I fell in love with the night sky when I first looked through a telescope as a young girl growing up in Delhi.

Growing up in Delhi, India, I did puzzles, explored numbers, and searched for patterns in everyday settings long before I ever saw an equation.

We cannot decide on the efficacy of a medical treatment by counting the number of 'Likes' an intervention receives on Facebook; no matter what, professionals will still need to conduct continued clinical trials and evaluate their outcomes carefully.

I am obsessed with trying to understand why there is such rampant denialism of science in our country. I find this exuberant irrationalism extremely disturbing. And this is particularly troubling, because I am a professional scientist.

Things changed with the discovery of neutron stars and black holes - objects with gravitational fields so intense that dramatic space and time-warping effects occur.

Just think for a moment if science really could move in the field of authenticity of works of art. There would be a cultural revolution to say the least, but also, I would say, a market revolution, let me add.

The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable. Not even the best scientists predicted the impact of nuclear physics, and everyday consumer items such as the iPhone would have seemed magic back in the 1950s.

Science is like a flashlight in the hands of people living in a huge balloon. They can illuminate anything in the balloon, but cannot shine it outside the balloon to see where it is floating - or if it is floating at all.