Physicists From England

"It might be an impossible task, but at least it was a well-defined one. The rules for performance were no problem. He had learned them long ago on Teufel: you succeed, or you die trying. Until you succeed, you never relax. Until you die, you never give up."

"“We’re just too nosy, Commander,” he went on. “Most humans have their patience level set a little too low, and their curiosity a bit too high.”"

"No purpose is served by making private suffering into a public event."

"That’s what logic says. But I say, phooey, who wants logic? Not you, and not me. We want results."

"Be an optimist! It’s the only way to live."

"What does one do when a madman suggests an appealing course of action? One worries—but probably goes along with it."

"Human history extends for approximately ten thousand years before the Expansion, with written records available for roughly half that time. Unfortunately, the human tendency for self-delusion, self-aggrandizement, and baseless faith in human superiority over all other intelligent life-forms renders much of the written record unreliable. Serious research workers are advised to seek alternative primary data sources concerning humans. —From the Universal Species Catalog (Subclass: Sapients)"

"But humans had to learn to ignore appearance. No two beings who shared common thinking processes and common goals should be truly alien to each other."

"And now I think about it, I never really wanted to live forever. I just want to live well."

"Everyone was polite; no one was happy."

"But mere plausibility did not make the statement true."

"Human culture is built around four basic elements: sexual relationships, territorial rights, individual intellectual dominance, and desire for group acceptance. The H’Sirin model using just these four traits as independent variables enables accurate prediction of human behavior patterns. On the basis of this, human culture is judged to be of Level Two, with few prospects for advancement to a higher level. —From the Universal Species Catalog (Subclass: Sapients)"

"Mathematics is universal. But very little else is."

"The partners were there; gravity was calling the changes, and the cosmic dance was ready to begin."

"The universe is all extremes. Monstrous gravity fields, or next-to-nothing ones; extreme cold, or heat so intense that solids and liquids cannot exist; multimillion atmosphere pressures, or near-vacuum. Ice or fire. Niflheim or Muspelheim: the ancient alternatives, imagined by humans long before the Expansion. It’s planets that are the oddities; the strange neutral zone between suns and space, the thin interface where moderate temperatures and pressures and gravity fields can exist. And if planets are anomalies, then planets able to support life are rarer yet—a zero-measure subset in that set of strangeness. And within that alien totality, where do humans fit?"

"If I’ve learned one thing wandering around inside and outside the Solar System, it’s this: Nature has more ways of killing you than you can imagine. When you think you’ve learned them all, another one pops up to teach you humility—if you’re lucky. If not, someone else will have to decide what did you in."

"The laws of probability not only permit coincidences; they absolutely insist on them."

"“It doesn’t make sense,” he said huskily. “Nothing ever does before you understand it, and then it seems obvious.”"

"The mills of bureaucracy may or may not grind fine, but they certainly grind exceeding slow."

"And there you had it. Most people hate to learn that they are wrong. Not McAndrew. When he’s proved wrong, he’s ecstatic. It means he’s learned something new, and that’s his main reason for existence."

"I think my inner voices are pretty good when it comes to warning of trouble. The problem is, I don’t always listen to them."

"Telepathy? It’s bunk, Tolly. Now, if you’d asked me that forty years ago, I’d have said it was the most exciting thing in the world. Back when Rhine started his work, I thought there was really something there. Since then, it’s gone nowhere. Christ, there’s been any amount of talk, lots of horseshit, no real evidence, and nothing for progress. So now, I say it’s bunk—or else we’ve been going about it all wrong."

"Irresponsible on my part, to put pleasure before professional work? Sure—but as I get older carpe diem gets more and more reasonable as a motto for life."

"War was senseless. And yet war came creeping steadily closer."

"Alexandria may indeed be full of Devils, Lord, but they behaved very like merchants to my eyes."

"Korin stared. It must be a novelty, finding someone more paranoid than he was."

"That’s the trouble with the younger generation. They don’t understand why a thing can’t be done, so they go ahead and do it."

"“I’ve been testing Kallen’s Law—my name for it, not his. Remember what he said? ‘Anything that can be put into a data bank by one person can be taken out of it by another, if you’re smart enough and have enough time.’ That’s one problem with a computer-based society, and one reason why computers were so tightly controlled on Pentecost: it’s almost impossible to prevent access to computer-stored information.”"

"That’s why we want it. Impossible gadgets are always the most valuable."

"Darya stood up, heard her voice rising, and knew she was doing what she insisted what a scientist should never do: allowing passion and the defense of personal theories to interfere with logical analysis."

"As the poet laureate of all confidence tricksters and treasure-seekers puts it, we were “given to strong delusion, wholly believing a lie.”"

"Darya was beginning to understand why she might be ruined forever for academic life. Certainly, the world of ideas had its own pleasures and thrills. But surely there was nothing to compete with the wonderful feeling of being alive, after knowing without a shadow of doubt that you would be dead in one second."

"The heirs, naturally, wanted everything to be theirs as soon as possible. No one is more rapacious, ruthless, and impatient than a loving family member."

"They saw every event through the distorting lens of their own paranoia."

