“Must be frustrating being a scientist. There you are, incrementally di...” — Charlie Brooker Quote

“Must be frustrating being a scientist. There you are, incrementally discovering how the universe works via a series of complex tests and experiments, for the benefit of all mankind - and what thanks do you get? People call you "egghead" or "boffin" or "heretic", and they cave your face in with a rock and bury you out in the wilderness.”

“I have often felt the worlds of social media and the Internet are like a weird dreamscape. Even physically, when you are looking at your phone, you are out of it.”

“When you're being earnest, people think you're being sarcastic, and when you're being sarcastic, they think you're being earnest. The moral in all this, of course, is that people should never attempt to communicate.”

“If your home is anything like mine, it contains several rarely explored crannies stashed full of archaic chargers, defunct cables, and freshly antiquated gizmos whose sole useful function in 2011 is to make 2005 feel like 1926, simply by looking big and dull and impossibly lumpen.”

“Is hacking ever acceptable? It depends on the motive.”

“Discover the force of the skies O Men: once recognised it can be put to use.”

“My father and mother are exceptional pedagogues who can motivate and tell it from all different angles. Later, chess for me became a sport, an art, a science, everything together. I was very focused on chess, and happy with that world.”

“A foreign publisher of [The Selfish Gene] confessed that he could not sleep for three nights after reading it, so troubled was he by what he saw as its cold, bleak message. Others have asked me how I can bear to get up in the mornings. A teacher from a distant country wrote to me reproachfully that a pupil had come to him in tears after reading the same book, because it had persuaded her that life was empty and purposeless. He advised her not to show the book to any of her friends, for fear of contaminating them with the same nihilistic pessimism. Similar accusation of barren desolation, of promoting an arid and joyless message, are frequently flung at science in general, and it is easy for scientists to play up to them. My colleague Peter Atkins begins his book *The Second Law* (1984) in this vein:”

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”

“Give me the positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe, and I will predict the future.”