to escape tigers, or lions, or predators. And so what makes common sense to us is the

world on our scale. You know, how to throw a rock or a spear or how to find a cave and

we didn’t evolve to understand quantum mechanics. And, therefore, it’s not too surprising

that on scales vastly different than the kind of experience we had as we were evolving as

a species, that nature seems strange and sometimes almost unfathomable, certainly violates our

common sense. Our sense of what is common sense and what's intuition. But as I like

to say, the universe doesn't care about our common sense. We have to force our ideas to

conform to the evidence of reality rather than the other way around And if reality seems

strange, that’s okay. In fact that’s what makes science so wonderful; it expands our

minds because it forces us to accept possibilities, which, in advance, we may never of thought

was possible.

I've said that scientists love mysteries, and we do. That’s the reason I'm a scientist.

Because it’s the puzzles of the universe that make it so exciting. Now it is true that

we want to solve, resolve those and solve those puzzles. That’s part of the fun of

doing science is solving puzzles, basically. But each time we do, new questions arise.

And I think for many of us, just as in our lives, the searching is often much more profound

than the finding. It’s the searching for answers through life in some sense that make

life worth living. If we had all the answers, we could just sit back and stare at out navels.

And I think what makes the search so exciting is that the answers are so surprising. The

universe continues to surprise us in ways we never would have imagined. Well beyond

our own imagination in advance, and that’s all we have to keep exploring the universe.

We can't just sit in a room and think about it because every time we open a new window

on the universe were surprised. And that makes the whole process incredibly exciting.