Gregory Benford Quotes

It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.

There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.

Once you've grown up in space, moving on means moving out, not going back to Earth. Nobody wants to be a groundpounder.

When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.

(Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.

People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.

Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.

To shine is better than to reflect.

Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available

Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future.

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.

I don't get even, I get odder.

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.

No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.

The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.

In a tough situation, don't avoid acting just because it's easier or comfortable. Don't lapse into a passive state. People who give up, die.

SF is a controlled way to think and dream about the future. An integration of the mood and attitude of science (the objective universe) with the fears and hopes that spring from the unconscious. Anything that turns you and your social context, the social you, inside out. Nightmares and visions, always outlined by the barely possible.

If you are losing at a game, change the game.

Religions do not teach doubt.

The biggest mistake is being too afraid of making one.

They will do anything for the worker, except become one.

Disintegration of structure equals information loss.

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.

The peers just fill the air with their speeches.""And from what I've seen, vice versa.

Jeff Carver is a hard sf writer who gets it right-his science and his people are equally convincing. NEPTUNE CROSSING combines his strengths, from a chilling look at alien machine intelligence, to cutting-edge chaos theory, to the pangs of finite humans in the face of the infinite. If you like intriguing ideas delivered in an exciting plot, this is your meat.

Peter Watts delivers-solid, inventive hard sf about the deep sea, but as we've never seen before. This moves like the wind.

At least being prosperous set one apart in England; here it guaranteed nothing, not even taste.

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.

Ugliness is nature's contraceptive.

Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.

Space travel leading to skylife is vital to human survival, because the question is not whether we will be hit by an asteroid, but when. A planetary culture that does not develop spacefaring is courting suicide. All our history, all our social progress and growing insight will be for nothing if we perish. No risk of this kind, however small it might be argued to be, is worth taking, and no cost to prevent it is too great. No level of risk is acceptable when it comes to all or nothing survival.