“There’s nothing I believe in more strongly than getting young people interested in science and engineering, for a better tomorrow, for all humankind.”

When we see the shadow on our images, are we seeing the time 11 minutes ago on Mars? Or are we seeing the time on Mars as observed from Earth now? It’s like time travel problems in science fiction. When is now; when was then?

Winter lingered so long in the lap of Spring that it occasioned a great deal of talk.

Our goal in science is to discover universal laws of nature. That pursuit fills me with wonder.

The strange thing about grinding that might surprise many people is that you can grind things and shape them using materials that are generally somewhat softer than the thing you’re grinding and shaping.

The most serious problem facing humankind is climate change. All of these people breathing and burning our atmosphere has led to an extraordinarily dangerous situation.

It fills me with joy to know that we can pursue these answers. It is an astonishing thing that we are — you and I are one of the ways the universe knows itself.

Unlike science, creationism cannot predict anything, and it cannot provide satisfactory answers about the past.

People get a lot out of being religious. They have strong senses of community and mutual support. So, what’s not to love [there]?

Think how fortunate we are to know this much. But think also of all that’s yet to be discovered. Here’s hoping the deep answers to the deep questions-from the nature of consciousness to the origin of life-will be found in not too much more time.

Apparently there is redundancy in memory: You store the same memory in different parts of your brain for accessing at different speeds. That speed would depend on the frequency of use and the importance of the knowledge.

Religion is a completely different thing from the claim that the Earth is six thousand years old. That’s just crazy.

Speaking of human computers, there is a guy named Art Benjamin, he’s a human calculator. He says it’s a skill he learned as a kid. Now he’s a math professor at Harvey Mudd. He can find the square root of a six digit number in a few seconds. Practice.

I abandoned my religious teachings after I read the Bible twice – cover to cover. It took me a couple of years.

If the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, it’s game over. It’s control-alt-delete for civilization.

The natural world is a package deal; you don’t get to select which facts you like and which you don’t.

I tell personal stories associated with aspects of the theory, and I hope they are interesting and compelling. I don’t feel you’re going to change a grownup’s mind in one reading. People have to be exposed to scientific ideas over and over again for years. It’s also not a textbook.

Engineering is too important to wait for science.

Leonardo Da Vinci combined art and science and aesthetics and engineering, that kind of unity is needed once again.

The Reservoir plan is an engineering mechanism applied to the field of economics, and in its essence it has nothing to do with democracy or any other political philosophy.

I kind of think of engineering like the chefs at a restaurant. Nobody’s going to deny chefs are integrally important, but there’s also so many other people who contribute to a great meal.

Death is an engineering problem.

Software engineering economics.

One man’s ‘magic’ is another man’s engineering. ‘Supernatural’ is a null word.

I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way