I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.

These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance , the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light.

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

We are one species. We are starstuff.

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.