Planets are too dim to be detected with existing equipment, far away, except in these very special circumstances where they're seen by their gravitational effect

I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.

Just because things get a little dingy at the subatomic level doesn't mean all bets are off.

What I try to do in the book is to trace the chain of relationships running from elementary particles, fundamental building blocks of matter everywhere in the universe, such as quarks, all the way to complex entities, and in particular complex adaptive system like jaguars.

If you know the wavefunction of the universe, why aren't you rich?

The mathematics clearly called for a set of underlying elementary objects-at that time we needed three types of them-elementary objects that could be combined three at a time in different ways to make all the heavy particles we knew. ... I needed a name for them and called them quarks, after the taunting cry of the gulls, "Three quarks for Muster mark," from Finnegan's Wake by the Irish writer James Joyce.

I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy.