Dune is the bestselling science fiction book of all time. It's something you really need to read in your lifetime. If you're going to read The Lord of the Rings which everyone should then you have to read Dune too.

I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories.

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his life.

The birth of science as we know it arguably began with Isaac Newton's formulation of the laws of gravitation and motion. It is no exaggeration to say that physics was reborn in the early 20th-century with the twin revolutions of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.

Traditionally scientists have treated the laws of physics as simply 'given ' elegant mathematical relationships that were somehow imprinted on the universe at its birth and fixed thereafter. Inquiry into the origin and nature of the laws was not regarded as a proper part of science.

Cosmologists have attempted to account for the day-to-day laws you find in textbooks in terms of fundamental 'superlaws ' but the superlaws themselves must still be accepted as brute facts. So maybe the ultimate laws of nature will always be off-limits to science.

Though we do need more women to graduate with technical degrees I always like to remind women that you don't need to have science or technology degrees to build a career in tech.

For me science is already fantastical enough. Unlocking the secrets of nature with fundamental physics or cosmology or astrobiology leads you into a wonderland compared with which beliefs in things like alien abductions pale into insignificance.

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.

The origin of life is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science.