Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.

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

I'd say many features of string theory don't mesh with what we observe in everyday life.

The beauty of string theory is the metaphor kind of really comes very close to the reality. The strings of string theory are vibrating the particles, vibrating the forces of nature into existence, those vibrations are sort of like musical notes. So string theory, if it's correct, would be playing out the score of the universe.

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.

The idea that there could be other universes out there is really one that stretches the mind in a great way.

Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.