You have to be careful when you use beauty as a guide. There are many theories people didn't think were beautiful at the time but did find beautiful later—and vice versa. I think simplicity is a good guide: The more economical a theory, the better.

Both religions and musicals work best with energetic and committed believers. Cynicism or detachment would have destroyed the magic - something true of religion, too.

Maybe dark matter is denser than we usually assume, kind of like the Milky Way plane.

An almost indispensable skill for any creative person is the ability to pose the right questions. Creative people identify promising, exciting, and, most important, accessible routes to progress - and eventually formulate the questions correctly.

I think it's a problem that people are considered immoral if they're not religious. That's just not true. If you do something for a religious reason, you do it because you'll be rewarded in an afterlife or in this world. That's not quite as good as something you do for purely generous reasons.

If such external influences are intrinsic to religion, then logic and scientific thought dictate that there must be a mechanism by which this influence is transmitted. A religious or spiritual belief that involves an invisible undetectable force that nonetheless influences human actions and behavior or that of the world itself produces a situation in which a believer has no choice but to have faith and abandon logic--or simply not care.

I had this illusion that if I kind of dressed badly that I wouldn't stand out. You know, so I actually went out of my way to not look different to the extent I could.