The Venus transit is not a spectacle the way a total solar eclipse is a spectacle.

I never got into 'Star Wars.' Maybe because they made no attempt to portray real physics. At all.

Great scientific minds, from Claudius Ptolemy of the second century to Isaac Newton of the seventeenth, invested their formidable intellects in attempts to deduce the nature of the universe from the statements and philosophies contained in religious writings.... Had any of these efforts worked, science and religion today might be one and the same. But they are not.

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.

For the film to 'earn' the right to be criticized on a scientific level is a high compliment indeed.

God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.

I want upon death to be buried, just like in the old days, where I decompose by the action of microorganisms, and I am dined upon by any form of creeping animal or root system that sees fit to do so.... I will have recycled back to the universe at least some of the energy that I have taken from it. And in so doing, at the conclusion of my scientific adventures, I will have come closer to the heavens than to Earth.