If you don't question you're stuck within a pre-existing parameters of knowledge. Questions are what take you outside of those parameters.

When I shop for fruit & melons I like to hold a grape next to a cantaloupe & think of Earth next to Jupiter. Then I eat Earth.

We think scientific literacy flows out of how many science facts can you recite rather than how was your brain wired for thinking. And it's the brain wiring that I'm more interested in rather than the facts that come out of the curriculum or the lesson plan that's been proposed.

The word smart is not applied to all professions, even if you are smart in that profession. No one talks about smart lawyers. They may say a brilliant lawyer. They'll talk about a creative artist. Smart is saved for scientists. It just is. It's not even really applied to medical doctors. It applies to scientists in the lab figuring out what hadn't been figured out before.

It turns out that the history of astrophysics is where we perfected time keeping.

Life existed on Earth for nearly four billion years before anything remotely resembling a human being showed up. And even then, when we started to branch off from other apes about 10,000,000 years ago, our ancestors looked pretty different.

The tenacity of life is mind-boggling. We keep finding it where no one thought it could be.