And what would Charlie do... now that we're so close... to answering the most meaningful questions... ever asked by mankind?

We've become addicted to their certainty, their assuredness, their definitiveness, and in the process, we have ceded our responsibility, substituting our intellect and our intelligence for their supposed words of wisdom.

But if we detect those earliest moments, it'll bring us that much closer to an understanding of the Big Bang, which brings us that much closer to asking some of the hardest, most elusive, questions.

But of course, because of tissue and blood, this is quite challenging, so this is really a call for scientists to start thinking about femto-photography as really a new imaging modality to solve the next generation of health-imaging problems.

They had all kinds of things. Shots were combined, and I was just really curious, I mean, what the hell were you looking at just a few minutes ago and how come, how'd you come up with this sort of description?

So this was an opportunity. If they were asking me whether I loved them or not, then I mustn't love them, which led me to the miracle of thought that I thought they wanted me to get to.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, the students were discussing and interacting with each other, and by 4 a.m. that night, I'm totally fascinated, having this epiphany, and by 4 a.m. in the morning, they had discovered the right answer.

And when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense, because forming a question is a really complex process, but he could get himself a lot of the way there by putting a word in a search box.

But each monk’s commitment to his own “answer” blinds him to the other’s insight, and in doing so, defies an essential Buddhist ideal: abolishing binary thinking.

Chris Anderson: Professor, if you had to guess either way, do you now believe that it is more likely than not that we are alone in the Milky Way, as a civilization of our level of intelligence or higher?

In fact, a 1994 study found that up to 48% of witnesses tend to pick the wrong person out of a lineup, even when many are confident in their choice.

The future state of any single job lies in the answer to a single question: To what extent is that job reducible to frequent, high-volume tasks, and to what extent does it involve tackling novel situations?

And I think that's actually a really telling answer, because it suggests that the circles of these altruists don't look like this, they look more like this.

And I didn't quite know how to react to that, because what I was hearing was this doctor tell me that I'm supposed to disregard everything I believe if a partner demands children.

It's because over the last 30 or so years -- and I know that's a long time, you're saying, "Why now?" -- but 30 years ago, we began to understand the functions of all the genes that are in an organism in general.

And here begins 400 years of frustration, of unfulfilled dreams -- the dreams of Galileo, Giordano Bruno, many others -- which never led to the answer of those very basic questions which humanity has asked all the time.

And here comes biology -- biology, with its basic question, which still stands unanswered, which is essentially: "If there is life on other planets, do we expect it to be like life on Earth?"