It's hard to teach passionately about something that you don't have a passion for.

No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you're going to fail.

If the theory turns out to be right, that will be tremendously thick and tasty icing on the cake.

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.

But, as Einstein once said, “For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”5

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

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