The Big Bang is our modern scientific creation myth. It comes from the same human need to solve the cosmological riddle [Where did the universe come from?]

I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.

One trend that bothers me is the glorification of stupidity, that the media is reassuring people it's alright not to know anything. That to me is far more dangerous than a little pornography on the Internet.

I believe that in every person is a kind of circuit which resonates to intellectual discovery-and the idea is to make that resonance work

Maybe it's a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds - promising untold opportunities - beckon. Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.

Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

Some 5 billion years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth... then the sun will begin to die, life will be extinguished, the oceans will boil and evaporate away.