“An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk abo...” — Steven Pinker Quote

An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets.

If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important.

As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.

One of my favourite kinds of movie is the American picaresque, in which the characters make their way across the country, learning about life against the gorgeous backdrops of that vast land.

Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn't reduce to physics. So it's just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.

I was having a conversation with my father and he was talking about this thing - strangeness and charm. It's actually the name of the two smallest particles that there are when you split the atom, so I wrote a song around it. I even managed to fit the word 'hydrogen' in there. Isn't that a nice thing for scientists to call them though?

Until four years ago, in fact, I was absolutely in love with the atom.

It's amazing that something only an atom thick can be an impenetrable barrier. You can have gas on one side and vacuum or liquid on the other, and with a wall only one atom thick, nothing would go through it.