I didn’t realize that scientists were like that, and that people were like that. I would have thought — and I like to hope — that I encourage people rather than discourage people. I think you can say no and still say, “Boy, that might be a tough problem, but if you really work at it maybe you’ll solve it,” rather than, “No, it will never happen.”

So, look, I read lots of books, lots of them, you know, especially when I went from programmer to a business, realizing I have to just learn business really quick. I got really dismayed with the quality of business books pretty quickly, because frankly, I think the business books are largely written by the people who have time, who are not the people who actually build companies, frankly.

I would come home and ask my mother, my father, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, 'Why?'. And they would say, 'That's the way it is. Don't get in the way, don't get in trouble!'

Yes, but not with a formula. So there are many, many efforts now to decentralize and they create a rigid formula and give people rules from on top and say, 'Now it's yours.' And that isn't worked very well either. … And, you think about the variety. If you look at a countryside, think of the variety out there in terms of the ecological variety. Well, if people are going to manage ecological variety, no single set of rules will work in a semi-arid versus a tropical-wet region. They have to be different.

So I wish to you—I have no more time, so I have just one wish for you—the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom. May I also give you one last bit of advice: Never say that you'll give a talk unless you know clearly what you're going to talk about and more or less what you're going to say.

The questions of the students are often the source of new research.  They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while.  It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now.  The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem.  It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things.

I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist.

It's made me a very happy man ever since.

At Cornell, I’d work on preparing my courses, and I’d go over to the library a lot and read through the Arabian Nights and ogle the girls that would go by.  But when it came time to do some research, I couldn’t get to work.  I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn’t do research!  This went on for what I felt was a few years, but when I go back and calculate the timing, it couldn’t have been that long.  Perhaps nowadays I wouldn’t think it was such a long time, but then, it seemed to go on for a very long time.  I simply couldn’t get started on any problem: I remember writing one or two sentences about some problem in gamma rays and then I couldn’t go any further.  I was convinced that from the war and everything (the death of my wife) I had simply burned myself out.

It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish.  I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.