During the 1970s and 1980s, the popular television soap opera As The World Turns portrayed sunrise during the opening credits and sunset during the closing credits... The soap-opera sunrise showed the sun moving toward the left as it rose rather than to the right. They obviously had gotten a piece of film showing a sunset and played it in reverse... Had they called their local astrophysicists, any one of us might have recommended that if they needed to save money, they could have shown the sunset in a mirror before they showed it running backward.

If it's a new planet, sign me up. I'm tired of driving around the block, boldly going where hundreds have gone before in orbit around earth-give me a place to go and I'll go.

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

I think we are all the sum of that which has happened in our lives. And if you're successful, it would be wrong to think that you'd be more successful had something been easier. That's not a given.

I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes people's politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true.

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

Trillions of years into the future, when all stars are gone...all parts of the cosmos will cool to the same temperature as the ever-cooling background. At that time, space travel will no longer provide refuge because even Hell will have frozen over. We may then declare that the universe has died-not with a bang, but with a whimper.