By about age 12, I would prefer to stay up and watch the stars than go to sleep. I started learning. I started going to the library and reading. But it was initially just watching the stars from my bedroom that I really did. There was just nothing as interesting in my life as watching the stars every night.

So important is this dark matter to our understanding of the size, shape, and ultimate fate of the universe that the search for it will very likely dominate astronomy for the next few decades.

I try to do my science in a moral way, and, I believe that, ideally, science should be looked upon as something that helps us understand our role in the universe.

We know very little about the universe. I personally don't believe it's uniform and the same everywhere. That's like saying the earth is flat.

One of my favorite things to do is play golf at Braemar Country Club. It's quiet and not overly crowded. The people are nice, and there's wildlife all around the course. As far as my game itself, I can go from a 10 handicap to a 30, depending on the day.

Climate change poses an existential threat to the planet that is no less dire than that posed by North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

Cosmologists have attempted to account for the day-to-day laws you find in textbooks in terms of fundamental 'superlaws,' but the superlaws themselves must still be accepted as brute facts. So maybe the ultimate laws of nature will always be off-limits to science.

The story seems to be that almost every star has a planetary system... and, also, the definition of 'habitable zone' has expanded. In our system, it used to be that only Mars and Earth were potentially habitable. Now we've got an ocean on Europa... Titan.