Tracking the history of the Universe from the instant after the Big Bang is a stellar achievement—but it leaves unanswered the fundamental question of how the Big Bang started in the first place.

“I am working strenuously on the further development of a theory on the connection between gravitation and electricity.”

Quantum mechanics is very impressive. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.

I tend more and more to the opinion that one cannot come further with a continuum theory.

All sorts of nasty things―TV sets showing Nixon’s “Checkers speech,” green slime, Japanese horror movie monsters, etc.―emerge helter-skelter from the singularity.

Modern physics has made amazing strides towards explaining the universe, heroically driving our ignorance back into the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

The fact that every cubic metre of space is filled with dark energy in amounts that are incredibly tiny, and yet not quite zero, is a profound puzzle about the nature of the vacuum, the ‘cost’ of free space.

If empty space is something, and if now you place a body in this empty space, you would have two ‘somethings’ at the same point at the same time.

Everything may thus be a quantum fluctuation out of nothing. But if this is so, I am still confronted with the enigma of what encoded the quantum possibility into the Void.