I Agree, Along With Carl Sagan, That

I Had Two Passions When I Was A Child. First Was To Learn About Einstein's Theory And Help To Complete His Dream Of A Unified Theory Of Everything. That's My Day Job. I Work In Something Called String Theory. I'm One Of The Founders Of The Subject. We Hope To Complete Einstein's Dream Of A Theory Of Everything.

I Often Think That We Are Like The Carp Swimming Contentedly In That Pond. We Live Out Our Lives In Our Own "pond," Confident That Our Universe Consists Of Only The Familiar And The Visible. We Smugly Refuse To Admit That Parallel Universes Or Dimensions Can Exist Next To Ours, Just Beyond Our Grasp. If Our Scientists Invent Concepts Like Forces, It Is Only Because They Cannot Visualize The Invisible Vibrations That Fill The Empty Space Around Us. Some Scientists Sneer At The Mention Of Higher Dimensions Because They Cannot Be Conveniently Measured In The Laboratory.

I Want To See Us To Explore Outer Space. But I Want To Do It Safely, Without The Loss Of Human Life, And Democratically: Where Is The Free-wheeling Debate On This Question? Only One Force Can Stop This Mission: The Will Of The American People. They Have Not Been Asked. Do They Want To Endanger Their Loved Ones, Their Industry With This Launch? One Force Is More Powerful Than Plutonium, The Spirit Of The American People United.

Language And Emotions Are Too Easily Misread. For Example, Laughing Can Mean Many Things: Laughing With You Or At You. Does That Laugh Reflect Joy, Anger, Or That S/he's About To Fire You? Too Many Jobs Require Complex Feelings, Pattern Recognition, Common Sense, And The Human Touch.

The Strength And Weakness Of Physicists Is That We Believe In What We Can Measure. And If We Can't Measure It, Then We Say It Probably Doesn't Exist. And That Closes Us Off To An Enormous Amount Of Phenomena That We May Not Be Able To Measure Because They Only Happened Once. For Example, The Big Bang. ... That's One Reason Why They Scoffed At Higher Dimensions For So Many Years. Now We Realize That There's No Alternative.