Science is the engine of prosperity. All the prosperity we see around us is a byproduct of scientific inventions. And that's not being made clear to young people. If we can't make it clear to young people they're not going to go into science. And science will suffer in the United States.

In the future we'll be able to mentally contact anybody we want, see whatever image we want. And when we don't like it, we'll just turn it off.

I have nothing against investment banking, but it's like massaging money rather than creating money.

Our best shot at finding life in our solar system might be to look at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Mars, increasingly, looks like a dead planet. But the oceans beneath the ice cover of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn may actually have more liquid water than the oceans of Earth.

What do oil company executives, vampires and NASA bureaucrats all have in common? They fear solar energy.

My point is, no one can stop the Internet. No one can stop that march. It doesn't mean that it's going to be smooth, though.

Once again, my colleague Stephen Hawking has upset the apple cart. The event horizon surrounding a black hole was once though to be an imaginary sphere. But recent theories indicate that it may actually be physical, maybe even a sphere of fire. But I don't trust any of these calculations until we have a full-blown string theory calculation, since Einstein's theory by itself is incomplete.