I don't want to make a member of Congress do something that that member of Congress's constituents would not approve of, or would not agree to. So in that regard, I'm kind of the opposite of a lobbyist.

Dark matter and dark energy are two things we measure in the universe that are making things happen, and we have no idea what the cause is.

For all we know, the aliens have already done this and unwittingly concluded that there was no intelligent life on Earth. They would now be looking elsewhere. A more humbling possibility would be if aliens had become aware of the technologically proficient species that now inhabits Earth, yet they had drawn the same conclusion.

Plenty of people get excited about the universe.

We are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That's kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It's not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.

It is in the best interests of civilization and our economy and our nation to understand what objective truths are as revealed by the methods and tools of science.

It turns out that the history of astrophysics is where we perfected time keeping.