Physicist

To me, what philosophy does best is reflect on knowledge that's generated in other areas.

Donald Trump's candidacy has been a source of anxiety for many reasons, but one stands out: the ability of the president to launch nuclear weapons. When it comes to starting a nuclear war, the president has more freedom than he or she does in, say, ordering the use of torture.

Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries.

Keeping religion immune from criticism is both unwarranted and dangerous.

For a physicist or a mathematician, the most symmetrical object you could think about would be a sphere, because it looks identical no matter what you do to it, however you rotate it in any given direction.

Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they're really doing is mathematics - it's not talking about things that have affected computer science; it's mathematical logic.

Symmetries are the playing field on which the physical world works and which determine the rules of the game. The symmetries of nature determine for us things that remain constant, that can't be changed. Those are the guideposts in physics, the quantities like energy and momentum.

The Bible is full of dubious scientific impossibilities, from Jonah living inside a whale, to the sun standing still in the sky for Joshua.

By his own admission, Carson's remarkable hand-eye coordination allowed him to soar as a surgeon, and he used that success to build a lucrative reputation as a purveyor of advice for young and old. His book for young people is titled 'You Have a Brain.'

If our species is to survive, our future will probably require outposts beyond our own planet.

It is, after all, impossible in the modern world to shield everyone from nonsense and stupidity.

When considering real-world issues, particularly those that touch on science and technology, it is harder to speak in platitudes or rely purely on emotion or fear. Substance, or its lack, becomes harder to mimic or mask, which is why I wish we had a true televised presidential debate on these subjects.

By no definition of any modern scientist is intelligent design science, and it's a waste of our students' time to subject them to it.

Life has survived for more than three billion years because it is robust, and almost no mutations can easily outwit the defense mechanisms built up through eons of exposure to potential pathogens.

If innovations were predictable, they wouldn't be discoveries.

The rise of a ubiquitous Internet, along with 24-hour news channels has, in some sense, had the opposite effect from what many might have hoped such free and open access to information would have had. It has instead provided free and open access, without the traditional media filters, to a barrage of disinformation.

Whatever the evolutionary basis of religion, the xenophobia it now generates is clearly maladaptive.

It's all too easy to imagine Trump issuing an ultimate, thermonuclear 'You're fired!' to China, Iran, or another nation - and perhaps to the whole human race.

Empirical explorations ultimately change our understanding of which questions are important and fruitful and which are not.

There are areas of philosophy that are important, but I think of them as being subsumed by other fields. In the case of descriptive philosophy, you have literature or logic, which, in my view, is really mathematics.