I've been through a lot. I've thought a lot about life, and I've spent a lot of time studying history and science.
The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe.
However, the sciences of society and of history retained their old subservient relation to metaphysics for a long time - well into the eighteenth century.
The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis.
I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.
Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism.
The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student's education.
Science has produced such powerful weapons that in a war between great powers there would be neither victor nor vanquished. Both would be overwhelmed in destruction.
How is AIDS research to progress when the premise of science is questioning but the premise of questioning HIV is considered so dangerous that even venturing into the facts is too great a risk?
I sort of was good at writing essays. I was never very good at mathematics, and I was never very good at algebra. I loved science, but I wasn't sure of it.
If you keep telling girls they're less good at science, that will probably be self-fulfilling. But there are quite a lot of women who are good at it.
I was always good at math and science, and I never realized that that was unusual or somehow undesirable.
Of course you can use the products of science to do bad things, but you can use them to do good things, too.
We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions.
We need to manage holistically, embracing all of our science and traditional knowledge - all sources of knowledge. We can do that from the household to government to international relations.
Now, there is always a tremendous fear of science and progressing forward into areas of the unknown and it is a valid fear. Some of the genetic alterations of food are a little edgy.
So one reason the science educators panic at the first sign of public rebellion is that they fear exposure of the implicit religious content in what they are teaching.
I wanted to be a political science professor and go to school in Boston. I never wanted to be a big, famous movie star and TV star. It kind of found me.
In future, lots of things will be made from beans and fibres grown on the farmers' fields. This new science is called chemurgy. Plastics, for industry, will come from the soil.
We must always emphasize research and development of science and mathematics, and I can think of no better way to achieve this than through our future in space.
I think science is about the search for God; it just comes at it from a different angle than religion.
