While I'm a big fan of science fiction, especially as rendered in expensive Hollywood blockbusters, it's the real universe that calls to me.
Scientists tend to be skeptical, but the weakness of the community of science is that it tends to move into preformed establishment modes that say this is the only way of doing science, the only valid view.
Cambridge was the place for someone from the Colonies or the Dominions to go on to, and it was to the Cavendish Laboratory that one went to do physics.
I told my three sons stories about germs more than fifty years ago as fanciful bedtime tales.
We didn't go to the moon to explore or because it was in our DNA or because we're Americans. We went because we were at war and we felt a threat.
The difference between reading a story and studying a story is the difference between living the story and killing the story and looking at its guts.
Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.
Besides numerous science courses, I had the opportunity to study philosophy, the history of architecture, economics, and Russian history in courses taught by extraordinarily knowledgeable professors.
You'll have to give me a minute here. Gravity's a real bitch this morning. Ian to Kori
But the prospects of designing chemical plants for industrial scale chemical processes seemed far less interesting than the chemical events that occur in biological systems.
I am told that I had a bad temper, and remember being banished to the back hall until civility returned.
This led to the discovery that long chain fatty acids would remarkably stabilize serum albumin to heat denaturation, and would even reverse the denaturation by heat or concentrated urea solutions.
This possibility bothered me as I thought it was not advisable to remain in one academic environment, and the long dark winters in Edinburgh could be rather dismal.
However, it required some years before the scientific community in general accepted that flexibility and disorder are very relevant molecular properties also in other systems.
In dedicating his estate to the honoring of endeavors that benefit mankind, Alfred Nobel expressed a lifelong concern that is even more timely in 1972 than it was in his lifetime.
The Nobel Prizes are much more than awards to scholars; they are a celebration of civilization, of mankind, and of what makes humans unique - that is their intellect from which springs creativity.
Concepts are vindicated by the constant accrual of data and independent verification of data. No prize, not even a Nobel Prize, can make something true that is not true.
It is crucial for scientists to be willing to be wrong; otherwise, you might not do the most important experiments, or you may ignore your most important findings.
We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon.
No matter how beautiful the theory, one irritating fact can dismiss the entire formulism, so it has to be proven.
My point is, no one can stop the Internet. No one can stop that march. It doesn't mean that it's going to be smooth, though.
