Childhood is a foreign country we've all visited but can't quite remember.

We recognized early on that smart people do very dumb things, and we wanted to know why and who, so that we could avoid them.

The discovery of DNA structure was like unraveling a very complex puzzle.

The Langlands program is a challenge to the boundaries of mathematical knowledge.

Our heroes are human heroes. That's a very new situation. Most other societies have had, right at their center, the worship of something transcendent: a god, a spirit, a natural force, the universe, whatever it is -- something else that is being worshiped. We've slightly lost the habit of doing that, which is, I think, why we're particularly drawn to nature.