Gregory Benford
American science fiction author and astrophysicist who is on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.
“One of the laws of nature,” Gordon said, “is that half the people have got to be below average.”
”For a Gaussian distribution, yeah,” Cooper said. “Sad, though.”
Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.
(Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.
Religions do not teach doubt.
Disintegration of structure equals information loss.
At least being prosperous set one apart in England; here it guaranteed nothing, not even taste.
Yes, perhaps that was it. For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable. Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right.
Organic forms are in the universe of things and also reside in the universe of essences. There we cannot go. … You are a spontaneous product of the universe of things. We are not. This seems to give you … windows. It was difficult for me to monitor your domestic transmissions, they fill up with branches, spontaneous paths, nuances…
Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.
“Free will again,” Cathy said.
“Or free won’t,” Peterson said mildly.
All right, he thought, so the details were not perfect. But maybe, in a sense, that was part of the magic, too.
There was something about such reflex stupidity that never failed to irritate him.
It was an example of what he thought of as the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.
Everybody feels he has a right to a life of luxury — or at least comfort — so there’s a lot of frustration and resentment when the dream craps out.
The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.
Somehow to them, the press was always the judge of things scientific.
If you were damned certain you weren’t looking for something, there was a very good chance you wouldn’t see it.
You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience, to replace everyday life’s pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with — no not with certainty but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial.
To shine is better than to reflect.