The most accessible field in science, from the point of view of language, is astrophysics. What do you call spots on the sun? Sunspots. Regions of space you fall into and you don’t come out of? Black holes. Big red stars? Red giants. So I take my fellow scientists to task. He’ll use his word, and if I understand it, I’ll say, “Oh, does that mean da-da-da-de-da?

I don't want to make a member of Congress do something that that member of Congress's constituents would not approve of, or would not agree to. So in that regard, I'm kind of the opposite of a lobbyist.

Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached.

If there were biologists among the extremophiles organisms that live in extreme conditions, they would surely classify themselves as normal and any life that thrived in room temperature as an extremophile.

Chimpanzees are an evolutionary hair's-width from us.... Now imagine a species on Earth, or anywhere else, as smart compared with humans as humans are compared with chimpanzees. How much of the universe might they figure out?

God displayed a sense of humor when he configured the region between our legs an entertainment complex built around a sewage system.

Scientific truth is not what any one scientist puts forth. It can be that, but it is generally not. It is the sum of multiple studies that all lean in the same direction in their results conducted by different people at different times of different nationalities with different competitive urges who all end up getting the same result. Then you have an emerging scientific truth, and then you put that in the textbooks, and that will never be shown to be wrong later on.