Timothy Ferris: Evidently not, since more than a million Americans, and millions in other nations, are at least sometime stargazers. If you're camping out, or otherwise find yourself under dark skies, stargazing can be instant entertainment, since it only takes a few minutes to accustom your eyes and start finding your way around in the sky.

Light pollution is a problem. It's hard to appreciate the beauty of the night sky if you live in Los Angeles or Chicago and the most you can see, looking up, is a few dozen stars. We Americans waste more than $3 billion a year uselessly lighting up the sky. But many communities are starting to redress this issue, and there is hope that we can make the starry sky once again a legacy to our children, as it was in prior centuries.

Many a life has been permanently enriched by just a small start, like going out with a star chart and a red-filtered flashlight. (Red light lets you read the chart without dazzling your eyes, so you can see dim stars. You can use a regular flashlight, with the business end wrapped in red plastic. The bag that many kinds of bread come in may suffice.) Learn a few constellations, and see if you like it. As with many activities, from baseball to walking in the woods, the more you learn the better you can enjoy the experience.

Trying to understand the relationship between the universe and the human mind -- which belongs to the universe, and arose from it, yet is somehow able almost to stand apart from it and examine it -- has been the centerpiece of my thinking for more than 40 years. In a sense, all my books represent efforts to explore and clarify this relationship. I don't have the answers, yet, but I have perhaps been able to improve the quality of my questions.

Two meditative exercises I enjoy while stargazing are:

1) Lie flat on you back and, rather than thinking you are looking up, consider instead that you are looking down, and that only the force of Earth's gravity is preventing you from falling into the rest of the universe.

2) Think about who or what out there may be looking back at you.

Limiting myself to astronomers, so the list doesn't get absurdly long, they include Johannes Kepler, who combined brilliance with an admirable work ethic and a delightful sense of humor; William Herschel, the most accomplished amateur astronomer of all time, a hawkeyed observer and skeptical enough that he seldom let his eyes play tricks on him; Patrick Moore, the eminent British lunar observer and science popularizer, who has done so much to awaken the public to the wonders of the stars; and Allan Sandage, whose galaxy images would qualify him as one of the great photographers of our times were he not already regarded as one of our foremost scientists.

Well, pretty much everything, but I think it's always helpful for writers to keep reading good writing. I read Homer and Proust just about every day, for instance, and I'm forever having to build additional shelves to deal with the stacks of books lying around. Nothing gives you more bang for the buck than a book.

This was the subject of one of my first published articles on science. (It was titled "How Do We Know Where We Are If We've Never Been Anywhere Else?" and it appeared in Rolling Stone on March 15, 1973.) I'd like to visit:

• The center of our galaxy, where thousands of golden stars cast shadows all night;
• The vicinity of the black hole, where gas funnels down into nothingness, a cosmic Niagara;
• The outskirts of the Orion Nebula, a red, green, and gray artist's palette a hundred light-years wide;
• The Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite of the Milky Way, from which I could look back and see what our galaxy looks like from outside it;
• The Alpha Centauri multiple star system, from which one can see the Sun as a yellow star in the constellation Cassiopeia;
• Saturn, from beneath the rings;
• The upper atmosphere of Jupiter, preferably in a balloon;
• Lots of planets with life.

Science is an admirable way of acquiring knowledge -- in many respects the best way -- but it's not the only way. Science is not of much help in, say, appreciating the Beethoven late quartets, or falling in love. Scientists who assume otherwise, who imagine that all the other paths of learning are delusions, trouble me a bit. But that's just narrowness, and most of us need to be less narrow, don't you think?

Its grandeur; its elegance. Its vastness and antiquity. Its reality.

Research into innovative ways to improve science education. Science is the most creative and most enlightening activity on this planet today, yet most kids, even in scientifically active nations like the U.S., never get turned on to it. This is a terrible deprivation. It's like living in Renaissance Florence and knowing nothing about painting and sculpture.

We shouldn't, and don't. We as a society spend much more money on medical research -- and on many other things, such as public education -- than on space exploration. But space exploration has its place. Were it not for exploration, there wouldn't be a United States in the first place.

One of my personal favorites is quantum nonlocality -- the fact that a subatomic system, if expanded to macroscopic dimensions, behaves in some respects as if it had never heard of space and time. Some argue that this doesn't much matter, as a question of hard science, and I can see their point. But I suspect that this issue is pregnant with the potential for new understanding.

Another is the riddle posed by dark matter and "dark energy" in the universe. I'm writing a piece for The New Yorker on that one, so stay tuned...