Physicist

Donald Trump called for the closing of borders to Muslims; John McCain said, in response to the President's address on the San Bernardino shooting, that 'this is the war of our time.' As that shooting shows, we react to terrorism with far more intensity than we do to an ordinary crime.

The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.

Organized religion, wielding power over the community, is antithetical to the process of what modern democracy should define as liberty. The sooner we are without it, the better.

We should provide the meaning of the universe in the meaning of our own lives. So I think science doesn't necessarily have to get in the way of kind of spiritual fulfillment.

Nothing can create something all the time due to the laws of quantum mechanics, and it's - it's fascinatingly interesting.

A snowflake is another beautifully ordered example of what simple, natural meteorological processes can produce. Stars form by gravity, collapsing into spherically ordered structures that can remain in this form only if they release tremendous heat energy into the environment.

When it comes to the things that people really want in science fiction - like space travel - the simplest things end up causing them not to happen. Humans are 100-pound bags of water, built to live on Earth.

Symmetry does mean something different for physicists than for members of the public. It means that an object or a theory does not change when you make some transformation - either rotating or moving it or doing something to the equations.

If I knew what the next big thing was, I'd be doing it now.

Feynman once said, 'Science is imagination in a straitjacket.' It is ironic that in the case of quantum mechanics, the people without the straitjackets are generally the nuts.

I am in favor of saying, 'Okay, let's get teams of educators and experts in certain disciplines to say, 'What are the basic things that we think are an essential part of an early education for people?'' Put them together and create, as well as possible, a set of goals and tools to learn those things.

When it comes to the real operational issues that govern our understanding of physical reality, ontological definitions of classical philosophers are, in my opinion, sterile.

I was most eager to see how Trump would respond to the climate-change question.

Education is far less about a set of facts than a way of thinking, than learning how to critically think. And therefore, what I always think should be the basis of education is not answers but questions.

The root cause of the looming energy problem - and the key to easing environmental, economic and religious tensions while improving public health - is to address the unending, and unequal, growth of the human population. And the one proven way to reduce fertility rates is to empower young women by educating them.

Imagining living in a universe without purpose may prepare us to better face reality head on. I cannot see that this is such a bad thing.

I used to read a lot of science fiction when I was younger.

I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false.

The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis.

It never ceases to amaze me that every second of every day, more than 6,000 billion neutrinos coming from nuclear reactions inside the sun whiz through my body, almost all of which will travel right through the earth without interruption.