How can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens above?

When you know the answer you want, it is often all too easy to figure out a way of getting it.

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

The absolute worst thing that you ever can do, in my opinion, in bringing science to the general public, is be condescending or judgmental. It is so opposite to the way science needs to be brought forth.

I can assure you that no string theorist would be interested in working on string theory if it were somehow permanently beyond testability. That would no longer be doing science.

Exploring the unknown requires tolerating uncertainty.

In the far, far future, essentially all matter will have returned to energy. But because of the enormous expansion of space, this energy will be spread so thinly that it will hardly ever convert back to even the lightest particles of matter. Instead, a faint mist of light will fall for eternity through an ever colder and quieter cosmos.