My father was a very good Boy Scout. He was very skilled with knots, and he showed me how to tie a bow tie.

No matter what you may believe spiritually or otherwise, the Earth is clearly not 6,000 or 10,000 years old.

I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, that's completely inconsistent with the world we observe, that's fine. But don't make your kids do it. Because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need engineers that can build stuff and solve problems.

The most serious problem facing humankind is climate change. All of these people breathing and burning our atmosphere has led to an extraordinarily dangerous situation. I hope next generation will emerge and produce technology, regulations, and a worldview that enable as many of us as possible to live happy healthy lives.

As my old professor Carl Sagan said so often, 'When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.’ And I base my beliefs on the information and the process that we call science. It fills me with joy to make discoveries every day of things I’ve never seen before. It fills me with joy to know that we can pursue these answers. It is an astonishing thing that we are — you and I are one of the ways the universe knows itself.

As you may know, I am a mechanical engineer.

There are two ways to be rich: to have more or need less. It's estimated that we squander about 30 percent of our energy leaving the lights on, the refrigerator door open, and so on. Then there is the enormous amount of food that we expend huge amounts of energy to raise and then throw away.