The center line of science literacy - which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point - is how you think.

There is a theorem that colloquially translates, You cannot comb the hair on a bowling ball. ... Clearly, none of these mathematicians had Afros, because to comb an Afro is to pick it straight away from the scalp. If bowling balls had Afros, then yes, they could be combed without violation of mathematical theorems.

Kids are born curious about the world. What adults primarily do in the presence of kids is unwittingly thwart the curiosity of children.

The value of the space program is beyond science, it's beyond military; it's a cultural shift in how we think of our place in the universe.

On Friday the 13th, April 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were an egg cup will fly so close to Earth that it will dip below the altitude of our communication satellites. We did not name this asteroid Bambi. Instead, we named it Apophis, after the Egyptian god of darkness and death.

Science is not there for you to cherry pick ... You can decide whether or not to believe in it but that doesn’t change the reality of an emergent scientific truth.

If a scientist is not befuddled by what they're looking at, then they're not a research scientist.