A single message from space will show that it is possible to live through technological adolescence. . . . It is possible that the future of human civilization depends on the receipt of interstellar messages.

My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.

Is mankind alone in the universe? Or are there somewhere other intelligent beings looking up into their night sky from very different worlds and asking the same kind of question?

The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature.

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'm only a four-dimensional creature. Haven't got a clue how to visualise infinity. Even Einstein hadn't. I know because I asked him