician Neil Ferguson to construct “models” that predicted up to 150 million people could die from the bird flu. In the end, about 100 people died from it, and most probably had comorbidities that were the real causes of death. That was after President Bush asked Congress for $1.2 billion for Big Pharma to come up with another of its experimental vaccines."

"Documents recently revealed that the Fauci-led National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) authorized $1.68M in taxpayer dues to experiment on beagles. The documents obtained by the White Coat Waste Project (WCW), a watchdog organization that investigates scientific research, said SRI International researched on beagles between October 2018 and February 2019. The experimentation, later deemed "unnecessary" by the FDA. According to the Daily Caller, the studies "involved force-feeding or injecting 44 beagle puppies aged 6-8 months old with an experimental drug before killing and dissecting them," and also "involved cutting the dogs' vocal cords so they could not bark, as well as experimentation on mice.""

"In a piece of legislation he introduced on Monday, Paul addressed the public’s growing weariness with the White House medical advisor by proposing to eliminate Fauci’s role as the director of NIAID altogether. “We’ve learned a lot over the past two years,” Paul said, “but one lesson, in particular, is that no one person should be deemed ‘dictator-in-chief’…To ensure that ineffective, unscientific lockdowns and mandates are never foisted on the American people ever again, I’ve introduced this amendment to eliminate Dr. Anthony Fauci’s position as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and divide his power into three separate new institutes.” So it’s no wonder Dr. Fauci is nervous. Things are about to get very interesting for “America’s Doctor.”"

"The chief fearmonger of the Trump Administration is without a doubt Anthony Fauci, head of the at the . Fauci is all over the media, serving up outright falsehoods to stir up even more panic. He testified to Congress that the death rate for the coronavirus is ten times that of the , a claim without any scientific basis. On , Fauci did his best to further damage an already tanking economy by stating, “Right now, personally, myself, I wouldn’t go to a restaurant.” He has pushed for closing the entire country down for 14 days. Over what? A virus that has thus far killed just over 5,000 worldwide and less than 100 in the United States? By contrast, tuberculosis, an old disease not much discussed these days, killed nearly 1.6 million people in 2017. Where’s the panic over this? If anything, what people like Fauci and the other fearmongers are demanding will likely make the disease worse."

"Speaker to Anthony Fauci: And would you also weigh in on this issue of hydroxychloroquine? What do you think about this and what is the medical evidence?"

"Tony, Tony Fauci, he's a nice guy. He said it is not a threat, it is not a problem. Then he said do not wear a mask, don't not not not do not wear a mask under any circumstances But he's a nice guy so I keep him around."

"... the same message has to ... be reiterated over and over again, because either people don't hear it, or they don't believe it, or they don't adopt it."

"Don't tell anybody, but let me wait until a little bit after the election."

"Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci. Now, I actually want to go a step farther, but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man. I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I'd put the heads on pikes, right. I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you're gone."

"Fauci knew from the very beginning that covid likely came from a Chinese lab. He took active steps to suppress the information and defame anyone who talked about it. This should be one of the greatest scandals in the history of the US. But instead it barely makes a wave."

"Most explicit information on the eigenfunctions of a Laplace operator on a compact manifold comes from computations where a high degree of symmetry is present. In these cases, eigenspaces may be of large dimension, the zeros of the eigenfunctions are often critical points, and the eigenfunctions usually have degenerate critical points. However, these properties are all unstable under small perturbations of the metric, and are therefore rather misleading to one's intuition."

"In the last several years, the study of gauge theories in quantum field theory has led to some interesting problems in nonlinear elliptic differential equations. One such problem is the local behavior of Yang-Mills fields ... over Euclidean 4-space. Our main result is a local regularity theorem: A Yang-Mills field with finite energy over a 4-manifold cannot have isolated singularities. Apparent point singularities (including singularities in the bundle) can be removed by a gauge transformation. In particular, a Yang-Mills field for a bundle over R4 which has finite energy may be extended to a smooth field over R4 \cup {∞} = S4."

"How did gauge theory appear and become successful in mathematics in the space of a few years? The fundamental mathematical ingredients were in place. The basics of fibre and vector bundles and their connections were in daily use by geometers. Chern-Weil theory (and even Chern-Simons invariants) were studied in most graduate courses in differential geometry. De Rham cohomology and its realization via the Hodge theory of harmonic forms were standard items in differential topology. In hindsight, the Yang-Mills equations were waiting to be discovered. Yet mathematicians were in themselves unable to create them. Gauge field theory is an adopted child."

"Selection rules governing the disintegration of a particle into two photons are derived from the general principle of invariance under rotation and inversion. The polarization state of the photons is completely fixed by the selection rules for initial particles with spin less than 2. These results which are independent of any specific assumption about the interactions may possibly offer a method of deciding the symmetry nature of mesons which decay into two photons."

"The spontaneous magnetization of a two-dimensional Ising model is calculated exactly. The result also gives the long-range order in the lattice."

"With the advent of special and general relativity, the symmetry laws gained new importance. Their connection with the dynamic laws of physics takes on a much more integrated and interdependent relationship than in classical mechanics, where logically the symmetry laws were only conse- quences of the dynamical laws that by chance possess the symmetries. Also in the relativity theories the realm of the symmetry laws was greatly enriched to include invariances that were by no means apparent from daily experience. Their validity rather was deduced from, or was later confirmed by complicated experimentation. Let me emphasize that the conceptual simplicity and intrinsic beauty of the symmetries that so evolve from complex experiments are for the physicists great sources of encouragement. One learns to hope that Nature possesses an order that one may aspire to comprehend. It was, however, not until the development of quantum mechanics that the use of the symmetry principles began to permeate into the very language of physics. The quantum numbers that designate the states of a system are often identical with those that represent the symmetries of the system. It in- deed is scarcely possible to overemphasize the role played by the symmetry principles in quantum mechanics."

