I missed the basic curiosity of being in the lab.

It always irritated me that people think they have to be locked into a career path.

The eventual goal is to marry all of my work together to make a high-speed, high-resolution, low-impact tool that can look deep inside biological systems.

You get so tied up with the minutiae of the day-to-day, there's never a chance to sit back and let your subconscious run wild.

What I have tried to show is that the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity - that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe.

Whatever I read went under my skin. I almost devoured the literature, which became like a road to discovery.

I can pour myself into Bon Iver. It's a thing about self- and mental discovery, and those are all important things. But it's not 148-shows-over-a-year-and-a-half important, though. It's a machine, and it's money, and you just get put on this indie rock cart, and it's embarrassing.

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.