"Self-study, in a sense of learning by yourself without anybody teaching you anything, has an enormous value."

“I guess the other thing I find a little bit on the downside is that all the papers can now be downloaded off the web. That bothers me a little because I think in the old days, when you picked up the journal, you kind of looked at everything on the back of it, the titles, and there were things you didn’t know that much about or that you had a faint connection with, and maybe you looked at the paper; maybe you read the abstract at least. Nowadays, you just dial up what you’re interested in; you don’t see any of the rest of the literature. I do worry over this kind of compartmentalization of astronomy, which I think has gotten to be a bit out of hand...”