There was a transition going on - Baghdad being the intellectual capital of the world where major advances were made in agriculture and mathematics and engineering and medicine and astronomy, and then that all sort of collapsed. And I was trying to understand how such a intellectually fertile environment can lose its compass bearing. Because I think about the creative centers today - countries, or even regions. Will Silicon Valley always be as innovative? Will the United States be innovative, or will we become complacent?

Deep in the world of atomic nuclei, life is not always tranquil.

Who knows how dead Lazarus was? Was Lazarus decomposing in a six-foot grave when Jesus resurrected him? No, he wasn't.

Dreams about the future are always filled with gadgets.

You could do math early, but there are no brilliant 16-year-old novelists. They don't know the human condition yet.

There are photons that have been traveling for 30,000 years, and I'm... snatching them from this journey and planting them into my digital detector. And then I started feeling bad for the photon, and I said maybe it wanted to continue but I got in its way. But then I said, no, those are probably happier photons than the one that slammed into the mountainside that will go unanalyzed and will not contribute to the depth of our understanding of the universe.

Whether or not you can become great at something, you can always become better.