The theory of probability is the only mathematical tool available to help map the unknown and the uncontrollable. It is fortunate that this tool, while tricky, is extraordinarily powerful and convenient.
I spent my time very nicely in many ways, but not fully satisfactory. Then I became Professor in France, but realized that I was not – for the job that I should spend my life in.
It was astonishing when at one point, I got the idea of how to make artifical clouds with a collaborator, we had pictures made which were theoretically completely artificial pictures based upon that one very simple idea. And this picture everybody views as being clouds.
Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there’s always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dustcloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.
If you look at a shape like a straight line, what’s remarkable is that if you look at a straight line from close by, from far away, it is the same; it is a straight line.
A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don’t get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.
