'Snow White' is an old fairy tale, so obviously the idea of vanity and obsession with youth is long-standing. With today's science, people have become crazy with trying to move their face around. It's bizarre.
It is no coincidence that so many religious beliefs date back to times when no science could possibly have accounted satisfactorily for many of the natural phenomena inspiring scripture and myths.
We who grew up with 'drop and cover' drills know all too well what wonders science can bring us, and we like to see the guy in the white lab coat suffer a little. Or a lot.
But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth.
If I had unlimited funds, wall space and storage, I would collect a lot more things, like 'Planet of the Apes,' 'Star Wars,' science fiction stuff, autographs, and prop guns and weapons. I have to draw the line somewhere.
However, I must not indulge in homespun wisdom here before so distinguished an assembly, especially as I am to be followed by a representative of science.
I've had young women come to me and say that before they watched 'Voyager' it didn't really occur to them that they could be successful in a higher position in the field of science; girls going to MIT, girls pursuing astrophysics with a view to a car...
Modern science developed in the context of western religious thought, was nurtured in universities first established for religious reasons, and owes some of its greatest discoveries and advances to scientists who themselves were deeply religious.
I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.
Sending people into space is very important culturally. That's really the justification. You cannot rationally justify it on the basis of the science and technology we get out of it.
When I came to Harvard, I was debating between math and science, and I guess I thought in the end I wanted something that could connect to the real world. I liked puzzle-solving and connections.
I was trained as a fine artist. I went to a progressive public school in Pennsylvania that developed these talents, but I was never able to apply to a decent college because I had no math, no science - I was allowed to just paint all day and write.
The word 'universe' is obviously not intended to have a plural, but science has evolved in such a way that we need a plural noun for something similar to what we ordinarily call our universe.
About the time you might start to think that science fiction - the real stuff, not the species of fantasy that goes under the name - is really dead, along comes a story by Cory Doctorow.
You know, there was a time, just before I started to study physical science, when astronomers thought that systems such as we have here in the solar system required a rare triple collision of stars.
I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.
No one knows who wrote the laws of physics or where they come from. Science is based on testable, reproducible evidence, and so far we cannot test the universe before the Big Bang.
Science is the one culture that's truly global - protons, proteins and Pythagoras's Theorem are the same from China to Peru. It should transcend all barriers of nationality. It should straddle all faiths, too.
Science is a part of culture. Indeed, it is the only truly global culture because protons and proteins are the same all over the world, and it's the one culture we can all share.
We can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don't know what banged and why it banged. That's a challenge for 21st-century science.
I've got a full plate, yes I do. That iPod, that's nice. A phone recorder? Nicely done. All right I'm a bit of a tech geek. I have a subscription to Popular Science and I keep up on all this stuff.
