Experimental evidence is the final arbiter of right and wrong.

My emotional investment is in finding truth. If string theory is wrong, I'd like to have known that yesterday. But if we can show it today or tomorrow, fantastic.

We are living through a remarkably privileged era when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration.

The central idea of string theory is quite straightforward. If you examine any piece of matter ever more finely, at first you'll find molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles. Probe the smaller particles, you'll find something else, a tiny vibrating filament of energy, a little tiny vibrating string.

...things are the way they are in our universe because if they weren't, we wouldn't be here to notice.

Evidence in support of general relativity came quickly. Astronomers had long known that Mercury’s orbital motion around the sun deviated slightly from what Newton’s mathematics predicted. In 1915, Einstein used his new equations to recalculate Mercury’s trajectory and was able to explain the discrepancy, a realization he later described to his colleague Adrian Fokker as so thrilling that for some hours it gave him heart palpitations.

The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand.