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

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

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.

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.

Anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.’ I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.

No man can claim to be free in real terms unless he is fully in control of his own destiny!

Riches cannot rescue from the grave, which claims alike the monarch and the slave.

Many people can rightfully claim, as much as anyone can rightfully claim anything, that much of their lives have been spent stumbling through a cloud of cluelessness.

Riches do not constitute any claim to distinction. It is only the vulgar who admire riches as riches.

I will not allow the light to blind me, not when even the darkness couldn’t claim me.

Claiming certainty without corroborating evidence is stupid.

I resolved to claim for my sex all that an impartial Creator had bestowed, which, by custom and a perverted application of the Scriptures, had been wrested from woman.