I've had various experiences where I've been called by Hollywood studios to look at a script or comment on various scientific ideas that they're trying to inject into a story.
My dad was a composer and a musician, but he never finished high school. His formal education was rather minimal from the standards of today's college graduates and Ph.D.'s, but he had a deep interest in questions of science and questions of the universe.
The number of e-mails and letters that I get from choreographers, from sculptors, from composers who are being inspired by science is huge.
The absolute worst thing that you ever can do, in my opinion, in bringing science to the general public, is be condescending or judgmental. It is so opposite to the way science needs to be brought forth.
I think math is a hugely creative field, because there are some very well-defined operations that you have to work within. You are, in a sense, straightjacketed by the rules of the mathematics. But within that constrained environment, it's up to you what you do with the symbols.
There was a time when 'universe' meant 'all there is.' Everything. The whole shebang. The notion of more than one universe, more than one everything, would seemingly be a contradiction in terms.
I wouldn't say that 'The Fabric of the Cosmos' is a book on cosmology. Cosmology certainly plays a big part, but the major theme is our ever-evolving understanding of space and time, and what it all means for our sense of reality.
We are living through a remarkably privileged era, when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration.
I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly - or ever - gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe.
One of the wonders of science is that it is completely universal. It crosses national boundaries with total ease.
Oftentimes, if you're talking to a seasoned interviewer who asks you a question, they may do a follow-up if they didn't quite get it. It's rare that they'll do a third or fourth or fifth or sixth follow-up, because there's an implicit, agreed-upon decorum that they move on. Kids don't necessarily move on if they don't get it.
You almost can't avoid having some version of the multiverse in your studies if you push deeply enough in the mathematical descriptions of the physical universe.
Our eyes only see the big dimensions, but beyond those there are others that escape detection because they are so small.
For most people, the major hurdle in grasping modern insights into the nature of the universe is that these developments are usually phrased using mathematics.
When we benefit from CT scanners, M.R.I. devices, pacemakers and arterial stents, we can immediately appreciate how science affects the quality of our lives.
String theory envisions a multiverse in which our universe is one slice of bread in a big cosmic loaf. The other slices would be displaced from ours in some extra dimension of space.
By dimension, we simply mean an independent direction in which, in principle, you can move; in which motion can take place. In an everyday world, we have left-right as one dimension; we have back-forth as a second one; and we have up-down as a third.
To tell you the truth, I've never met anybody who can envision more than three dimensions. There are some who claim they can, and maybe they can; it's hard to say.
One of the strangest features of string theory is that it requires more than the three spatial dimensions that we see directly in the world around us. That sounds like science fiction, but it is an indisputable outcome of the mathematics of string theory.
A unified theory would put us at the doorstep of a vast universe of things that we could finally explore with precision.
