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.

I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false.

The universe does not care what we want.

The ultimate goal of physicists is to arrive at an equation that explains everything and could fit on a t-shirt. That may happen but the t-shirt would have to be 10-dimensional.

It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: you are all stardust.

Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can't even measure them.

Science has been effective at furthering our understanding of nature because the scientific ethos is based on three key principles: (1) follow the evidence wherever it leads; (2) if one has a theory, one needs to be willing to try to prove it wrong as much as one tries to prove that it is right; (3) the ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one's a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one's theoretical models.