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Medieval alchemists, despite their lust for gold, considered mercury the most potent and poetic substance in the universe. As a child, I would have agreed with them.

When first presented with the jumble of the periodic table, I scanned for mercury and couldn't find it. It is there - between gold, which is also dense and soft, and thallium, which is also poisonous. But the symbol for mercury, Hg, consists of two letters that don't even appear in its name.

President Bush's mercury rule is a gift to the big energy companies that helped put him in office.

Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.

There was a lot of risk taken in the Mercury and Apollo eras, and we don't take those risks anymore. We've designed the systems to eliminate risk, which makes it take forever and cost too much money.

Science does not permit exceptions.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.

The Constitution has not greatly bothered any wartime President.

'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated.