If a Martian came down to Earth and watched television, he'd come to conclusion that all the world's society is based on Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. He'd be amazed that our society hasn't collapsed.

You cannot create new science unless you realize where the old science leaves off and new science begins, and science fiction forces us to confront this.

When we're born, we want to know why the stars shine. We want to know why the sun rises.

The media, of course, loves to make claims about the fountain of youth. Don't believe it. No one has it. But we're getting close.

Now, we used to think the brain was like a computer. But now, we realize that's not true. There's no programming of the brain. There's no Windows. And we think the brain is more like a large corporation. Because think of the unconscious mind. In a corporation, you have subdivisions which operate independently of the main office.

I think Newton would be the greatest scientist who ever lived.

I'm a physicist, and we have something called Moore's Law, which says computer power doubles every 18 months. So every Christmas, we more or less assume that our toys and appliances are more or less twice as powerful as the previous Christmas.

You have to have a cultural ethic that allows for making mistakes. It cannot be that just because you make mistakes, you're out. You have to make mistakes in order to innovate.

Anything that promotes a kernel of science, even though it's exaggerated and hyped by Hollywood, I think is a step forward. We in the ivory tower ultimately have to realize that in some sense we have to sing for our supper.

To me, it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance.

Consciousness-one level is understanding where we are in space. Consciousness two is where we understand our position in society: who's top dog, who's underdog and who's in the middle. And type-three consciousness is simulating the future. And type-three consciousness, only humans have this ability to see far into the future.

Aging is basically the build-up of error: error at the genetic level, error at the cellular level. Cells normally repair themselves; that's why you heal when you get a cut. But even the mechanism of repair eventually falls apart.

You see, I'm also a futurist. I dream about the world 50, 100, maybe even 1,000 years in the future. But I also realize I'm probably not going to see it. However, I wouldn't mind having at least a copy of myself see the future, maybe 50, 100, 1,000 years into the future. It would be a fantastic ride.

In the future, I can imagine that we will genetically modify ourselves using the genes that have doubled our life span since we were chimpanzees.

Growing new organs of the body as they wear out, extending the human lifespan? What's not to like?

Science fiction without the science just becomes, you know, sword and sorcery, basically stories about heroism and not much more.

I think the 'Terminator' idea is a reasonable one - that is that one day the Internet becomes self-aware and simply says that humans are in the way. After all, if you meet an ant hill and you're making a 10-lane super highway, you just pave over the ants. It's not that you don't like the ants, it's not that you hate ants; they are just in the way.

A lot of the things you see in science fiction revolve around black holes because black holes are strong enough to rip the fabric of space and time.

The quest for a quantum gravity is one of the greatest unsolved problems in all of science.

Democracies are slow to anger and hesitant to go to war: Voters don't want to sacrifice their children for the glory of a selfish king.

In the 1950s, we had all these B-grade science-fiction movies. The point was to scare the public and get them to buy popcorn. No attempt was made to create movies that were somewhat inherent to the truth.

Some people are a little bit afraid about the future because they see all these gadgets and gizmos coming down the pike and they think they're too old to learn all this new stuff. But eventually they begin to realize, 'Hey, some of this stuff is useful.'

I realized very early in life what my abilities and limitations were, and foreign languages was definitely one of my limitations. With strenuous effort, I just barely passed my French class at Harvard so I could graduate.

The river of time may fork into rivers, in which case you have a parallel reality and so then you can become a time traveler and not have to worry about causing a time paradox.

No one knows who wrote the laws of physics or where they come from. Science is based on testable, reproducible evidence, and so far we cannot test the universe before the Big Bang.

The Internet frees people to realize they don't have to live like slaves.

I think that by creating a world of plenty, by creating institutions and organizations that promote knowledge and promote understanding, I think I could be part of being in a better world.

When you look at the calculation, it's amazing that every time you try to prove or disprove time travel, you've pushed Einstein's theory to the very limits where quantum effects must dominate. That's telling us that you really need a theory of everything to resolve this question. And the only candidate is string theory.

One day I went up to my mom and I said, 'Mom, can I have permission to build a 2.3-million electron-volt atom smasher - a betatron - in the garage?' And my mom stared at me, and she said, 'Sure. Why not? And don't forget to take out the garbage.'

I get paid to do what I love. If you understand physics, the foundation of the atomic theory and relativity, you understand how the future is going to unfold. You understand what things are not possible. You understand why things work. I get paid to do what I love the most, and that is to work on the Unified Field Theory and to see the future.

When I get bored, or get stuck on an equation, I like to go ice skating, but it makes you forget your problem. Then you can tackle the problem with a fresh new insight. Einstein liked to play the violin to relax. Every physicist likes to have a past time. Mine is ice skating.

I'm not a science fiction writer, I'm a physicist.

We do spend too much time on the telephone, and you know something? We love it.

Cancer is like the common cold; there are so many different types. In the future we'll still have cancer, but we'll detect it very, very early, so that it won't kill anybody. We'll zap it at the molecular level decades before it grows into a tumor.

It's very dangerous to put astronauts on a moon base where there's radiation, solar flares and micro meteorites. It'd be much better to put robots on the moon and have them mentally connected to astronauts on the Earth.

Remember the movie 'The Matrix,' where virtual information popped up to help inform physical day-to-day reality? Such things won't always be the stuff of Hollywood. If the Internet is accessible via contact lenses, biographies will appear next to the faces of the people we talk to, and we will see subtitles if they speak a foreign language.

I used to watch the old 'Flash Gordon' series on TV, and it was thrilling to rocket to the planet Mongo every week. But after a while, I figured out that although Flash got the girl and all the accolades, it was really Dr. Zarkov who made the series work. Without Dr. Zarkov, there could be no Flash Gordon.

Physics is often stranger than science fiction, and I think science fiction takes its cues from physics: higher dimensions, wormholes, the warping of space and time, stuff like that.

If I wasn't a professional scientist, I'd be an amateur scientist. But plan B was to go into computers.

My point is, no one can stop the Internet. No one can stop that march. It doesn't mean that it's going to be smooth, though.

Already from your own cells scientists can grow skin, cartilage, noses, blood vessels, bladders and windpipes. In the future, scientists will grow more complex organs, like livers and kidneys. The phrase 'organ failure' will disappear.

I predict that technology will enable people to transmit their neuronal, actual feelings over the Internet.

Years ago, I picked up figure skating. How hard could spins and jumps be, I thought? It's just applied Newtonian physics. After repeatedly falling on my rear end, I realized it was harder than I thought. But it had an upside. That is how I met my wife, who was ice dancing at the Rockefeller Center ice rink.

The H-1B visa is called the 'genius visa' for a reason.

It's inevitable that we'll have some form of designer children, fueled not just by the science but by parents' hard-wired desire to give their children every advantage.

If space is a fabric, then of course fabrics can have ripples, which we have now seen directly. But fabrics can also rip. Then the question is what happens when the fabric of space and time is ripped by a black hole?

Sooner or later, we will face a catastrophic threat from space. Of all the possible threats, only a gigantic asteroid hit can destroy the entire planet. If we prepare now, we better our odds of survival. The dinosaurs never knew what hit them.

One day when I was 8 years old, everyone was talking in hushed tones about a great scientist that had just died. His name was Albert Einstein.

Our astronauts, when they go orbiting around the earth, they actually come back slightly younger than a twin that they would have on the planet Earth who was stationary. This is called the twin paradox.

I have nothing against investment banking, but it's like massaging money rather than creating money.