I remember being fascinated by ants and wasps and other bugs when I was a kid. I'd set out a Coke can and stand back 20 feet and use my telescope to watch wasps land on it.

The lessons learned as we try to build ever more sophisticated nanomachines will almost certainly inform our understanding of the origins of life.

It's amazing that something only an atom thick can be an impenetrable barrier. You can have gas on one side and vacuum or liquid on the other, and with a wall only one atom thick, nothing would go through it.

Nanotechnology is the idea that we can create devices and machines all the way down to the nanometer scale, which is a billionth of a meter, about half the width of a human DNA molecule.

I feel a responsibility to encourage everyone to excel in science.

I believe that the future of humanity is in the progress of reason through science. I believe that the pursuit of truth, through science, is the divine ideal which man should propose to himself.

One day we're going to look back, and whatever this era will get called, it's going to put a premium on math and science.

It's worth noting that invoking God as the entity who set our universe in motion isn't contradicted by the data. Of course, scientists would say the supreme being hypothesis is faith, and outside the realm of science - that it's not amenable to experiment. But we currently have the same problem with the notion of parallel universes.