My personal philosophy is that people should be extremely selfish for the first half of their life and extremely unselfish for the second half because then they can do the most good.

Humans have 3 percent human error, and a lot of companies can't afford to be wrong 3 percent of the time anymore, so we close that 3 percent gap with some of the technologies. The AI we've developed doesn't make mistakes.

When I was 13, I thought I was pretty hot stuff because I knew BASIC programming, self-taught on the family's Commodore 64. One of my crowning accomplishments was writing a silly little program that showed a crudely-drawn Space Shuttle lifting off in a cloud of pixelated smoke.

It's common in rural Ireland to pick up a nickname that relates to an animal, bird, or a spider. Mine became 'scorpion' because I fought back, and scorpions are docile creatures until pushed too far.

Some of the best ideas come from sheer discovery, and not by some masterminded, preconceived genius.

Science is a highly technical and intellectual endeavor. Any theory or fact or discovery has an ocean of depth to it. You can always go deeper with science, and you can always ask a new and interesting question. That's what makes a topic nerdy: depth.

I read so much science fiction when I was young. I believe science fiction is the genre for exploration and to learn about possibilities via book.

The team at the Space Telescope Science Institute has a demonstrated record of meeting the high-performance challenges of operating the Hubble Space Telescope and preparing for the James Webb Space Telescope.