Stephen Hawking said he spent most of his first couple of years at Cambridge reading science fiction (and I believe that, because his grades weren't all that great).
Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
We are in a tech-heavy society, plunging headlong into an unknown future. Science fiction is what allows you to stand back and analyze the impact of that and put it in context of how it affects people.
'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
I absolutely hated 'Gattaca.' I left the theater shaking my head because the science in the film was just terrible. No genetic test will ever tell you how many heartbeats you have left. No genetic test will ever be more accurate in telling an employer how well you'll do at a job than your performance at a past job would be.
Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors.
While most of us know that we feel better after a good hearty laugh, science, in many cases, is yet to prove why.
I hope I have helped to raise the profile of science and to show that physics is not a mystery but can be understood by ordinary people.
Modern science, then, so far from being an enemy of romance, is seen on every hand to be its sympathetic and resourceful friend, its swift and irresistible helper in its serious need, and an indulgent minister to its lighter fancies.
Science fiction without the science just becomes, you know, sword and sorcery, basically stories about heroism and not much more.
The leading edge in evidence presentation is in science; the leading edge in beauty is in high art.
Doing science fiction at a high level is tricky. It's really tricky.
When high school students ask to spend their afternoons and weekends in my laboratory, I am amazed: I didn't develop that kind of enthusiasm for science until I was 28 years old.
Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school.
I know we can all remember the days of sitting in algebra class asking ourselves, 'why will I need algebra or chemistry in the future?' The answer was and still remains that advanced math and science classes help high school students develop their analytical and cognitive skills and better prepare them to compete in college and the workplace.
We're not a vocational school. If someone wants to get a high-paying job, I would hope that there are easier ways to do it than working through a formal computer science curriculum.
When you start a company, it's more an art than a science because it's totally unknown. Instead of solving high-profile problems, try to solve something that's deeply personal to you. Ideally, if you're an ordinary person and you've just solved your problem, you might have solved the problem for millions of people.
We must teach science in the mother tongue. Otherwise, science will become a highbrow activity. It will not be an activity in which all people can participate.
Class I to XII wasn't much help; I was always a mediocre student. But when I pursued higher education and studied economics with theatre or psychology with science fiction, I got a whole new world view.
