You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.

I can't stand clutter. I can't stand piles of stuff. And whenever I see it, I basically just throw the stuff away.

My best teachers were not the ones who knew all the answers, but those who were deeply excited by questions they couldn't answer.

I would say in one sentence my goal is to at least be part of the journey to find the unified theory that Einstein himself was really the first to look for.

Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.

In essence, we string theorists have been trying to work out the score of the universe, the harmonies of the universe, the mathematical vibrations that the strings would play. So musical metaphors have been with us in science since the beginning.

The main challenge that television presents is that I have a tendency to say things with a great deal of precision and accuracy. Often a description of that sort, which will work in a book because people can read it slowly - they can turn the pages back and so on - doesn't really work on TV because it interrupts the flow of the moving image.