"Science doesn't always go forwards. It's a bit like doing a Rubik's cube. You sometimes have to make more of a mess with a Rubik's cube before you can get it to go right. You build up this picture of what there is and you believe it to be true and you work with this picture and you refine it but sometimes you have to abandon the picture. Sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everybody thought we had, actually turns out to be wrong."

“If we assume we've arrived: we stop searching, we stop developing.”

“Science is a quest for understanding. A search for truth seems to me to be full of pitfalls. We all have different understandings of what truth is, and we'll each believe, or we are in danger of each believing, that our truth is the one and only absolute truth, which is why I say it's full of pitfalls. I think a search for understanding is much more serviceable to humankind, and is a sufficiently ambitious goal of itself.”

“By the end of my PhD I could swing a sledgehammer.”

“I switched on the high speed recorder and it came blip.... blip.... blip.... blip.... blip.... Clearly the same family, the same sort of stuff and that was great, that was really sweet. It finally scotched the little green men hypothesis cos it's highly unlikely there's two lots of little green men, opposite sides of the universe, both deciding to signal to a rather inconspicuous planet earth, at the same time, using a daft technique and a rather common place frequency. It has to be some new kind of star, not seen before, and that then cleared the way for us publishing, going public!”

“Looking at the universe as a whole; cosmology, the birth, life and death of the whole universe, we used to have a nice simple model. Then we had to add things like dark energy, and our nice simple picture is getting messier and messier and messier.”

“The girls got sent to the domestic science room and the boys to the science lab. ... I protested — unsuccessfully.”