We can summarize electricity, magnetism and gravity into equations one inch long, and that's the power of field theory. And so I said to myself: I will create a field theory of strings. And when I did it one day, it was incredible, realizing that on a sheet of paper I can write down an equation which summarized almost all physical knowledge.

Global warming is controversial, of course, but the controversy is mainly over whether human activity is driving it.

When I was 16 years old, I assembled a 2.3 million electron volt beta particle accelerator. I went to Westinghouse, I got 400 pounds of translator steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and I assembled a 6-kilowatt, 2.3 million electron accelerator in the garage.

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

We need an enduring, robust theory of education. Now, it seems education careens from one fad to another and often back again. I think that with better education and students willing to put in the 10,000-hours to become expert, we could develop better science professionals, even theoretical physicists.

In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time.

I hope we find evidence of dark matter in the lab and in outer space. This would go a long way to proving the correctness of string theory, which is what I do for a living. That is my day job. So string theory is a potentially experimentally verifiable theory.