There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science. And two thousand years earlier, the beginnings of science were as much Babylonian and Egyptian as Greek. One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white. It belongs to everybody who is willing to make the effort to learn it.

The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right archi…

The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A…

The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.

Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, natural science at a stand, philosophy lame, letters dumb, and all things involved in darkness.

If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, ha…