Early on, it's good to develop the ability to write. Learning to write is a useful exercise, even if what you're writing about is not that relevant.

The human's place in the universe will be set in the scheme of evolution, the product of our biological inheritance.

By asking a novel question that you don't know the answer to, you discover whether you can formulate a way of finding the answer, and you stretch your own mind, and very often you learn something new.

Scientists tend to be skeptical, but the weakness of the community of science is that it tends to move into preformed establishment modes that say this is the only way of doing science, the only valid view.

I think there's always been, to some degree, a misunderstanding about what science fiction is all about, in that it has been judged by the general public as being literature of prediction, and it isn't.

We pretend that the debate about genetically modified crops is a debate about science when the reality is, actually, that the science is very clear. It is really a debate about values.

Let philosophy resolutely aim to be as scientific as possible, but let her not forget her strong kinship with literature.

Though women are no longer barred from university laboratories and scientific societies, the idea that they are innately less suited to mathematical science is deeply ingrained in our cultural genes.