There's no way that scientists can ever rule out religion, or even have anything significant to say about the abstract idea of a divine creator.

I think the relationship between memory and time is a very deep and tricky one, to tell you the truth. I don't consider memory another sense. I do consider memory that which allows us to think that time flows.

When you drive your car, E = mc2 is at work. As the engine burns gasoline to produce energy in the form of motion, it does so by converting some of the gasoline's mass into energy, in accord with Einstein's formula.

That is, you can have nothingness, absolute nothingness for maybe a tiny fraction of a second, if a second can be defined in that arena, but then it falls apart into a something and an anti-something. And that something is then what we call the universe. But can we really understand that or put rigorous mathematics or testable experiments against that? Not yet. So one of the big holy grail of physics is to understand why there is something rather than nothing.

I believe the process of going from confusion to understanding is a precious, even emotional, experience that can be the foundation of self-confidence.

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.

For me it's been very exciting to contribute to the public's understanding of how rich and wondrous science is.