14 Quotes by Adam Frank

From the exoplanet data, astronomers can now say with confidence that one out of every five stars hosts a world where life as we know it could form. So, when you’re standing out there under the night sky, choose five random stars. Chances are, one of them has a world in its Goldilocks zone where liquid water could be flowing across its surface and life might already exist.

In other words, pretty much every star you see in the night sky hosts at least one planet.The next time you find yourself outside at night, take a moment to stop and consider the implications of this result as you gaze at all those pinpricks of light.Every one of them hosts at least one world, and most stars will have more than one planet. Solar systems are the rule and not the exception. They’re everywhere.

New laws, new kinds of things can emerge as the universe evolves. The more moving parts you have in something, the more possibilities there are. There's a whole new science now of complexity, and what we see is that complexity requires a very different approach than the kind of bottom-up approach that fundamental physics has always used. We're gonna have to think about the world in a different way if we want to address complex systems.

Millennials, in particular, consider themselves to be spiritual, but they're not necessarily going to anybody's church. It's not like the world is becoming hardcore, Richard Dawkins-atheist, but people are looking to sort of synthesize science - people love science, especially the millennials.

There's not a single shred of evidence for the multiverse. If, in order to explain this universe, you need a theory that invents an infinite number of parallel universes - that's not a very good theory.

Rather than make claims of final theories, perhaps we should focus on our ever-continuing dialogue with the universe. It is the dialogue that matters most, not its imagined end. It is the sacred act of inquiry wherein we gently trace the experienced outlines of an ever-greater whole. It is the dialogue that lets the brilliance of the diamond’s infinite facets shine clearly. It is the dialogue that instills within us a power and capacity that is, and always has been, saturated with meaning.

People love science and all it offers, but they also feel a calling in themselves to the sense of what's deeper.

Scientists and artists are both living in the cultural milieu that they come up in. They're always responding to what is happening culturally.

The ideas always have to be in service of the story. And that's what Scott and the writers did - they weren't trying to beat you over the head with an idea; they had a story they wanted to tell, and they had ideas, so they used the story as a way of fleshing out the ideas. It all depends on where they want to go with it.