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

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.

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.

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

The way superheroes dominate the fictional landscape now, along with dystopian futures and zombies. Yeah, definitely – I think these stories function as a kind of mythology for us.

New laws, new kinds of things can emerge as the universe evolves.

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