One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.

The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.

Half the battle is just showing up.

I used to think information was destroyed in black hole. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science.

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.

While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I'm no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women.

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract.