The sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed: It was past eight thirty and still light.
In 1975 I met Alison Brown and in 1982 we were married. She works for Cornell Computer Services.
The hardest problems of pure and applied science can only be solved by the open collaboration of the world-wide scientific community.
While at Cal Tech I talked a lot with Jon Mathews, then a junior faculty member; he taught me how to use the Institute's computer; we also went on hikes together.
When I entered graduate school I had carried out the instructions given to me by my father and had knocked on both Murray Gell-Mann's and Feynman's doors and asked them what they were currently doing. Murray wrote down the partition function for the three-dimensional Ising model and said it would be nice if I could solve it (at least that is how I remember the conversation). Feynman's answer was 'nothing'.
Through this additional support, we must renew our commitment to provide talented young people with the opportunity to build scientific careers based on their curiosity, the same opportunity that was provided to me when I began my work.
One other hobby of mine has been playing the oboe but I have not kept this up after 1969.
The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce, first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages, was not suddenly abolished in modern times.
I gut check my show. I say, I say, "Gut, gut, does that feel true to you?" And Gut says, "Yes it does, Stephen. Let's get a grilled cheese sandwich. "
The mental disease of the present generation is impatience of study, contempt of the great masters of ancient wisdom, and a disposition to rely wholly upon unassisted genius and natural sagacity.
The intelligent person is not one who merely knows what is good and what is bad. The intelligent person is one who, when he sees what is good, follows it, and when he sees evil, shuns it.