A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

There is nothing bigger or older than the universe.

The universe does not behave according to our pre-conceived ideas. It continues to surprise us.

A picture is worth a thousand words...and uses up a thousand times the memory.

Using e-mail, I can communicate with scientists all over the world.

Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it.

In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder.