I'm most proud of maintaining my sense of identity, you know, because I had a lot of success, and the whole whirlwind sort of happened during very formative years for me,

I think I'm trying to be as normal as possible, as authentic as possible, and I always try to stay the same way for as long as possible,

I think three things. One is the great advances in auto safety. I mean, there are tens of thousands of people being saved every year because cars are safer, and millions of people over a decade, injuries prevented. I think that’s a good example of the need to make technology more humane. We may benefit from a lot of technologies, but they exact a cost. Emphysema, cancer, soil contamination, contaminated water, death and injury on the highway. We’ve got to put more effort on making them more humane.

I was really proud that it was my stars that had convinced the prize committee that there was good physics in astrophysics.

It’s easy to try to exaggerate the problems just to get more attention. So for me, it was very clear that the best way to deal with that was to do the best science that I was capable of doing.

At first the research did not seem to be particularly interesting – I carried out a systematic search for processes that might destroy the CFCs in the lower atmosphere, but nothing appeared to affect them. We knew, however, that they would eventually drift to sufficiently high altitudes to be destroyed by solar radiation. The question was not only what destroys them, but more importantly, what the consequences are.

So achievement, to me, is something that just comes with this attitude of doing your work the best you can in a passionate way. It’s not something that you have to expect. It’s something that’s a consequence of what you do, but it’s certainly important.

I did. As a kid, I liked music. I still like it a lot of course. I used to play the violin. I did contemplate, well, maybe that’s an option. I could become a musician. Somehow my parents got some advice that unless I was willing to spend eight or 10 hours a day just playing the violin that I should just give it up. To me, that was very bad advice because you could of course, get very involved in music without being a musician. Fortunately, even though I gave up eventually playing the violin myself, I never gave up my fondness for music. But if I had a chance again, I would not give it up. I would just do it as a hobby. I think that was just because I did not get the correct advice.

Certainly not. As a young child, I remember just dreaming about the Nobel Prize, but that was just a dream. It’s not something I would have ever thought was possible for me.

there are really very many. Again, as a child, it was obviously those scientists which had lived in the past that had made such an important mark in science history.