While I'm a big fan of science fiction, especially as rendered in expensive Hollywood blockbusters, it's the real universe that calls to me. To fall into a black hole, that is more amazing than anything I've ever read in a science-fiction story.

But my vote for Venus's most peculiar feature is the presence of craters that are all relatively young and uniformly distributed over its surface. This innocuous-sounding feature implicates a single planetwide catastrophe that reset the cratering clock... turning Venus's entire surface into the American automotive dream-a totally paved planet.

We hunger for significance, for signs that our personal existence is of special meaning to the universe. To that end, we’re all too eager to deceive ourselves and others, to discern a sacred image in a grilled cheese sandwich or find a divine warning in a comet

Some morning while your eating breakfast and you need something new to think about, though, you might want to ponder the fact that you see your kids across the table not as they are but as they once were, about three nanoseconds ago.

One of the reasons we're here, that we exist at all, is that Earth, cosmically speaking, is in a relatively peaceful place: orbiting our Sun in a near perfect circle.

I love the future we might invent for ourselves that I have not yet dreamt of.

There is no true understanding of Biology without Chemistry. And there's no true understanding of Chemistry without Physics.