Maybe Quotes (3 quotes)
The trouble with the integers is that we have examined only the small ones. Maybe all the exciting stuff happens at really big numbers, ones we can’t get our hands on or even begin to think about in any very definite way. So maybe all the action is really inaccessible and we’re just fiddling around.
As quoted by Paul Hoffman, 'The Man Who Loves Only Numbers', The Atlantic (Nov 1987), 260, No. 5, 74. Also quoted in Clifford Pickover, 'Preface', Wonders of Numbers: Adventures in Mathematics, Mind and Meaning (2000), x.
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
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The world itself looks cleaner and so much more beautiful. Maybe we can make it that way - the way God intended it to be - by giving everybody that new perspective from out in space.
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In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
