I had always had a deep interest in social science, history. So even when I was in high school, I was debating, and in college debating, and interested in contemporary events.
The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.
I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.
One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.
I sort of feel that climate change will be solved by science. I just feel instinctively that we will find a way of saving ourselves. But I am less confident that we won't destroy ourselves in other ways.
Climate change - for so long an abstract concern for an academic few - is no longer so abstract. Even the Bush administration's Climate Change Science Programme reports 'clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.'
Economics pretends to be a science. Its practitioners fill blackboards with equations and clog computers with data. But it is really a faith, or more accurately a set of overlapping and squabbling faiths, each with its own doctrines.
When you're doing Sebring in the back straight at 185 or 187, and the car's moving, you gotta know what to do with it, how to read it. Just the science of understanding shocks - forget spring rates - is mind-boggling.
I was raised a Southern Baptist, and my whole family were Christians. However, my Dad was really into science and astronomy, so I felt very balanced. I still had respect for faith.
My brother and I were born in an Irish county called Tipperary. We were both very math- and science-inclined in high school. My dad trained as an electrical engineer, and my mom is in microbiology.
When I was born in 1970 with a rare genetic disorder called spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita (SED), medical science wasn't what it is today and my mum and dad were treated terribly by the medical profession.
Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers, you see, but we're also realists, of a sort.
While I was at community college, I studied industrial design because I thought maybe I'd be an automotive designer - I grew up in Detroit - and I also studied, geology because I was interested in science, a little bit.
There's no doubt who was a leader in space after the Apollo Program. Nobody came close to us. And our education system, in science, technology, engineering and math, was at the top of the world. It's no longer there. We're descending rather rapidly.
Education happens to be something that all people, all cultures, need to embrace. Math, science, the words of the world. To be able to speak and be able to have clarity and to be able to think. Those are the greatest of gifts.
I think the combination of graduate education in a field like Computer Science and the opportunity to apply this in a work environment like Microsoft is what drove me. The impact these opportunities create can lead to work that has broad, worldwide i...
To have a stable economy, to have a stable democracy, and to have a modern government is not enough. We have to build new pillars of development. Education, science and technology, innovation and entrepreneurship, and more equality.
Now the main areas of higher education that still enjoy considerable financial support from government are subjects like engineering and science and the research ringfence which is the basic minimum to protect Britain's scientific competitiveness.
We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.
My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically - and destructively - demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.
Fracking is doable if there's full disclosure of all chemicals used. Secondly, science dictates the policy rather than politics. Third, there's collaboration between environmental groups and the natural gas industry.
