I believe we owe our young an education that captures the exhilarating drama of science.

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

When I give this talk to a physics audience, I remove the quotes from my 'Theorem'.

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.

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.

Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. Where did the totality of reality come from? Did time have a beginning?

I can't stand clutter. I can't stand piles of stuff. And whenever I see it, I basically just throw the stuff away.