Lawrence M. Krauss

Aside from communications satellites, space is devoid of industry.

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.

When it comes to the things that people really want in science fiction - like space travel - the simplest things end up causing them not to happen. Humans are 100-pound bags of water, built to live on Earth.

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?

Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they're really doing is mathematics - it's not talking about things that have affected computer science; it's mathematical logic.

Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries.

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.

Keeping religion immune from criticism is both unwarranted and dangerous.

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.

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.

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.

Donald Trump's candidacy has been a source of anxiety for many reasons, but one stands out: the ability of the president to launch nuclear weapons. When it comes to starting a nuclear war, the president has more freedom than he or she does in, say, ordering the use of torture.

When considering real-world issues, particularly those that touch on science and technology, it is harder to speak in platitudes or rely purely on emotion or fear. Substance, or its lack, becomes harder to mimic or mask, which is why I wish we had a true televised presidential debate on these subjects.

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.

No one intuitively understands quantum mechanics because all of our experience involves a world of classical phenomena where, for example, a baseball thrown from pitcher to catcher seems to take just one path, the one described by Newton's laws of motion. Yet at a microscopic level, the universe behaves quite differently.

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.

The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis.

The Internet is a clear example of how our lives have changed in ways we couldn't have imagined: a distributed information source, which is invisible to everyone, where you can access anything, and it's distributed throughout the whole world. Basically, communication is instantaneous.

The biggest conceptual change over the last 100 years in the way physicists think about the world is symmetry.