The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.
Lawrence M. Krauss
Feynman once said, 'Science is imagination in a straitjacket.' It is ironic that in the case of quantum mechanics, the people without the straitjackets are generally the nuts.
The biggest conceptual change over the last 100 years in the way physicists think about the world is symmetry.
I can't prove that God doesn't exist, but I'd much rather live in a universe without one.
It is, after all, impossible in the modern world to shield everyone from nonsense and stupidity.
Religious leaders need to be held accountable for their ideas.
Education is far less about a set of facts than a way of thinking, than learning how to critically think. And therefore, what I always think should be the basis of education is not answers but questions.
On the question of information security, he claims that, in a Trump Administration, the U.S. government will not spy on its own citizens. If true, this would represent a turn away from the strong language that he has used about identifying terrorists on our soil.
Keeping religion immune from criticism is both unwarranted and dangerous.
The Bible is full of dubious scientific impossibilities, from Jonah living inside a whale, to the sun standing still in the sky for Joshua.
On the question of preserving public lands, Trump replies that our elected officials have spent too long rewarding 'special interests,' by which I assume he doesn't mean petroleum companies and the Bundy family.
These days, gun violence can strike anywhere, from a church hall in Charleston to a movie theatre or a Planned Parenthood office in Colorado. But our response to it depends on whether that violence is understood to be terrorism.
Symmetry does mean something different for physicists than for members of the public. It means that an object or a theory does not change when you make some transformation - either rotating or moving it or doing something to the equations.
Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can't even measure them.
A snowflake is another beautifully ordered example of what simple, natural meteorological processes can produce. Stars form by gravity, collapsing into spherically ordered structures that can remain in this form only if they release tremendous heat energy into the environment.
I have always felt that, aside from research that violates universal human mores, when it comes to technological applications, that which can be done will be done.
The root cause of the looming energy problem - and the key to easing environmental, economic and religious tensions while improving public health - is to address the unending, and unequal, growth of the human population. And the one proven way to reduce fertility rates is to empower young women by educating them.
I am in favor of saying, 'Okay, let's get teams of educators and experts in certain disciplines to say, 'What are the basic things that we think are an essential part of an early education for people?'' Put them together and create, as well as possible, a set of goals and tools to learn those things.
Parents, of course, have concerns and 'say,' but they don't have the right to shield their children from knowledge. That is not a right, any more than they have the right to shield their children from healthcare or medicine.
If our species is to survive, our future will probably require outposts beyond our own planet.
Whatever the evolutionary basis of religion, the xenophobia it now generates is clearly maladaptive.
For all of his bravado, obnoxiousness, hatred, and vitriol, the scariest thing about Trump, to me, is his unique combination of ignorance about the world, convolved with ignorance about himself.
A significant fraction of evangelical voters appear more likely to ignore the candidates' specific economic and foreign policy platforms in favor of concerns about gay marriage or abortion.
The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis.
By his own admission, Carson's remarkable hand-eye coordination allowed him to soar as a surgeon, and he used that success to build a lucrative reputation as a purveyor of advice for young and old. His book for young people is titled 'You Have a Brain.'
For a man with an impressive educational C.V., Ben Carson makes a lot of intellectual missteps.
We should teach kids how to question. Now having said that, of course, to be a productive adult, there are certain skills that are required - reading, writing, and, in the old-fashioned days, we used to say arithmetic. Now we say mathematics.
I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false.
Donald Trump called for the closing of borders to Muslims; John McCain said, in response to the President's address on the San Bernardino shooting, that 'this is the war of our time.' As that shooting shows, we react to terrorism with far more intensity than we do to an ordinary crime.
If innovations were predictable, they wouldn't be discoveries.
Imagining living in a universe without purpose may prepare us to better face reality head on. I cannot see that this is such a bad thing.
Local order in parts of the universe is always possible at the expense of heat and disorder dissipated to the external environment. The human body is one example: we take in energy from our environment to build up complex molecules that help power our bodies, and, in doing so, we release heat to the world around us.
Richard Nixon, famously, conducted his foreign policy according to the 'madman theory': he tried to convince enemy leaders that he was irrational and volatile in an attempt to intimidate them. But this was a potentially useful approach to foreign policy only because it was an act.
We need to walk into the future, no matter how unnerving, with open eyes if society is to keep pace with technology.
We should provide the meaning of the universe in the meaning of our own lives. So I think science doesn't necessarily have to get in the way of kind of spiritual fulfillment.
When it comes to the real operational issues that govern our understanding of physical reality, ontological definitions of classical philosophers are, in my opinion, sterile.
Nothing can create something all the time due to the laws of quantum mechanics, and it's - it's fascinatingly interesting.
To me, what philosophy does best is reflect on knowledge that's generated in other areas.
People are interested in science, but they don't always know they're interested in science, and so I try to find a way to get them interested.
Teaching and writing, to me, is really just seduction; you go to where people are and you find something that they're interested in and you try and use that to convince them that they should be interested in what you have to say.
Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
By no definition of any modern scientist is intelligent design science, and it's a waste of our students' time to subject them to it.
To the extent that we even understand string theory, it may imply a massive number of possible different universes with different laws of physics in each universe, and there may be no way of distinguishing between them or saying why the laws of physics are the way they are. And if I can predict anything, then I haven't explained anything.
I don't know if science and reason will ultimately help guide humanity to a better and more peaceful future, but I am certain that this belief is part of what keeps the 'Star Trek' fandom going.
One might rationally argue that individual human beings should be free choose what moral behavior they approve of, and which they don't, subject to the constraints of the law.
Organized religion, wielding power over the community, is antithetical to the process of what modern democracy should define as liberty. The sooner we are without it, the better.
For many, to live in a universe that may have no purpose, and no creator, is unthinkable.
When a person's religious beliefs cause him to deny the evidence of science, or for whom public policy morphs into a battle with the devil, shouldn't that be a subject for discussion and debate?
Empirical explorations ultimately change our understanding of which questions are important and fruitful and which are not.
Aside from communications satellites, space is devoid of industry.
