In the beginning, nearly 14 billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.
Dark energy is a mysterious pressure in the vacuum of space that acts in the opposite direction of gravity, forcing the universe to expand faster than it otherwise would.
When Newton breached this philosophical barrier by rendering all motion comprehensible and predictable, some theologians criticized him for leaving nothing for the Creator to do.
Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist.
For reasons I have yet to understand, many people don't like chemicals, which might explain the perennial movement to rid foods of them. andlt;...andgt; Personally, I am quite comfortable with chemicals, anywhere in the universe. My favorite stars, as well as my best friends, are all made of them.
People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.
Not only are we in the universe, the universe is in us. I don't know of any deeper spiritual feeling than what that brings upon me.
If you love what you do, you'll be your best at it compared to anything else you might have chosen as a career. Or at least you will love it more, and you won't lead a depressed day of your life.
It would be great if we were on multiple planets, but I think that's unrealistic. Hawking says we have to be on multiple planets so an asteroid could come and you'd still have some humans left. It's a nice idea. It satisfies the multiple-eggs-in-multiple-baskets concept.
If you want to assert a truth, first make sure it's not just an opinion that you desperately want to be true.
I love being wrong because that means in that instant, I learned something new that day.
To be scientifically literate is to empower yourself to know when someone else is full of shit.
Climate change has taken on political dimensions. That's odd because I don't see people choosing sides over E=Mc2 or other fundamental facts of science.
Einstein's theory, we know that it fails. In advance, we know it fails. So that a deeper understanding of nature is awaiting us.
If you want to come behind the Bible and explain everything scientifically, then you're denying God's power over miracles.
If you removed all the arteries, veins, and capillaries from a person's body, and tied them end-to-end…the person will die.
Dark matter and dark energy are two things we measure in the universe that are making things happen, and we have no idea what the cause is.
I'd bet almost anything that life from another planet, if formed independently from life on Earth, would be more different from all species of Earth life than any two species of Earth life are from each other.
To be scientifically literate is to empower yourself to know when someone else is full of bullshit.
For centuries, epilepsy was the exact expectation of someone being possessed by the Devil. There was no better explanation, and it allows you to admit the existence of the Devil. If there's a Devil, that mean's there's a God.
Scientists are human. We have our blind spots and prejudices. Science is a mechanism designed to ferret them out. Problem is we aren't always faithful to the core values of science.
While I'm a big fan of science fiction, especially as rendered in expensive Hollywood blockbusters, it's the real universe that calls to me. To fall into a black hole, that is more amazing than anything I've ever read in a science-fiction story.
No matter what eyewitness testimony is in the court of law, it is the lowest form of evidence in the court of science.
My popularity does not derive from me pandering to people. People came to me. I don't tell anyone to follow me on Twitter. I don't tell people to like my Facebook page. I don't tell people to fill the venue. I'm offered to people, and then people come.
Don't know if it's good or bad that a Google search on Big Bang Theory lists the sitcom before the origin of the Universe.
Gamma rays are the sort of radiation you should avoid. Want proof? Just remember how the comic strip character The Hulk became big, green, and ugly.
Practically every food you buy in a store for consumption by humans is genetically modified food. There are no wild, seedless watermelons. There's no wild cows.
You get to say that the Earth is flat because we live in a country that guarantees your free speech. But it's not a country that guarantees that anything you say is correct.
I try to write in a way where you care deeply what the next paragraph will be. I hear the rhythm of prose and that, to me, distinguishes great writing from ordinary writing. By the way, I don't even claim that I'm good. I claim that I value it.
Extreme skepticism and extreme gullibility are two equal ways of not having to think at all. And I don't think I'm the first to say that.
The day that you stop looking -- because you're content God did it -- I don't need you in the lab. You're useless on the frontier of understanding the nature of the world.
Let's create a World's Fair that captures everybody's visions of tomorrow together and let's celebrate that vision. Let's have articles on it with illustrators imagining how we'd be living differently.
Wanna lose 1200 Calories a month? Drink a liter of ice water a day. You burn the energy just raising the water to body temp.
They scientists of centuries past call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.
Odd how often blood is shed to obtain freedom from those in power. Oppressors must be the most insecure people in the world.
Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.
The depth of experience fine wine can bring to a dinner, particularly a bottle that has been through the past 100 years, makes you take stock of your own life.
Around the world, varying belief systems lead to political differences that are not always resolved peacefully. The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them.
In other words, after the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.
The remarkable feature of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. After the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.
We account for all the matter and energy that we're familiar with, measure up how much gravity it should have, it's one-sixth of the gravity that's actually operating on the universe. We call that dark matter. It really should be called dark gravity. We don't know what that is.
Science is not just 'Here are some facts, learn that'. There's a thread through these stories that, if you know how to tell it because you know how they connect, then it's a thread that will land right in your mind, body and soul.
