Physicist

One thing I cannot understand - and people are probably going to be upset about this - is why local school boards have control over educational content.

The Internet is a clear example of how our lives have changed in ways we couldn't have imagined: a distributed information source, which is invisible to everyone, where you can access anything, and it's distributed throughout the whole world. Basically, communication is instantaneous.

We should teach kids how to question. Now having said that, of course, to be a productive adult, there are certain skills that are required - reading, writing, and, in the old-fashioned days, we used to say arithmetic. Now we say mathematics.

Local order in parts of the universe is always possible at the expense of heat and disorder dissipated to the external environment. The human body is one example: we take in energy from our environment to build up complex molecules that help power our bodies, and, in doing so, we release heat to the world around us.

Aside from communications satellites, space is devoid of industry.

The biggest conceptual change over the last 100 years in the way physicists think about the world is symmetry.

I can't prove that God doesn't exist, but I'd much rather live in a universe without one.

As a physicist, I've always found cosmology to be a rational elixir; it distances me from ordinary concerns.

Either Trump only talks to those who play up to his delusion, or he simply doesn't listen to those who might burst his bubble. Either way, that is a cause for worry.

One might rationally argue that individual human beings should be free choose what moral behavior they approve of, and which they don't, subject to the constraints of the law.

These days, gun violence can strike anywhere, from a church hall in Charleston to a movie theatre or a Planned Parenthood office in Colorado. But our response to it depends on whether that violence is understood to be terrorism.

On the question of information security, he claims that, in a Trump Administration, the U.S. government will not spy on its own citizens. If true, this would represent a turn away from the strong language that he has used about identifying terrorists on our soil.

Parents, of course, have concerns and 'say,' but they don't have the right to shield their children from knowledge. That is not a right, any more than they have the right to shield their children from healthcare or medicine.

Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can't even measure them.

Religious leaders need to be held accountable for their ideas.

No one intuitively understands quantum mechanics because all of our experience involves a world of classical phenomena where, for example, a baseball thrown from pitcher to catcher seems to take just one path, the one described by Newton's laws of motion. Yet at a microscopic level, the universe behaves quite differently.

For all of his bravado, obnoxiousness, hatred, and vitriol, the scariest thing about Trump, to me, is his unique combination of ignorance about the world, convolved with ignorance about himself.

Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Cabinet members may disagree and even resign in protest, but, ultimately, they must obey the order of the Commander-in-Chief.

When a person's religious beliefs cause him to deny the evidence of science, or for whom public policy morphs into a battle with the devil, shouldn't that be a subject for discussion and debate?