It was strange, in a way, because there were no ideas involved in the laser that weren't already known by somebody 25 years before lasers were discovered. The ideas were all there; just, nobody put it together.

A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention.

I was brought up as Christian, and while my ideas have changed, I have always felt myself religiously oriented.

I don't think that science is complete at all. We don't understand everything, and one can see, within science itself, there are many inconsistencies. We just have to accept that we don't understand.

I was very eager to produce an oscillator for short waves. I was doing science with microwaves, and I would get down to a few millimetres in wavelength, but I wanted to get shorter wavelengths; I wanted to get into the infra-red because I saw there was a lot more to be done there.

The imposing edifice of science provides a challenging view of what can be achieved by the accumulation of many small efforts in a steady objective and dedicated search for truth.