After my mother died, I learned that she'd had a scholarship to the University of Nebraska, but - in kind of a tradition that females don't do things like that - her father prevented her from going. She always said that she wasn't allowed to go to college, but until she died, I never knew that she'd had this scholarship.

A lot of missions for NASA or experiments on accelerators happen through a whole process of scientific retreats, long-range planning, forming collaborations to do studies - all this kind of stuff. It's very democratic.

It seems kind of nutty to send up something new when there's something already there that can do the job.

When I was really young, my ambition wasn't to do science. I didn't really know that I could. It was to write a great novel.

The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly - to develop strategies of seeing and showing.

I've always liked all the sciences, like math, physics and biology.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

In World War II, a British mathematician named Alan Turing led the effort to crack the Nazis' communication code. He mastered the complex German enciphering machine, helping to save the world, and his work laid the basis for modern computer science. Does it matter that Turing was gay?