Who you are, where you've been and what you've done is all up here, captured and preserved in your memories. If you lost that - the story of your own origins - you'd lose your identity, your sense of self.

Wow, monitor lizards are pretty gnarly creatures. I want to go with the monitor lizard. That's just weird enough to be true. No?

I remain fearless of airplanes after 9/11. But during a trip to Los Angeles on a Boeing 767, I couldn't keep my mind from drifting: What's the largest piece of this airplane that could crash into the World Trade Center, explode out the other side, and survive intact? The landing gear? My computer battery? My belt buckle? My wedding ring?

If we want to unlock the secret behind the origin of our sun and its planets, it would be helpful to find some remnants from the birth itself, an event that took place about four-and-a-half-billion years ago.

There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It's the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end.

I knew my interest in the universe and I owned a telescope that I bought with money I earned by walking dogs. 50 cents per walk, per dog, and that accumulated quickly. I bought a camera, a telescope. I taught myself astrophotography. I did all this.

Kids should be allowed to break stuff more often. That's a consequence of exploration. Exploration is what you do when you don't know what you're doing.