In modern times, if the sole measure of what’s out there flows from your five senses then a precarious life awaits you.

There are two ways you can receive energy from your environment: One is molecules bumping against you. That's the air. The other is radiative energy. That's what you're feeling from the sun. When they say "Get out of the sun, out of the heat," the air is the same temperature; it's just you're exposed to sunlight.

Pop culture is the scaffold we all carry around with us.

There are books on my shelf that I'm not into. They are things I don't know anything about yet. It's going to lead me off into a new place. The books don't represent an interest; they represent a source of my ignorance.

Cutting PBS support (0.012% of budget) to help balance the Federal budget is like deleting text files to make room on your 500Gig hard drive

I want upon death to be buried, just like in the old days, where I decompose by the action of microorganisms, and I am dined upon by any form of creeping animal or root system that sees fit to do so.... I will have recycled back to the universe at least some of the energy that I have taken from it. And in so doing, at the conclusion of my scientific adventures, I will have come closer to the heavens than to Earth.

People like it when they understand something that they previously thought they couldn't understand. It's a sense of empowerment.