Only when creative people take ownership of cosmic discovery will society accept science as the cultural activity that it is.

If the people of Comic-Con ruled the world...then tomorrow would be invented every day.

Once you've got the makings of a star, gravity draws leftover gas and dust into a giant swirling disk. The dust continues to stick together, clumping into rocky asteroids, which eventually become orbiting rocky planets. And voila: a solar system!

There was a transition going on - Baghdad being the intellectual capital of the world where major advances were made in agriculture and mathematics and engineering and medicine and astronomy, and then that all sort of collapsed. And I was trying to understand how such a intellectually fertile environment can lose its compass bearing. Because I think about the creative centers today - countries, or even regions. Will Silicon Valley always be as innovative? Will the United States be innovative, or will we become complacent?

With automatic spell checkers running unleashed over what we compose, our era is that of correctly spelled typos.

The very nature of science is discoveries, and the best of those discoveries are the ones you don't expect.

All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA.