We can certainly go further than cats, but why should it be that our brains are somehow so suited to the universe that our brains will be able to understand the deepest workings?

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

The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand.

When you know the answer you want, it is often all too easy to figure out a way of getting it.

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.

The real question is whether all your pondering and analyses will convince you that life is worth living. That's what it all comes down to.

General relativity is in the old Newtonian framework where you predict what will happen, not the probability of what will happen. And putting together the probabilities of quantum mechanics with the certainty of general relativity, that's been the big challenge and that's why we have been excited about string theory, as it's one of the only approaches that can put it together.