"Nothing was more fascinating than information. It was infinite in quantity, or effectively so, limited only by the total entropy of the universe; it was vastly diverse and various; it was eternal; It was available for collection, anywhere and anytime. And, perhaps best of all, E. C. Tally thought with the largest amount of self-satisfaction that his circuits permitted, you never knew when it might come in useful."

"The prevailing theory to resolve this paradox comes from limited studies of Lo’tfian physiology. The male brain, it is believed, is highly organized and possesses powerful intelligence. However, it contains an unknown physical inhibitor, chemical in nature, that forbids the employment of that intelligence when in the presence of a Lo’tfian female. Confronted by such a female, the reasoning ability of the male Lo’tfian simply switches off. (A much weaker form of this phenomenon has been attributed to other species. See Human entry of this catalogue.) —From the Universal Species Catalog (Subclass: Sapients)"

"But maybe we wrongly define the higher human functions. How we think and feel about everything except questions of pure logic is decided maybe five percent in our brains, ninety-five percent in our glands. And how many events in human history have been the result of logical thought? Just try to name one."

"The trouble with apocalyptic visions is that they often won’t withstand a rational examination."

"I find that prayers don’t work when you need them most. Unless you answer them for yourself."

"It’s no surprise that there are people like Anna Griss in the world. There always have been. Go back fifty thousand years, to a time when most of us were just grubbing along, looking for a decent bush of ripe berries or a fresher lump of meat. A few, like McAndrew, were busy inventing language or numbers, or painting the walls of the cave. And some, just a handful but too many in every generation, were seeking an edge over the rest of us: Water access, or mating rules, or restricted entry to heaven. No matter how few they were, Anna Griss would have been one of them."

"A long time ago humans talked of terraforming Mars and Venus, but we never did it. Just too busy blowing ourselves up, I guess, ever to get round to it."

"Never get involved in a venture with a man who inherited his money and didn’t earn any himself. He’ll assume he’s smarter than you are, just because he’s rich and you’re not, and he’ll expect you to bow down to his greatness because for all his life people have."

"More and more, she felt certain that the members of the Legion of Argos from the top down were mental cases. Prophecies, penances, holy cleansings, arbitrary murders to settle grievances, ethnic entry requirements, guns everywhere, regimented behavior, visitors who were effectively prisoners—all the signs of a paramilitary religious cult."

"But no one, no matter how intelligent, could make good inferences from bad data."

"I sometimes think that the only thing in life that I find truly irresistible is the challenge to finagle something that everyone else says can’t be done."

"The main influence on all of the activity in electromagnetic theory during the later years of the nineteenth century came from Maxwell's famous treatise (Maxwell 1873). Poynting was a member of the group of young physicists led by Heaviside, Fitzgerald, Lodge and Hertz who developed Maxwell's electromagnetic theory in the years following his death in 1879. They transformed his 1873 presentation into the formalism recognizable today as Maxwell's equations. The detailed historical accounts by Hunt (1991) and Warwick (2003) describe Poynting's contributions to electromagnetism, mainly during the 1880s. His name is more familiar to students of electromagnetic theory than those of other important members of the group on account of the widespread use of his eponymous energy-conservation theorem and energy-flow vector."

"The Earth, then, is very round. If an exact model were made the size of a two-inch billiard ball, we should just be able to see that it was flatter at the poles, and, no doubt, in rolling it would exhibit its want of roundness. The highest mountains would be represented by elevations of \frac {1} {800}th inch, say by the thinnest smear of grease, the deepest oceans by the spreading of a drop into a film but \frac {1} {700}th inch thick."

"When we see the havoc wrought on a sea-wall by a storm, it is easy to believe that ocean waves exert a pressure against the shore on which they beat. But it is not easy to think that the tiny ripples of light also press against every body on which they fall, to think that when a lamp is lighted waves of pressure are sent out from it—pressing against the source from which they start, pressing against every surface which they illuminate. It is a very minute pressure, far too small, even when it is strongest, to be felt by our bodies, and only to be detected by exceeding sensitive apparatus."

"A space containing electric currents may be regarded as a field where energy is transformed at certain points into the electric and magnetic kinds by means of batteries, dynamos, thermoelectric actions, and so on, while in other parts of the field this energy is again transformed into heat, work done by electromagnetic forces, or any form of energy yielded by currents. Formerly a current was regarded as something travelling along a conductor, attention being chiefly directed to the conductor, and the energy which appeared at any part of the circuit, if considered at all, was supposed to be conveyed thither through the conductor by the current. But the existence of induced currents and of electromagnetic actions at a distance from a primary circuit from which they draw their energy, has led us, under the guidance of Faraday and Maxwell, to look upon the medium surrounding the conductor as playing a very important part in the development of the phenomena. If we believe in the continuity of the motion of energy, that is, if we believe that when it disappears at one point and reappears at another it must have passed through the intervening space, we are forced to conclude that the surrounding medium contains at least a part of the energy, and that it is capable of transferring it from point to point."

"A very simple experiment shows that a black surface is a better radiator, or pours out more energy when hot, than a surface which does not absorb fully, but reflects much of the radiation which falls upon it. If a platinum foil with some black marks on it be heated to redness, the marks, black when cold, are much brighter than the surrounding metal when hot; they are, in fact, pouring out much more visible radiation than the metal."