And knife making is as much art as science, as far as I’m concerned: Forging metals from an old farm tool into a blade thin enough to effortlessly cut a tomato yet strong enough to mince ginger, all while looking beautiful, is comparable to Ginger Rogers dancing backwards in heels.
If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.
There’s a perspective that I’ve gained as an astronaut that I didn’t get from my science activities. In my science activities, I learned by the seat of my pants. Spending 17 years as an astronaut, I learned the NASA formalism of systems engineering as if my life depended on it. Literally.
Everybody has ideas. The vital question is, what do you do with them? My rock musician sons shape their ideas into music. My sister takes her ideas and fashions them into poems. My brother uses his ideas to help him understand science. I take my ideas and turn them into stories.
Innovations in science and technology are the engines of the 21st-century economy; if you care about the wealth and health of your nation tomorrow, then you’d better rethink how you allocate taxes to fund science. The federal budget needs to recognize this.
As a kid, I went from reading kids’ books to reading science fiction to reading, you know, adult fiction. There was never any gap. YA was a thing when I was a teenager, but it was a library category, not a marketing category, and you never really felt like it was a huge section.
We’re going to be focusing our science on things that will take us farther and longer into space. For many of those experiments, the crew members are human guinea pigs, which is fine; that’s part of my job. I don’t mind being a human guinea pig.
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.
Moreover, the concern of some that moving DNA among species would breach customary breeding barriers and have profound effects on natural evolutionary processes has substantially disappeared as the science revealed that such exchanges occur in nature.
When I was younger, I was an avid science girl. I was all about, ‘I’m going to be a doctor.’ Even when I graduated, I was like, ‘I’m going to be a doctor.’ Even though I did acting and I was in plays and drama clubs in high school and college, I still didn’t think I was going to take it on as a career.
The whole of science, and one is tempted to think the whole of the life of any thinking man, is trying to come to terms with the relationship between yourself and the natural world. Why are you here, and how do you fit in, and what’s it all about.
Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.
My social philosophy may be said to be enshrined in three words: liberty, equality and fraternity. Let no one, however, say that I have borrowed by philosophy from the French Revolution. I have not. My philosophy has roots in religion and not in political science. I have derived them from the teachings of my Master, the Buddha.
I was on the football team because I wanted to experience the different iconic social classes of high school. So football for me was an attempt to socially integrate in an interesting way. And then I didn’t like it anymore and stopped doing it and focused more on drama and science and other forms of art and music.
A permanent base on Mars would have a number of advantages beyond being a bonanza for planetary science and geology. If, as some evidence suggests, exotic micro-organisms have arisen independently of terrestrial life, studying them could revolutionise biology, medicine and biotechnology.
Hence, even in the domain of natural science the aid of the experimental method becomes indispensable whenever the problem set is the analysis of transient and impermanent phenomena, and not merely the observation of persistent and relatively constant objects.
I believe that schools of today with all their answers on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, above everything else, take us back to the industrial revolution in time, when people thought that nature could be conquered and consumption or production could be unlimited.
The American doctor, in my opinion, possesses a combination of conservatism and that other quality which has put the United States in the forefront in almost every department of science – that is, an eagerness to know what it is really all about in order that he may not be the one left behind if there is something to it.
My latter schooldays and my university days were during the war, when science – physics, in particular – was a very important and glamorous subject. A lot of us felt that if we couldn’t get into science, we might try engineering or medicine.
Science tells us we need to keep the majority of fossil fuels in the ground, and that we must urgently invest in renewable energy, and other alternative industries. Doing so would create millions of jobs, ensure a fair transition for fossil fuel workers into new industries, and avert the most catastrophic climate breakdown.
My mother fed my love of demons, science fiction, and paranormal. She was a devout horror movie fan who kept me up until the wee hours to watch ‘Outer Limits,’ ‘Night Gallery,’ ‘Twilight Zone,’ and ‘Star Trek.’ We lived to watch those reruns.
Like university science departments, the arts have shown how they can earn their way and point to an economically newborn future for this country. They show that the U.K. could be a prime provider of imaginative riches and intellectual adventure, which I think are the two great prizes of the 21st century.
More than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn’t afraid of looking uncool – he wasn’t scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.
Stradivarius, in particular, was the most amazing craftsman and one of the great artists and scientists that ever lived because he figured out something with the sound and the science of acoustics that we still don’t understand it completely.
Through basic science literacy, people can understand the policy choices we need to be making. Scientists are not necessarily the greatest communicators, but science and communication is one of the fundamentals we need to address. People are interested.