Seventy percent of Earth's surface is water and over 99 percent is uninhabited, so you would expect nearly all impactors to hit either the ocean or desolate regions on Earth's surface. So why do movie meteors have such good aim?
The people that first climbed Mt. Everest weren't scientists, right, they were adventurers. If you're an adventurer, you want to go yourself. It's different than a scientist, who is simply wanting to learn.
The whole society has to recognize the importance of the value in embracing what science is going into the 21st Century. Otherwise, we might as well start packing and moving back into the cave right now, because that's where we'll end up.
This past year, we received our second Emmy nomination for Outstanding Informational Series. While we'd all like to win, I can say with utmost sincerity that it mattered more to me that we got noticed than whether or not we win.
To achieve this density of a neutron star at home, just cram a herd of 50 million elephants into the volume of a thimble.
It would be amazing if something completely spiritual sounding happened. Oh, my gosh! We'd be all over it. Because it's something new about the physical universe.
Note, however, that you cannot simply add temperatures the way you can add volumes or weights. Two people in bed, each with body temperatures of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, do not normally create a 197.2 degree under-the-cover oven.
One of the reasons we're here, that we exist at all, is that Earth, cosmically speaking, is in a relatively peaceful place: orbiting our Sun in a near perfect circle.
Cutting PBS support (0.012% of budget) to help balance the Federal budget is like deleting text files to make room on your 500Gig hard drive.
I think everyone should have a personal mission to leave the Earth a better place for them having lived in it and let Earth then take it from there.
Photons are accurately and legitimately described as waves and particles at the same time. They are genuine wavicles.
If all that you see, do, measure and discover is the will of a deity, then ideas can never be proven wrong, you have no predictive power, and you are at a loss to understand the principles behind most of the fundamental interconnections of nature.
If you are that person, you are more likely to believe that God cured you, this invisible force, creator of the universe, cured you, than that you had three idiotic doctors diagnose you. ... I taught physics to pre-med students who became doctors. Not all of them are smart, I assure you.
So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.'
I remain unconvinced that anything other than rapid decomposition is the fate of my body and mind after death.
If we want to unlock the secret behind the origin of our sun and its planets, it would be helpful to find some remnants from the birth itself, an event that took place about four-and-a-half-billion years ago.
Why can't we summon the ingenuity and courage of the generations that came before us? The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What's our excuse?
I didn't even know there were stars to look at to not see. If you don't know that they're there, you don't know that you're missing them.
It is astonishing to realize that until Galileo performed his experiments on the acceleration of gravity in the early seventeenth century, nobody questioned Aristotle's falling balls. Nobody said, Show Me!
People like it when they understand something that they previously thought they couldn't understand. It's a sense of empowerment.
Who you are, where you've been and what you've done is all up here, captured and preserved in your memories. If you lost that -- the story of your own origins -- you'd lose your identity, your sense of self.
We can trace the elements. They were forged in the centers of high-mass stars that went unstable at the ends of their lives, they exploded, scattered their enriched contents across the galaxy, sprinkled into gas clouds that then collapsed and formed stars and planets and life.
Earth's Moon is about 1 400th the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 1 400th as far from us, making the Sun and the Moon the same size on the sky--a coincidence not shared by any other planet -- moon combination in the solar system, allowing for uniquely photogenic total solar eclipses.
Like a snowplow in overdrive, a supernova shockwave might sweep away any gas clouds in its path.
A supernova is one of the most powerful explosions in the universe. It's so luminous, it can be seen across billions of light years. It releases as much energy in an instant as our sun will produce over its 10-billion-year lifetime.
I knew my interest in the universe and I owned a telescope that I bought with money I earned by walking dogs. 50 cents per walk, per dog, and that accumulated quickly. I bought a camera, a telescope. I taught myself astrophotography. I did all this.
There's nothing a teacher likes better than ten minute videos. It's not the whole class, but it's not too short, it's enough to wrap a lesson plan around.
Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher. A community of minds, reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.
Perhaps these ancient observatories like Stonehenge perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what's going on in the sky.
With no gravitational force to work against, your body not only doesn't need the same amount of muscle and bone, it starts breaking them down. As on Earth, so in space: use it or lose it. And exercise may not solve the problem.
Science surrounds you. It's not something that you can step aside, step over or push out of your way because you were never good at science in school. Science is around you. Once you know and embrace that fact, it might stimulate curiosity within you to learn more about the natural world.
So when I think of, what is the meaning of life, to me, that's not an eternal unanswerable question. To me it is in arms reach of me every day.
Scientific literacy is an intellectual vaccine against the claims of charlatans who would exploit ignorance.
You know, there's black holes and what -- could there be wormholes? Could -- might there be a multi-verse? These are all fascinating frontiers. What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy? And what was around before the universe? And do we have access to higher dimensions?