In any city with lots of skyscrapers, lots of skyline, the moon seems bigger than it is. It's called the moon illusion.

We're quite happy with our Big Bang description of cosmic origins. But actually, the Big Bang accounts for what happened only after the beginning. The beginning itself, and especially what happened before, remains the biggest mystery of all.

Science is not just a topic we can step around or ignore.

One of the reasons we're here, that we exist at all, is that Earth, cosmically speaking, is in a relatively peaceful place: orbiting our Sun in a near perfect circle.

The solar system should be viewed as our backyard, not as some sequence of destinations that we do one at a time.

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?

One of the things that fascinates me most is when people are so charmed by the universe that it becomes part of their artistic output.