The magic words 'on the Internet,' if inserted into nearly any sentence, seem to protect it from normal critical scrutiny.

Another random thing I do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. And you may be familiar with the movie 'Contact,' which sort of popularized that. It turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way.

Many of the things the slow food people honor were innovations within historical times. Somebody had to be the first European to eat a tomato.

With cult foods, there is an underlying assumption that the best cooking ideas came generations ago. Yet culinary innovation is nothing to be ashamed of. When a chef tells me he is cooking with his grandmother's recipe, I always wonder why. Did talent skip the past two generations?

Most of my work is science fiction, with many a spaceship but few cars.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.

We physicists don't like to admit it, but some of us are closet science fiction fans. We hate to admit it because it sounds undignified. But when we were children, that's when we got interested in science, for a lot of us.

I don't think the scientific method and the science fictional method are really analogous. The thing about them is that neither is really practiced very much, at least not consciously. But the fact that they are methodical does relate them.