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.

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

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

In any finite region of space, matter can only arrange itself in a finite number of configurations, just as a deck of cards can be arranged in only finitely many different orders. If you shuffle the deck infinitely many times, the card orderings must necessarily repeat.

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

A watch worn by a particle of light would not tick at all. Light realizes the dreams of Ponce de Leon and the cosmetics industry: it doesn't age.

Oftentimes, if you're talking to a seasoned interviewer who asks you a question, they may do a follow-up if they didn't quite get it. It's rare that they'll do a third or fourth or fifth or sixth follow-up, because there's an implicit, agreed-upon decorum that they move on. Kids don't necessarily move on if they don't get it.