“So they used the story as a way of fleshing out the ideas. It all depends on where they want to go with it.”

The ideas always have to be in service of the story. And that’s what Scott and the writers did – they weren’t trying to beat you over the head with an idea; they had a story they wanted to tell, and they had ideas

The more moving parts you have in something, the more possibilities there are.

It is the dialogue that matters most, not its imagined end. It is the sacred act of inquiry wherein we gently trace the experienced outlines of an ever-greater whole.

Like most young physicists, when I was a kid enraptured with physics, I thought, “Everything can be explained by the theory of the atom!”

The number of people who consider themselves to be religious and going to services is dropping, and the number of people who consider themselves to be spiritual but not religious is increasing.

People have been talking about multiverses as a philosophical idea for a long time. But the current incarnations in physics

Rather than make claims of final theories, perhaps we should focus on our ever-continuing dialogue with the universe.

But as I’ve gotten older, and I look at the world, I think there’s a lot of ways in which that kind of building up from the smallest building blocks doesn’t actually account for the world.

Scientists and artists are both living in the cultural milieu that they come up in. They’re always responding to what is happening culturally.

Millennials, in particular, consider themselves to be spiritual, but they’re not necessarily going to anybody’s church.

People love science and all it offers, but they also feel a calling in themselves to the sense of what’s deeper.

Right now, culturally, we’re seeing a really interesting evolution in ideas about spirituality and the world, right?

There’s a whole new science now of complexity, and what we see is that complexity requires a very different approach than the kind of bottom-up approach that fundamental physics has always used.

I’m found of what’s called emergence – as the universe gets more complex, new laws can emerge. Like evolution – there’s things that you just aren’t able to explain, even if you had an understanding of atoms.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve also become sensitive to the ways – to all that is not amenable to explanation. Things that, even if you had an explanation, what good would it be?

It’s not like the world is becoming hardcore, Richard Dawkins-atheist, but people are looking to sort of synthesize science – people love science, especially the millennials.