I very much enjoyed my career in science. I didn't leave science because I was disillusioned, but felt I'd done my bit for it after about twenty-five years.

Quantum theory also tells us that the world is not simply objective; somehow it's something more subtle than that. In some sense it is veiled from us, but it has a structure that we can understand.

Evolution, of course, is not something that simply applies to life here on earth; it applies to the whole universe.

Of course, nobody would deny the importance of human beings for theological thinking, but the time span of history that theologians think about is a few thousand years of human culture rather than the fifteen billion years of the history of the universe.

In parallel with the development of my interests in technical gadgetry I began to acquire a profound love of and respect for the natural world which motivates my scientific thinking to this day.

But man has still another powerful resource: natural science with its strictly objective methods.

I imagine a day, some time in the not too distant future when children and teenagers will be able to create their own genetically engineered machines, cure the diseases of the old and find new ways to build and extend the capabilities of humanity, moving from programming software to programing the physical world, through biology.

Very few recognize science as the high adventure it really is, the wildest of all explorations ever taken by human beings, the chance to glimpse things never seen before, the shrewdest maneuver for discovering how the world works.