I was holding [my four-year-old daughter] and I said, ‘Sophia, I love you more than anything in the universe.’ And she turned to me and said, ‘Daddy, universe or multiverse?’

Greene uses a domestic, affectionate moment to comic effect: even a child in his household has absorbed the vocabulary of contemporary cosmology. The punchline (“universe or multiverse?”) juxtaposes parental hyperbole—“more than anything in the universe”—with the speculative scientific idea that our universe might be only one among many. Beyond humor, it gently illustrates how scientific concepts can permeate everyday life and language, and it underscores a theme common in Greene’s public work: big cosmological questions are not merely abstract but can shape how we imagine scale, reality, and even expressions of love.