When you organize extraordinary missions, you attract people of extraordinary talent who might not have been inspired by or attracted to the goal of saving the world from cancer or hunger or pestilence.

The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The...

Some people think emotionally more often than they think politically. Some think politically more often than they think rationally. Others never think rationally about anything at all.No judgment implied. Just an observation.

… informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between...

Doing what has never been done before is intellectually seductive, whether or not we deem it practical.

The moment when someone attaches you to a philosophy or a movement, then they assign all the baggage and all the rest of the philosophy that goes with it to you. And when you want...

We conquer the Independence Day aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus to the mothership (which happens to be one-fifth the mass of the Moon), thus disarming its protective force field....

We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.

Science literacy is being plugged into the forces that power the universe. There is no excuse for thinking that the Sun, which is a million times the size of Earth, orbits Earth.