In America, there are people who don't read science fiction but still think about tomorrow, so it's not only the force of science-fiction that makes you a tomorrow thinker.

But to measure cause and effect... you must ensure that a simple correlation, however tempting it may be, is not mistaken for a cause. In the 1990s the stork population of Germany increased and the German at-home birth rate rose as well. Shall we credit storks for airlifting the babies?

If factual information upsets you, then you are creating a world that is not embracing objective truths, and that's not how you advance a democracy.

Everything we do understand about the universe - the periodic table of elements, Einstein's laws, Newton's laws, all of chemistry, all of biology - that's 4 percent of the universe. We got to the moon on the 4 percent we do understand. We landed on Mars on the 4 percent we do understand. So the day we crack the nut of the rest of that 95 percent... Oh my gosh.

People like it when they understand something that they previously thought they couldn't understand. It's a sense of empowerment.

If the only time you think of me as a scientist is during Black History Month, then I must not be doing my job as a scientist.

I'm not hard to find. I'm all over the Internet.