When I was growing up, I had lots of smart classmates that were girls, but none of us were really pushed into math or computers or anything like that. Girls took AP history and AP English and AP European history. And boys took calculus and physics.
It is rather fantastic to realize that the laws of physics can describe how everything was created in a random quantum fluctuation out of nothing, and how over the course of 15 billion years, matter could organize in such complex ways that we have human beings sitting here, talking, doing things intentionally.
I think I always wanted to go into physics. What always fascinated me about science was the desire to understand what underlies it all, and I think physics is basically the study of that.
The idea of combining the physics of modern particle theory with cosmology was very young when I started working on cosmology.
The science of semiconducting and metallic polymers is inherently interdisciplinary; it falls at the intersection of chemistry and physics.
If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.
Novels aren't pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it's a good starting place for me.
One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.
The New Horizons Pluto mission will be the first mission to a binary object and will help us understand everything from the origin of Earth's moon to the physics of mass transfer between binary stars.
Indubitably, magic is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgment and practice than in any other branch of physics.
