Science & Tech Quote by Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks is pitching wonder as a two-language project: the measurable and the ineffable. “Physics and poetry” isn’t just a neat pairing; it’s a quiet argument about what we’re allowed to call inspiring in a culture that often treats scientific literacy as niche and sentiment as unserious. He insists you need both. Physics gives you the terrifying scale and the hard constraints; poetry gives you a way to live with what those numbers do to your ego.

The Hubble reference is doing heavy cultural lifting. Hubble is the cleanest mainstream symbol of cosmic revelation: a machine that turns cold instrumentation into images people hang on dorm walls, the kind of proof that reality is stranger than our most expensive metaphors. When Hanks says it’s “hard to wrap your head around,” he’s not performing ignorance so much as modeling a relatable humility. Awe becomes democratic. You don’t need a PhD to feel your mind buckle at the edges.

Coming from an actor - and specifically Hanks, whose brand is earnest competence - the line reads like a defense of storytelling itself. Actors translate experience into emotion the way scientists translate light into data. The subtext: we don’t have to pick teams between STEM and the arts, between rigor and feeling. Our best encounters with the world come when the facts land with the force of a lyric, when the universe isn’t just understood but felt.