NASA has spin-offs, and it's a huge and very impressive list, including accurate and affordable LASIK eye surgery.

As areas of knowledge grow, so too do the perimeters of ignorance.

You will never find scientists leading armies into battle. You just won’t. Especially not astrophysicists -we see the biggest picture there is. We understand how small we are in the cosmos. We understand how fragile and temporary our existence is here on Earth. We understand there are bigger problems we need to solve as a species than what God you pray to.

To achieve this density of a neutron star at home, just cram a herd of 50 million elephants into the volume of a thimble.

This influential, yet controversial idea requires that the mixture of species on Earth at any moment acts as a collective organism that continuously (yet unwittingly) tunes Earth's atmospheric composition and climate to promote the presence of life... But I'd bet there are some dead Martians and Venusians who advanced the same theory about their own planets a billion years ago.

Science is like an inoculation against charlatans who would have you believe whatever it is they tell you.

Anyone who has wrestled knows that it's the hardest thing in the world to do. Anyone who says something else is the hardest thing has never wrestled. That's what I have found. ... You don't wrestle because it's easy, you wrestle because it's hard. I don't do astrophysics because it's easy, I do it because it's hard. And I juxtapose the two in my mind, body, and soul all the time.