We Believe That Black Holes Collapse To

What I Do For Living, Working On Something Called String Theory Which We Think May Answer The Fundamental Question: Are There Other Universes? Can You Go Through A Black Hole? Can You Warp The Fabric Of Space And Time And Meet Your Mother Before You Were Born? These Are All Questions That In Principle String Theory Should Be Able To Answer.

I Think A Colony In Space Will Take Much Longer Than Sci Fiction Writers Think. It Costs $10,000 To Put A Pound Of Anything Into Near Earth Orbit. That Is Your Weight In Gold. It Costs About $100,000 A Pound To Put You On The Moon. And It Costs $1,000,000 A Pound To Put You On Mars.

After That Cancellation [of The Superconducting Super Collider In Texas, After $2 Billion Had Been Spent On It], We Physicists Learned That We Have To Sing For Our Supper. ... The Cold War Is Over. You Can't Simply Say "russia!" To Congress, And They Whip Out Their Checkbook And Say, "how Much?" We Have To Tell The People Why This Atom-smasher Is Going To Benefit Their Lives.

It's Humbling To Realise That The Developmental Gulf Between A Miniscule Ant Colony And Our Modern Human Civilisation Is Only A Tiny Fraction Of The Distance Between A Type 0 And A Type Iii Civilisation - A Factor Of 100 Billion Billion, In Fact. Yet We Have Such A Highly Regarded View Of Ourselves, We Believe A Type Iii Civilisation Would Find Us Irresistible And Would Rush To Make Contact With Us. The Truth Is, However, They May Be As Interested In Communicating With Humans As We Are Keen To Communicate With Ants.

I Hope We Find Evidence Of Dark Matter In The Lab And In Outer Space. This Would Go A Long Way To Proving The Correctness Of String Theory, Which Is What I Do For A Living. That Is My Day Job. So String Theory Is A Potentially Experimentally Verifiable Theory.