Instead of having to be a member of the Royal Society to do science the way you had to be in England in the 17th 18th centuries today pretty much anybody who wants to do it can and the information that they need to do it is there.

Today over half of China's undergraduate degrees are in math science technology and engineering yet only 16 percent of America's undergraduates pursue these schools.

Science is defined in various ways but today it is generally restricted to something which is experimental which is repeatable which can be predicted and which is falsifiable.

Today's recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.

And I thought I would just share with you what science says today about silicone breast implants. If you have them you're healthier than if you don't. In fact there's no science that shows that silicone breast implants are detrimental and in fact they make you healthier.

Today's preoccupation with physical theories of everything takes a wrong turn from the purpose of science - to question all things relentlessly. Modern physics has become like Swift's kingdom of Laputa flying absurdly on an island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath.

Today Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights.

It is not so for art in appreciation because art is concerned with human behavior. And science is concerned with the behavior of metal or energy. It depends on what the fashion is. Now today it's energy. It's the same soul behind it. The same soul you see.

What we see today is an American economy that has boomed because of policies and developments of the 1950s and '60s: the interstate-highway system massive funding for science and technology a public-education system that was the envy of the world and generous immigration policies.

Much of today's public anxiety about science is the apprehension that we may forever be overlooking the whole by an endless obsessive preoccupation with the parts.