Like most young physicists, when I was a kid enraptured with physics, I thought, "Everything can be explained by the theory of the atom!" But as I've gotten older, and I look at the world, I think there's a lot of ways in which that kind of building up from the smallest building blocks doesn't actually account for the world. As I've gotten older, I've also become sensitive to the ways - to all that is not amenable to explanation. Things that, even if you had an explanation, what good would it be?

People have been talking about multiverses as a philosophical idea for a long time. But the current incarnations in physics, I think, are more indicative of problems with some things going on at the frontier of physics than ideas that are gonna last.

I'm found of what's called emergence - as the universe gets more complex, new laws can emerge. Like evolution - there's things that you just aren't able to explain, even if you had an understanding of atoms.

New laws, new kinds of things can emerge as the universe evolves. The more moving parts you have in something, the more possibilities there are. There's a whole new science now of complexity, and what we see is that complexity requires a very different approach than the kind of bottom-up approach that fundamental physics has always used. We're gonna have to think about the world in a different way if we want to address complex systems.

Millennials, in particular, consider themselves to be spiritual, but they're not necessarily going to anybody's church. It's not like the world is becoming hardcore, Richard Dawkins-atheist, but people are looking to sort of synthesize science - people love science, especially the millennials.

The way superheroes dominate the fictional landscape now, along with dystopian futures and zombies. Yeah, definitely - I think these stories function as a kind of mythology for us.

People love science and all it offers, but they also feel a calling in themselves to the sense of what's deeper.