This year’s Yom Kippur was sober. I decided to forgive a few scientists who chose not to read our recent expedition paper but nevertheless criticized it publicly. Two days later, I was asked in an extensive interview for Die Welt: “You are arguably the most famous practicing scientist in the…

My routine morning jog at sunrise was slightly delayed today by an early television interview on the CBC News Network in Canada. Natalie Kalata asked me for the significance of the sample return from the asteroid Bennu today and I replied: “It feels like touching a piece of sky.” When…

There are many popularizers of science, including journalists, bloggers and those who call themselves “astrophysicists” without writing a single scientific paper for decades. But there are only a few practicing scientists who engage the public in their ongoing research. Just as sport commentators suggest to soccer players how to pass…

My Harvard colleague and 2007 Nobel laureate in Economics, Eric Maskin, invited me last night to dinner in the company of the 2017 Nobel Laureate in molecular biology, Michael Rosbash. As soon as the three of us sat down, Michael said: “The discovery of recombinant DNA changes everything in my…

The absolute silence dominated my routine jog this morning along an empty path, with the rising sun as my only companion. I was struck by how lonely we can be in the company of physical objects, even as magnificent as this giant fusion reactor situated 8.33 light-minutes away. This sense…

When a plumber arrived today to solve a gutter problem in my backyard, he looked at me and said: “I saw you in the news. Your job is to look at the stars!” This reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s insight: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us…

The first reading of the new play about my latest research, titled “A Piece of Sky”, by playwright Josh Ravetch , will take place at the end of September and will hopefully show off Broadway within a year. In his latest email, Josh asked me: “How do we invite the…

It is arrogant of us to believe that we are the most intelligent species that ever existed in the Universe since the Big Bang. Not just because there are billions of Earth-Sun analogues within the Milky-Way galaxy alone. But also because many past civilizations might have perished by now as…

Over the past week, I received hundreds of emails inspired by the new findings from the expedition to the Pacific Ocean, as summarized in a new scientific paper, accessible here. Below is a representative sample of these letters to illustrate that innovation in scientific research is worthwhile well beyond the…