Avi Loeb

She saw you on television and now she only speaks about aliens.

You know, two days later, I speak with a reporter from the London Times.

And he puts out his report and says, I read the report for half an hour to my kids, and they told me they want to become scientists.

And this is another thing that, there are two things that are missed by my colleagues.

One, it's an opportunity to excite the kids to get into science.

That's an amazing, I mean, when we discovered the Higgs boson, it was an important confirmation of an idea that came in the 60s.

the Nobel Prize was awarded, but I bet you that the daughter, Arianna, the daughter of the US Air Force pilot, would not be inspired to become a scientist because it's very abstract.

Here, there is a connection.

So that's one thing that is missed.

And of course, the second one is, here is a subject that the public cares about,

And the public fund science, so we should attend to that.

It's our obligation as scientists.

You know, I always, since I started science, which was by chance, by the way, I wanted always to become a philosopher, but circumstances led me because I led a project that was funded by the Star Wars initiative of President Reagan.

It was the first international project.

And then that brought me into astrophysics because I was offered a position at Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein was a faculty a few decades earlier.

So it was an arranged marriage.

But I felt that even though it's an arranged marriage, I'm married to my true love because I can address philosophical questions using the scientific method.

And I recognize things that my colleagues do not because I'm different.

Well, I think about the big picture.

The one thing that I mention in my book, Extraterrestrial, is on the first day of school, I showed up to the class and I saw the kids jumping up and down on the tables in the classroom.