Among my activities was membership in the Boy Scouts; I rose each year through the ranks, eventually achieving the rank of Eagle Scout and undertaking leadership roles in the organization.

Most of these experiments required the reduction of the cosmic ray muon flux in order to be successful, and the group necessarily became expert in the operation of deep underground laboratories.

Our home had many books due principally to the educational interests of my sister and two brothers, all of whom where serious students engaged in professional studies; my sister became a doctor of medicine and my brothers became lawyers.

In 1958, I was a delegate to the Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva.

There is real confusion about what it means to be right and wrong - the difference between what spiritual beliefs are and what science is.

Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. Reading - even browsing - an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search. Patience is a virtue, gluttony a sin.

There's more to research than just looking up facts. Eventually, you have to make subjective calls. If you're writing a science fiction novel, there's probably some speculative technology in it. You'll have to decide how to project existing technology forward in a plausible way.

The lives of those such as Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein are plainly of interest in their own right, as well as for the light they shed on the way these great scientists worked. But are 'routine' scientists as fascinating as their science? Here I have my doubts.