Growing up in Switzerland, you learn German pretty much from day one in school. You learn French and Italian as well. I took English as an extra language because I figured that was the language of the world.

I was a big fan of wrestling growing up and of WWE.

I was a big fan of Kurt Angle when I was growing up. Actually, his book is a big part of the reason that I work out so hard.

You have to be a professional in every single thing you do.

When I was a physics major in the late 1970s, my very few fellow female students and I had high hopes that women would soon stand equal with men in science. But progress has proved slower than many of us imagined.

Abundant choice doesn't force us to look for the absolute best of everything. It allows us to find the extremes in those things we really care about, whether that means great coffee, jeans cut wide across the hips, or a spouse who shares your zeal for mountaineering, Zen meditation, and science fiction.

Science trumps magical thinking: there was a reason the Incas called their mercury mine 'la mina de los muertos,' the mine of the dead. Building a life and a community upon principles that ignore such realities is doomed to fail.

The ideas associated with the problems of the development of science, as far as I can see by looking around me, are not of the kind that everyone appreciates.