"The repulsive δ interaction problem in one dimension for N particles is reduced, through the use of Bethe's hypothesis, to an eigenvalue problem of matrices of the same sizes as the irreducible representations R of the permutation group S'N. For some Rs this eigenvalue problem itself is solved by a second use of Bethe's hypothesis, in a generalized form. In particular, the ground-state problem of spin-½ fermions is reduced to a generalized Fredholm equation."

"In a letter to Ampère dated 3 September 1822, Faraday lamented, "I am unfortunate in a want of mathematical knowledge and the power of entering with facility into abstract reasoning, I am obliged to feel my way by facts closely placed together." ... Faraday's "facts" were his experiments, both published and unpublished. During a period of 23 years, 1831–54, he compiled the results of those experiments into three volumes, called Experimental Researches in Electricity ... A most remarkable thing is that there was not a single formula in this monumental compilation, which showed that Faraday was feeling his way, guided only by geometric intuition without any precise algebraic formulation."

"Many physicists recall October 1957 as a time of excitement and legend. In that year, at the age of 35, Yang won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Yang and Lee thereby became the first Chinese laureates. The significance of the award lay not only in the academic achievement, but also in the boost it provided to the self-belief of a nation. Before that, the scientific talent of the Chinese had been questioned. Ching-Wu Chu, a distinguished physicist specialized in superconductivity and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, was in high school at the time. He spent his spare time reading every news report he could find about Yang, and talked earnestly to his classmates about “parity non-conservation” – a subject on which they could understand nothing. Tsu-Teh Chou, a professor of physics at the University of Georgia, was dining at a tiny Chinese restaurant in Liverpool, England, 12 years later, and overheard both the chef and the owner talking proudly about Yang’s achievements."

"When those of us who are now middle-aged went to high school and to college, what we learned about cancer was completely descriptive. We learned how cancer cells look compared to the way normal cells look and it was beautiful, it was elegant. We learned how cancerous organs look compared to the way normal organs look. We learned about how patients decline with cancer. But it was very frustrating at least for me, because we didn’t have any understanding or sense of why these processes were occurring. Exactly what was happening, why it was it happening, when was it happening, how was it happening, all the questions you ask of mystery. We now don’t have them all answered — if it were an easy problem it would have long since been solved. But we do have a very good sense of the kinds of changes that a cell undergoes between the time it is a normal cell and the time that it is growing completely out of control, causes a tumor that can invade, metastasize and kill its host."

"When women our age started in the field, there were very few of us, and we were absolutely on the margins. People pretty much ignored us. I have come to realize that there was a great freedom in being ignored, that you could go after huge questions, because nobody noticed."

"And my mother shrieked ... "You can't leave that child here alone!" And, you know, fair enough. And this unmistakable voice, above and behind me, said, "Emily and I will be fine." And I turned around and said, "Thank you." And my mother looked at me and said, "You can't leave Emily with a total stranger!" And I said, "Mom, if you can't trust Joe DiMaggio, who can you trust?""

"My own belief is that science remains the most powerful tool we have yet generated to apply leverage for our future. It is the instrument which is most useful for guiding our own destinies, for assuring the condition of man in the years to come. I have much to hope that we will not abandon that tool, leaving us to our own brute devices."

"In my considered opinion the peer review system, in which the proposals rather than the proposers are reviewed, is the greatest disaster to be visited upon the scientific community in this century"

"When one observes the many and great changes that have occurred in some s since the beginning of the , he is inclined to the belief that a longer period of time was involved than he had been led to believe. is an example where lakes of great depth once existed in a locality that is now a true desert. Segments of giant fans, some faulted, have been built out on the dried-up lake basin. Some large s on the surface are so deeply weathered that a hammer blow will reduce them to . We are rapidly learning that certain are much more rapid than we have been wont to believe. But only recently have s attempted to determine by actual measurement process rates formerly the subject of general reasoning or speculation. Such measurement programs have documented the fact that rates of landscape change are greater than had earlier been suspected."

"Over a period of ten years, simultaneous measurement of storm rainfall and resulting during individual storms were made in small basins in the , California. By simple measurement, without any recording devices, data collected define a relation of basin lag time to drainage area. This lag time, expressed as time between center of mass of rainfall and center of mass of runoff, is a specific measure of some basin characteristics including the effect of . Using lag time relations, synthetic hydrography construction shows the effect of urbanization on peak discharge from a given storm. The method applied to one storm shows that urbanization increased the peak discharge by two fold."

"The excess of over loss to the is a surprisingly small percentage of the average precipitation. The average amount of water that falls as precipitation over the United States annually is 30 es. Of this total, 21 inches are returned to the atmosphere in the form of through the process of evaporation and transpiration from plants. The balance of 9 inches contributes to the maintenance of and the ."

"The fate of rivers would evidently not be disregarded by Leopold’s watchful eye. In the late 1950s, he and W.B. Langbein initiated what came to be called the Vigil Network, consisting of sections in small s where natural changes would be recorded regularly. Some of these have been operating continuously for half a century, and similar schemes are in operation in Israel and Sweden. Just as productive were some of Leopold’s rafting expeditions down rivers for which he needed depth and velocity data. In 1965, he surveyed 450 km of the in this manner (and again many years later with his distinguished collaborator, the physicist, soldier, and desert explorer ). Besides feeding into the morphometric work, these investigations paved the way for a concerted attack on the problems of and , presaged in a joint study of flood control with T. Maddock Jr. in 1954 and developed with T. Dunne in 1978 and D.L. Rosgen in the 1980s."