God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.
I see myself in pop culture. I listen to pop music, I do pop things, and I'm also a scientist.
For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains.
Curiosity is a self-driven motivation to explore and to learn. Learning is like... you know, you have to take your medicine. And that is what it has become. And that's unfortunate.
Right now people think God is dark energy and dark matter, the spirit. Go ahead and think that, but the day we can tell you exactly what it is - that it's gremlins in the vacuum of space or whatever - then what's your recourse at that point?
If Earth ever suffers a runaway greenhouse effect (like what has happened on Venus), then our atmosphere would trap excess amounts of solar energy, the air temperature would rise, and the oceans would swiftly evaporate into the atmosphere as they sustained a rolling boil. This would be bad.
I don't want to go into space because of war. I think we would if it was triggered. If China said they want to put military bases on Mars, we'd be at Mars in two years. That would be quick. I don't want that to be the reason.
America 2012: The Learning Channel has HoneyBooBoo, History Channel has PawnStars: and the Science Channel has PumpkinChunkin
If there's something that someone else can do, let them do it. If I couldn't do it uniquely, let someone else do it and I would get back to the lab.
The press still thinks [global warming] is controversial. So they find the 1% of the scientists and put them up as if they're 50% of the research results. You in the public would have no idea that this is basically a done deal and that we're on to other problems, because the journalists are trying to give it a 50/50 story. It's not a 50/50 story. It's not. Period.
The universe is hilarious! Like, Venus is 900 degrees. I could tell you it melts lead. But that's not as fun as saying, 'You can cook a pizza on the windowsill in nine seconds.' And next time my fans eat pizza, they're thinking of Venus!
What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. That's not science. You can get a parrot to do that.
We in astrophysics we think of the universe all the time. So to us, Earth is just another planet. From a distance, it's a speck. And I'm convinced that if everyone had a cosmic perspective you wouldn't have legions of armies waging war on other people because someone would say, "Stop, look at the universe."
There's no greater sign of the failure of the American educational system than the extent to which Americans are distracted by the possibility that Earth might end on December 21, 2012. It's a profound absence of awareness of the laws of physics and how nature works. So they're missing some science classes in their training in high school or in college that would empower them to understand and to judge when someone else is basically just full of it. Science is like an inoculation against charlatans who would have you believe whatever it is they tell you.
Relativity. Gravity. Quantum. Electrodynamics. Evolution. Each of these theories is true, whether or not you believe in them.
As they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion... Although just as in hostage negotiations, it's probably best to keep both sides talking to each other.
I want people to see that the cosmic perspective is simultaneously honest about the universe we live in and uplifting, when we realize how far we have come and how wonderful is this world of ours.
People put clips of me up. There are quotes from me. I've written books, of course. I'm on Twitter. There are dozens of ways to consume my offerings, and a lecture in a large venue is really only just one of them. So I have no concerns about how much access people would have to me no matter what is the capacity of your pocketbook.
Our entire universe emerged from a point smaller than a single atom. Space itself exploded in a cosmic fire, launching the expansion of the universe and giving birth to all the energy and all the matter we know today. I know that sounds crazy, but there’s strong observational evidence to support the Big Bang theory. And it includes the amount of helium in the cosmos and the glow of radio waves left over from the explosion.
Anyone who has wrestled knows that it's the hardest thing in the world to do. Anyone who says something else is the hardest thing has never wrestled. That's what I have found. ... You don't wrestle because it's easy, you wrestle because it's hard. I don't do astrophysics because it's easy, I do it because it's hard. And I juxtapose the two in my mind, body, and soul all the time.
when I wrestled, I would set aside the time to wrestle, so that in my mind it didn't interfere with my study time. That helped me psychologically. When I'm wrestling, I'm not studying the universe. And when I'm studying the universe, I'm not wrestling.
Once you've got the makings of a star, gravity draws leftover gas and dust into a giant swirling disk. The dust continues to stick together, clumping into rocky asteroids, which eventually become orbiting rocky planets. And voila: a solar system!
For decades, we've been trying to cook up the building blocks of life, in the lab, and recreate the origins of it all, but the parts didn't seem to fit together, until now.
If the only time you think of me as a scientist is during Black History Month, then I must not be doing my job as a scientist.
Science is basically an inoculation against charlatans.
