If an alien lands on your front lawn and extends an appendage as a gesture of greeting, before you get friendly, toss it an eightball. If the appendage explodes, then the alien was probably made of antimatter. If not, then you can proceed to take it to your leader.

The center line of science literacy - which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point - is how you think.

God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.

We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say we have been empowered by the universe to figure itself out - and we have only just begun.

In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world.

I'm an educator, and I'm a scientist, and I speak what is objectively true. And if that offends you, I can try to have a conversation with you to ask why it offends you, and tell you why objective truth should not offend you because that's how the world works.

Just to settle it once and for all: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The egg, laid by a bird that was not a chicken.