Do you find they push you to make connections and make solutions?

Yeah - one of the fun things about doing this job is it�s really forced me to stretch my imagination quite a bit. When I first started as the science consultant, which was the final season of the Next Generation, I was always trying to find something from real science that would work in that place in that script.Sometimes I just couldn�t, but what I then realised is, I really have to think farther into the future. I have to take what we know today and try to extrapolate and also acknowledge that there are going to be things discovered hundreds of years in the future that we have no idea about today. There are going to be some things that are discovered that will contradict some of the things that we think we know today.

So, it�s allowed me to use my imagination a little bit more and to play a little bit with the ideas of science and the language of science. And, hopefully, still make very credible stories.

It is a sort of an iterative process. I make suggestions and if they don�t like them, then I will give them some alternatives and sometimes we�ll come up with something together. I�m not just sort of preaching from the science mountain here and telling them :'You need to say this...'