'As a physicist I draw lines around the edge of my knowledge and say "I don’t know". I also don’t know what is the self or the universe. I’ve encountered many conflicting explanations, and I just can’t know right now. There are many questions out there to which the right answer is "I don’t know". In this exploration of unknown, our job is to constantly not know, that’s research.

'Maybe there are three infinities in front of us. There’s the infinitesimal, the universe-scale, and the meter-scale infinity of activity called life. Although I don’t know myself or the universe, I can shape the way I interact with other forms of life. How I treat other life is my way of understanding life.

'We professors are benchmarked against numbers that quantify our performance. You can slip into prioritizing these numbers so much t ...