Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science - steam carriages zeppelins armoured trains - none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last century's attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission.

Biology is now bigger than physics as measured by the size of budgets by the size of the workforce or by the output of major discoveries and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century.

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

Polygraph tests are 20th-century witchcraft.

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

Back then a half-a-century ago the situation was totally different. Economically we were practically on our knees and politically we were still excluded from the community of nations. Today in this respect we have a totally different and much more stable basis.

One of the people that I respect the most now a person I think has done a heck of a lot for this world as a leader is Margaret Thatcher. She helped create a world that offers us a lot of excitement as we look to the next century.

The twentieth century has exhibited a barbarism and lack of respect for human life on a massive scale just about unknown before.