I think it's too fast to say that all sci-fi ultimately winds up having some place in science. On the other hand, imaginative minds working outside of science as storytellers certainly have come upon ideas that, with the passing decades, have either materialized of come close to materializing.

I may be a Jewish scientist, but I would be tickled silly if one day I were reincarnated as a Baptist preacher.

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.

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

Over the centuries, monumental upheavals in science have emerged time and again from following the leads set out by mathematics.

My best teachers were not the ones who knew all the answers, but those who were deeply excited by questions they couldn't answer.

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