I do not believe in a personal God.

Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.

If you understand how the universe operates, you control it in a way.

[On President Bush's plan to get to Mars in 10 years] Stupid. Robots would do a better job and be much cheaper because you don't have to bring them back.

There are no black holes - in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity. There are however apparent horizons which persist for a period of time.

So when people ask me if I believe God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn't exist before the Big Bang, so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It's like asking for directions to the edge of the earth; the earth is a sphere, it doesn't have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.

Perhaps we could write code to optimize code, then run that code through the code optimizer?