I learn tons of John Frusciante's licks from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I'm never going to play like the Chili Peppers, but I might use that if I've got a dub beat or reggae thing mixed with a soul thing.

I don't want to be a lead player. I don't want to shred and play fast licks. I just want to be the best rhythm section ever.

When I first started fingerpicking, the first thing I learned was 'Don't Think Twice It's Alright' from Bob Dylan.

I was never a fan of open tunings, because some people will do that and fumble around. But that's not my jam.

As I've gotten older, I've realized the element that sounds like The Gaslight Anthem that's mine is always going to be me. The other three-fourths of it is going to be the other guys. I can't stop doing what I do naturally, whether I'm in The Gaslight Anthem or my own thing.

I've spent my life playing music.

The piano is where everything starts and ends. Everything is based off of it. If you understand that, you wind up understanding a lot more in all other instruments. For me, it had always been something important to try and learn.

You never get away from that thing in your hometown that it has over you. You don't outgrow where you come from.

There are two things that matter when you're making music. First, that you're doing what you love, even if it's crazy and other people tell you it's crazy. The second thing is the only people you really need to worry about are the people who love your music, not the people who speak badly about it.

I'd like to say I don't care, but I do. 'Cause when you put out a record, you try to do it for yourself first, and you want your audience to accept it, but you also want the press to accept it, too, because it validates what you do.

I'm from New Jersey, the Shore, and Asbury Park and all that goes with that. I wouldn't want to mess around with that. I like New Jersey. There are nice people here.

When you write a lot of songs, sometimes you don't have a place for them, and you need an outlet for them.

You can't staple me to the Brooklyn hipster. I don't buy skinny jeans and $50 T-shirts. I wear the same clothes I've always worn, from Target.

I spend my money on cars. That's why I have a Challenger. It's a muscle car, like a Mustang. It's big and rumbly.

Gaslight Anthem's thing is its power. It's just like boom and explosions and loud, and play with everything you got.

The boldness of asking deep questions may require unforeseen flexibility if we are to accept the answers.

Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.

Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.

We might be the holographic image of a two-dimensional structure.

I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly - or ever - gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe.

How can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens above?

No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you're going to fail.

We can certainly go further than cats, but why should it be that our brains are somehow so suited to the universe that our brains will be able to understand the deepest workings?

If the theory turns out to be right, that will be tremendously thick and tasty icing on the cake.

A unified theory would put us at the doorstep of a vast universe of things that we could finally explore with precision.

String theory has the potential to show that all of the wondrous happenings in the universe - from the frantic dance of subatomic quarks to the stately waltz of orbiting binary stars; from the primordial fireball of the big bang to the majestic swirl of heavenly galaxies - are reflections of one, grand physical principle, one master equation.

My mom says: 'Why aren't you a doctor?' and I'm like, 'I am a doctor!' and she's all, 'No, I mean a real doctor.' She reads my books, but she says they give her a headache.

My emotional investment is in finding truth. If string theory is wrong, I'd like to have known that yesterday. But if we can show it today or tomorrow, fantastic.

Our eyes only see the big dimensions, but beyond those there are others that escape detection because they are so small.

Supersymmetry is a theory which stipulates that for every known particle there should be a partner particle. For instance, the electron should be paired with a supersymmetric 'selectron,' quarks ought to have 'squark' partners, and so on.

We know that if supersymmetric particles exist, they must be very heavy; otherwise we would have spotted them by now.

String theory envisions a multiverse in which our universe is one slice of bread in a big cosmic loaf. The other slices would be displaced from ours in some extra dimension of space.

Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. 'Where did the totality of reality come from?' 'Did time have a beginning?'

Intelligence is the ability to take in information from the world and to find patterns in that information that allow you to organize your perceptions and understand the external world.

I would say in one sentence my goal is to at least be part of the journey to find the unified theory that Einstein himself was really the first to look for.

We're on this planet for the briefest of moments in cosmic terms, and I want to spend that time thinking about what I consider the deepest questions.

The idea that there could be other universes out there is really one that stretches the mind in a great way.

I think it's too fast to say that all sci-fi ultimately winds up having some place in science. On the other hand, imaginative minds working outside of science as storytellers certainly have come upon ideas that, with the passing decades, have either materialized of come close to materializing.

I may be a Jewish scientist, but I would be tickled silly if one day I were reincarnated as a Baptist preacher.

The melded nature of space and time is intimately woven with properties of light speed. The inviolable nature of the speed of light is actually, in Einstein's hands, talking about the inviolable nature of cause and effect.

The bottom line is that time travel is allowed by the laws of physics.

Most scientists like to operate in the context of economy. If you don't need an explanatory principle, don't invoke it.

There's no way that scientists can ever rule out religion, or even have anything significant to say about the abstract idea of a divine creator.

Science is very good at answering the 'how' questions. 'How did the universe evolve to the form that we see?' But it is woefully inadequate in addressing the 'why' questions. 'Why is there a universe at all?' These are the meaning questions, which many people think religion is particularly good at dealing with.

The universe is incredibly wondrous, incredibly beautiful, and it fills me with a sense that there is some underlying explanation that we have yet to fully understand. If someone wants to place the word 'God' on those collections of words, it's OK with me.

It's hard to teach passionately about something that you don't have a passion for.

I think the relationship between memory and time is a very deep and tricky one, to tell you the truth. I don't consider memory another sense. I do consider memory that which allows us to think that time flows.

Every moment is as real as every other. Every 'now,' when you say, 'This is the real moment,' is as real as every other 'now' - and therefore all the moments are just out there. Just as every location in space is out there, I think every moment in time is out there, too.

I'd say many features of string theory don't mesh with what we observe in everyday life.

In my own research when I'm working with equations, I never feel like I really understand what I'm doing if I'm solely relying on the mathematics for my understanding. I need to have a visual picture in my mind. I'm constantly translating from the math to some intuitive mind's-eye picture.