I'm immensely proud to be a Democrat because of our party's history of fighting for justice, fairness, and equality. From Roosevelt to Obama, we've worked to bring seniors and children out of poverty, expanded civil rights, supported science and research, and pushed for equality of opportunity.
If science has a lot to do with what works, then clearly there's much about today's social and economic setup that isn't scientific, because things aren't working very well for a majority of the world's population or the environment.
There are no shortcuts in evolution.
I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.
The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler.
When it comes to the things that people really want in science fiction - like space travel - the simplest things end up causing them not to happen. Humans are 100-pound bags of water, built to live on Earth.
We do a hard fantasy as well as hard science fiction, and I think I probably single-handedly recreated military science fiction. It was dead before I started working in it.
Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.
Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making.
The frontiers of science, on the very small scale and very large scale, require large investments and international effort.
I have taught history on the high school and college levels, and am or have been a lecturer at the Smithsonian, The National Institutes of Health, and numerous colleges and universities, mostly on science fiction and technology subjects.
The relevance of Marxism to science is that it removes it from its imagined position of complete detachment and shows it as a part, but a critically important part, of economy and social development.
Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric.
By isolating the issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, climate change, environment, governance, economics, catastrophe and whatever other problems the present embodies or the future may bring, science fiction can do what Dickens and Sinclair did: make real the consequences of social injustice or human folly.
Infectious disease exists at this intersection between real science, medicine, public health, social policy, and human conflict. There's a tendency of people to try and make a group out of those who have the disease. It makes people who don't have the disease feel safer.
Science and technology are going to be the basis for many of the solutions to social problems.
Social progress is a big thing for me. Although science fiction is traditionally concerned with the hard sciences, which is chemistry, physics, and, some might argue, biology, my father was and still is a social scientist at the University of Toronto.
If even in science there is no a way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters, then this must be even more so in the social sciences: truth lies in power.
As a child, I had no interest in science whatsoever - then I started writing and recognized how relevant it was. My first book about science and medicine captured the world of organ transplantation in 1989 from the points of view of all of the participants - scientists, surgeons, social workers, organ recipients and even donor families.
Philip Kitcher thinks that mathematics is surprisingly like empirical science. Few mathematicians would agree; philosophers too, from Socrates on, have held the opposite opinion.
