There is no such thing as outside the universe, as far as we can tell.

All the stuff we've ever seen in the laboratory, all the kinds of particles and matter and energy, that only makes up 5 percent of our universe.

We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality. Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description.

The speed of time is 1 hour per hour, no matter what else is going on in the universe.

There's no verbs before time itself exists, right? There's no popping into existence, there's no fluctuating, there's no quantum mechanical craziness, there is literally nothing.

Just the idea that we, these little collections of atoms and molecules, are part of the world, but a part that can look at the rest of the world and figure it out in a self-referential way, is kind of breathtaking.

The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.