Science fiction is essentially a kind of fiction in which people learn more about how to live in the real world, visiting imaginary worlds unlike our own in order to investigate, by way of pleasurable thought-experiments, how things might be done differently.
Science, it is said, no doubt has ameliorated the material conditions of human life, but is powerless to solve those moral and philosophical questions that interest cultured people so deeply.
I am a science fiction enthusiast, really, deep down.
We'll be investing in basic science research with the goal of curing disease.
Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.
Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.
With the observable fact that scientific knowledge makes our lives better when applied with concern for human welfare and environmental protection, there is no question that science and technology can produce abundance so that no one has to go without.
As with any large investment, it can be emotionally difficult to abandon a line of research when it isn't working out. But in science, if something isn't working, you have to toss it out and try something else.
Remember, science fiction's always been the kind of first level alert to think about things to come. It's easier for an audience to take warnings from sci-fi without feeling that we're preaching to them. Every science fiction movie I have ever seen, any one that's worth its weight in celluloid, warns us about things that ultimately come true.
Because we have a society that by and large is illiterate in these areas - science, math and engineering - what we do is a mystery to them, and they find it scary. And because of that, it creates easy opportunities for opponents of development, activist organizations, to manufacture fear.
Science is definitely part of America's infrastructure, the engine of prosperity. And yet science is given almost no visibility in the media.
Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them.
I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction.
Science is a part of culture. Indeed, it is the only truly global culture because protons and proteins are the same all over the world, and it's the one culture we can all share.
I've always wanted to do a project with space imagery because I've always loved these amazing sci-fi electro book covers. I've always loved science fiction. I feel like space imagery has no boundaries.
I think you can get away with being a bit more political in science fiction.
I'm a traditional Jew with an orthodox background, and it informs much of my approach to science. Of course I think it's very important that if you have those sorts of backgrounds you don't impose them on other people as a clinician, of course.
The center line of science literacy - which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point - is how you think.
It is absolutely critical for competitiveness in the United States for us to really raise the bar in education, especially in math, in science, in technology.
I'm not much of a math and science guy. I spent most of my time in school daydreaming and managed to turn it into a living.
There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
With modern medicine prolonging life no matter what condition you're in, it seems like we're working towards immortality by science.
In the culture at large, the war over science fiction's creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality.
Science fiction is my way of pushing the imagination onward. It's a way to understand how the world will look in the future.
Art makes us human, music makes us human, and I deeply feel that science makes us human.
General writing about science, even if we do it badly, helps us to see our work in perspective and broadens our vision.
No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.
In the U.S. you have a system of lobbying and influence on our policy and law makers which is incredibly pronounced. The gas industry spent $250 million getting an exemption from our Safe Water Act. Every one of those dollars is toxic; a contaminant in our political system. It disrupts the normal flow of justice, science, fact and reporting.
Science provides an understanding of a universal experience. Arts provide a universal understanding of a personal experience.
You could get an entire computer science education for free right now.
That's what 'Star Trek' was: We don't know how to make an ideal society, but we're going to portray that, and then we're going to work backward. I think that's why science fiction - despite the dystopian parts - comes out of this super ideal that, eventually, we will get to some better place where we actually live up to our ideals.
Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it.
When I was 10 years old, that nuclear spark hit me. Whatever it may be, I really don't know what it was about nuclear science, but whatever it was that triggered that interest, it stuck. I went after that one with a passion.
The more science I studied, the more I saw that physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers. The farther you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, 'Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.'
From the viewpoint of the writer, the most significant aspect of fantasy and science fiction is that stories of these kinds are either set in imaginary worlds or feature the appearance in the familiar world of some imaginary entity.
There's no one 'right' way of making a science fiction movie; there's no one way of making any kind of movie, really!