We still don't know for sure what the trigger was, but since we've discovered meteorites with supernova dust, we do know that a violent explosion rocked our cosmic neighborhood at the time of our birth, and it's quite possible that without it, our stable, stately solar system would never exist at all.

No one is saying you're possessed by the devil anymore except the most ignorant of people in modern culture.

The universe's destiny has very little to do with the near-term destiny of Earth.

To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place. By comparison, human nature-the psychologist's domain-is infinitely more daunting.

I would expunge the word "aptitude" from our vocabulary, because if you're interested in something, that's all that matters. You'll spend more time doing it, that than anything else, and possibly more time doing it than anybody else. And that's all that matters, because in the end, if you love what you do, you'll be your best at it compared to anything else you might have chosen as a career.

Most of what Einstein said and did has no direct impact on what anybody reads in the Bible. Special relativity, his work in quantum mechanics, nobody even knows or cares. Where Einstein really affects the Bible is the fact that general relativity is the organizing principle for the Big Bang.

The solar system should be viewed as our backyard, not as some sequence of destinations that we do one at a time.