Until computers and robots make quantum advances, they basically remain adding machines: capable only of doing things in which all the variables are controlled and predictable. Robots are bad at pattern recognition and certainly at common sense. That's why computers can beat humans in chess but can't have even a basic conversation with a six-year-old.

Even if we mortgage the next 100 years of generations of human beings, we would not have enough energy to build a Death Star.

Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.

In fact, all of us have a piece of Chernobyl in our bodies going back to 1986.

I got a four year scholarship to Harvard, and while I was there they wanted to groom me for work in the Star Wars program designing weapons ignited by hydrogen bombs. I didn't want to do that. I thought about how many scientists had died in World War II.

There's the caveman in us. The caveman in you says, "I want direct contact. I don't want a picture." The caveman in our body says once in a while, we have to go outside. We have to meet real people, talk to real people, and do real things.

I would hope that the publicity around the Higgs boson would increase the public awareness of physics and cosmology.