A supernova is one of the most powerful explosions in the universe. It's so luminous, it can be seen across billions of light years. It releases as much energy in an instant as our sun will produce over its 10-billion-year lifetime.

When you innovate, you create new industries that then boost your economy. And when you create new industries and that becomes part of your culture, your jobs can't go overseas because no one else has figured out how to do it yet.

The greatest teachers are the ones that turn a B student into an A student, or a failing student into a B student.

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.

We're an elective democracy where science and technology will define where the economically strong countries in the world will be. And science and technological literacy is important for security, as well.

One of the things that fascinates me most is when people are so charmed by the universe that it becomes part of their artistic output.

Down there between our legs, it's like an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system. Who designed that?