When I came to Berkeley, I met all these Nobel laureates and I got to know that they were regular people. They were very smart and very motivated and worked very hard, but they were still humans, whereas before they were kind of mythical creatures to me.

I always think of space-time as being the real substance of space, and the galaxies and the stars just like the foam on the ocean.

The discovery and investigation of life on other planets is likely to change many of our ideas about how life arose on the Earth and even what is life and its natural development.

With something like Chernobyl, the public reaction was 'Oh, my God, science has really done wrong.'

I like to cross the divide between the personal world and the scientific world.

We think of the 1950s as an oppressive time in the culture, and indeed it was, but it was also in many ways a more secular moment, and one in which great scientific achievements flourished. I don't want to get too gauzy about this, but there was much more respect for science as a necessary part of society.

We are the number one economy in the world, and we ought to continue to pursue those kinds of policies that ensure that we maintain that position, like innovation and like technology and like education and like just research and development and discovery.

We are in a tech-heavy society, plunging headlong into an unknown future. Science fiction is what allows you to stand back and analyze the impact of that and put it in context of how it affects people.