Nature's patterns sometimes reflect two intertwined features: fundamental physical laws and environmental influences. It's nature's version of nature versus nurture.

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

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

The number of e-mails and letters that I get from choreographers, from sculptors, from composers who are being inspired by science is huge.

General relativity is in the old Newtonian framework where you predict what will happen, not the probability of what will happen. And putting together the probabilities of quantum mechanics with the certainty of general relativity, that's been the big challenge and that's why we have been excited about string theory, as it's one of the only approaches that can put it together.

Far from being accidental details, the properties of nature's basic building blocks are deeply entwined with the fabric of space and time.

We might be the holographic image of a two-dimensional structure.