Discerning the merits of competing claims is where the empirical basis of science should play a role. I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false. What fails the test of empirical reality, as determined by observation and experiment, gets thrown out like yesterday's newspaper.

Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

90% of the mass in your body comes from empty space.

Teaching and writing, to me, is really just seduction; you go to where people are and you find something that they're interested in and you try and use that to convince them that they should be interested in what you have to say.

I like to say that while antimatter may seem strange, it is strange in the sense that Belgians are strange. They are not really strange; it is just that one rarely meets them.

The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not.

I hope that every [person] at one point in their life has the opportunity to have something that is at the heart of their being, something so central to their being that if they lose it they won't feel they're human anymore, to be proved wrong because that's the liberation that science provides. The realization that to assume the truth, to assume the answer before you ask the questions leads you nowhere.