"First of all, it helps to be ignorant. The time when I did my best work was when I was most ignorant. Knowing too much is a great handicap. Especially if you’v

"First of all, it helps to be ignorant. The time when I did my best work was when I was most ignorant. Knowing too much is a great handicap. Especially if you’ve been teaching for some years, things get so fixed in your mind and it’s impossible to think outside the box." For me, this is the most important piece in the interview (but what a man! As he himself comments to be so lucid as a 90+ year-old famous scientist is very rare). A recurrent "if I were a rich man" fantasy of mine is to build a platform where people from very different disciplines would come together and discuss open problems in one discipline, something similar to a TED talk but spending 2-3 weeks on one problem. 99.9% of the ideas generated by the non-experts will be BS, but if the remainder is non-zero, it would be worth it.