“I understand that you take the Bible, as written in English, translated many many times over the last three millennia as to be a more accurate, more reasonable assessment of the natural laws we see around us than what I and everybody in here can observe. That, to me, is unsettling.”

I hope climate science becomes the big thing. And then what I want is electrical engineers to solve the world’s energy problems, energy distribution problems.

If you decide to become a dancer on Broadway, never say who your favorite dance partner is, because members of the media will presume you never want to dance with anybody else.

In another couple centuries I’m sure that worldview won’t even exist. There’s no evidence for it.

But investment in space stimulates society, it stimulates it economically, it stimulates it intellectually, and it gives us all passion.

From an evolutionary standpoint you can’t just wipe everything out and start over, and I don’t think you can do it in the school system either.

The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it.

The Big Bang banged, and for some reason we’re here. And that’s astonishing. And that we can understand that, that’s the most astonishing.

When we sit down to draw or paint the sun’s rays, we generally use yellow because in the morning and the evening with the blue light scattered away so strongly you’re left with a little bit of red and it comes out yellowish.

Teaching creationism in science class as an alternative to evolution is inappropriate.

I say to the grown-ups, ‘If you want to deny evolution and live in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we’ve observed in the universe that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it.’

Hard to find anything lovelier than a tree. They grow at right angles to a tangent of the nominal sphere of the Earth.

I want mechanical engineers to make better transportation systems. I want chemical engineers to develop better solar panels, and so on.

You start doing the addictive behavior to feel good and then your receptors get overloaded with dopamine, then you stop doing the addictive thing and some of the receptors have shut down and you don’t have enough dopamine to feel good.

That’s what makes a human a human, if we store information outside our bodies.

Talk about science with everyone you meet. Especially talk about climate change. It needs to become a part of our everyday conversation (the way it is everywhere else in the world).

One of the drawbacks of English is you can’t spell things by hearing them.

Where did I do well?” When I did this assessment of my life, I said to myself, “It was really good.”

When I turned 50, I threw myself a big birthday party, and I looked seriously at what my life has been about. I recommend this to everybody. Ask yourself, “What have I done? How did I do it? Where’d I mess up?

The normal curve is a distribution most appropriate to chance and random activity. Education is a purposeful activity and we seek to have students learn what we would teach.

The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It’s not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it’s the resentment that settles on your face