If you love what you do, you'll be your best at it compared to anything else you might have chosen as a career. Or at least you will love it more, and you won't lead a depressed day of your life.

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?

The past is another planet.

Everyone has all different experiences in school. I just know that throughout my life, at no time did any teacher ever point to me and say, hey. He'll go far.

I object to religion in science classrooms not because it's religion but because it's not science.

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.

I'd go back and hang out with Isaac Newton. I'm torn between do I hang out with him or do I bring him into the present to hang out with me. See, that might be terrifying because his head will just explode once he sees everything that was derived from his discoveries, but I'd spend more time with someone who I think is one of the most brilliant minds our species has ever known.