As you may know, I am a mechanical engineer.

When we see the shadow on our images, are we seeing the time 11 minutes ago on Mars? Or are we seeing the time on Mars as observed from Earth now? It's like time travel problems in science fiction. When is now; when was then?

For me, the meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future.

If we raise a generation of students who dont believe in the process of science, who think everything that weve come to know about nature and the universe can be dismissed by a few sentences translated into English from some ancient text, youre not going to continue to innovate.

The Big Bang banged, and for some reason we’re here. And that’s astonishing. And that we can understand that, that’s the most astonishing.

That's what makes a human a human, if we store information outside our bodies.

Researchers have proven that scientifically, that all humans are one people