Science is definitely part of America's infrastructure, the engine of prosperity. And yet science is given almost no visibility in the media.

Faust was this mythical figure who sold his soul to the devil for unlimited power. The Japanese have made that Faustian bargain because they don't have coal, oil or hydro power.

Cesium, iodine from the Chernobyl reactor accident went around the world many times and everyone on the Earth has a piece of Chernobyl in their bodies, but it's very tiny - too small to cause much damage.

The reactors in Japan are stable in the same way that a ticking time bomb is also stable. It wouldn't take much to light the fuse - a 6.6 earthquake, like what happened today in Japan, a pipe break, an over-pressurized containment vessel - anything could set it off, in which case we would have another Chernobyl, three times the magnitude of a Chernobyl accident.

A hundred years ago, Auguste Compte, ... a great philosopher, said that humans will never be able to visit the stars, that we will never know what stars are made out of, that that's the one thing that science will never ever understand, because they're so far away. And then, just a few years later, scientists took starlight, ran it through a prism, looked at the rainbow coming from the starlight, and said: "Hydrogen!" Just a few years after this very rational, very reasonable, very scientific prediction was made, that we'll never know what stars are made of.

I am a figure skater, which helps me appreciate Newton's theory of mechanics.

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.