After my mother died, I learned that she'd had a scholarship to the University of Nebraska, but - in kind of a tradition that females don't do things like that - her father prevented her from going. She always said that she wasn't allowed to go to college, but until she died, I never knew that she'd had this scholarship.

A lot of missions for NASA or experiments on accelerators happen through a whole process of scientific retreats, long-range planning, forming collaborations to do studies - all this kind of stuff. It's very democratic.

It seems kind of nutty to send up something new when there's something already there that can do the job.

When I was really young, my ambition wasn't to do science. I didn't really know that I could. It was to write a great novel.

The weird thing about the arrow of time is that it's not to be found in the underlying laws of physics. It's not there. So it's a feature of the universe we see, but not a feature of the laws of the individual particles. So the arrow of time is built on top of whatever local laws of physics apply.

Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.

I had a difficult time getting my arms around Einstein's work, even when I was a physics major at one of the top universities in India.

I always liked movies, so I started writing for Hollywood, but my day job was physics.