Physicists From England

"Solar geoengineering, I’m afraid I think it’s a fool’s paradise, and I’ve been saying the same thing for many years."

"She appears regularly on TV, radio and in print media, and as a result, gets a lot of emails – many from people who do not believe that humans are causing climate change. She tries to reply to them all unless they are directly offensive, but admits she has about a “two percent success rate” in positive responses to her explaining the science."

"Don’t get caught again. Never, never, never. That was the Golden Rule, the only important rule."

"“That’s a whole lot of ifs you got there.” “True. But which would you prefer, Louis Nenda?” Atvar H’sial rose from her crouched position. “A substantial set of contingent possibilities, or a single unpleasant certainty?”"

"Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue."

"Arabella Lund had been full of “rules,” and one of her most basic was this: Anything in the universe can happen once, or at least it can seem to happen. If you want to obtain information, make it happen again."

"When you had little or no information, it was unreasonable to have any expectations. But somehow you did, even if they were often wrong."

"You crazy? You’ve got me confused with a guy who cares about other people."

"Sometimes I think about dying. And then I wonder about going to hell. And then I think that if and when I go there, the place will be completely organized and run by lost souls, with a council and a works committee and an ethics panel, and I’ll feel right at home."

"As you will one day discover, a leader is not a leader because of the way that he or she behaves. He is a leader only because of the way that he is treated by others."

"If you wanted to get yourself killed, there was no better way than to think you knew all the tricks. It took experience to make you realize that the universe could always pull another one out of the bag and throw it at you."

"I do not like to concatenate implausibilities."

"Somehow he felt more resigned than surprised. Things had been going far too well for far too long. Just when you thought you had the universe by the tail, it turned round and bit you on the ass."

"Happy endings were for children’s stories and fool. You live in misery, and then you die. Life, by definition, was not designed to end happily. Louis continued aft. No happy ending, then. That was a fact, certain as death itself. He was living at the moment in a dream, an imagined world where everything went right. But—dreams are real while they last. Could you say more of life? A dream sequence was no more than a happy interlude, but maybe a happy interlude could last for an awful long time."

"When you have something to do, do it. When you have nothing to do, sleep."

"Idle wishing for circumstances different from what you had was a waste of time."

"Although the schoolchildren of this country emerge from our institutions of supposed learning ninety percent illiterate, knowing nothing of science, nothing of technology, little geography, and less history, every one of them will tell you who rules the country. We are governed by the interaction of a President, learned judges, and our people’s representatives. Every child knows this; and every child is wrong. Perhaps it was once that way, but today the Court and President and Congress are either members of the old and wealthiest families, like the Michelsons and Brooks; or they have been bought and controlled by them. The sprawl of government passes and implements policies. But far fewer people, about a hundred in number, set policies."

"Nothing in life produce a more powerful joy than a near miss by the Angel of Death."

"When a person was so consistently wrong, it was time to give up having opinions."

"He was a professional trouble-shooter. That was a fancy name for an idiot."

"One form of insanity bears the name curiosity."

"He realized a profound truth: there is no one so generous as a bureaucrat spending other people’s money."

"Logic was good, but too much logical analysis inhibited action. Darya had heard it seriously suggested that the original human cladeworld, Earth, had degenerated to an ineffectual backwater of a planet because computer trade-off analysis had increasingly been used as the basis for decision making. On purely logical grounds, no one would ever explore, invent, rejoice, sing, strive, fall in love, or take physical and psychological risks of any kind. Better to stay in bed in the morning; it was much safer."

"Improbable as it seems, I think she admires you more than me."

"His sin was something that scientists had done for thousands of years. Scientists didn’t usually change data, not unless they were outright charlatans. But when facts didn’t agree with theory, there was an awful temptation to find reasons for rejecting the offending data and and hanging on to the theory. Ptolemy had done it. Newton had done it. Darwin had done it. Einstein had done so explicitly."

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

"Trouble comes in a thousand different ways. Not usually anything you expect, either. That’s why it’s trouble."

"“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.”"

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

"We are creatures of conditioning, Commander. We assume that what we know is easy, and we find mysterious whatever we do not."

"Didn’t anything scare the two aliens? Sometimes she wondered if humans were the only beings in the universe with a sense of cowardice (be charitable, and call it and instinct for self-preservation)."

"His mind was as furiously active as his hormones."

"Who should run the world? There’s no easy answer, no magic solution. There never is, to a really hard question."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"“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.”"

"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."

"“My aunt doesn’t even believe there is a Ship. She says we’ve been here on Pentecost forever.” “What did you tell her?” “Nothing. For someone with that view, logic is irrelevant—she’ll believe what she chooses, regardless of evidence. Her religion says God placed us here on Pentecost, and for her that’s the end of the argument.” “And you?” Peron was aware that she had moved in very close to him. “What do you think?” “You know what I think. I’m cursed with a logical mind, and a lot of curiosity.”"

"Earth has been regarded for centuries as a giant self-regulating machine, absorbing all changes, great and small, and diluting their effects until they become invisible on a global scale. Mankind has taken that stability for granted. Careless of consequences, we have watched as forests were cleared, lakes poisoned, rivers dammed and diverted, mountains leveled, whole plains dug out for their mineral and fuel content. And nothing disastrous happened. Earth tolerated the insults, and always she restored the status quo. Always—until now. Until finally some hidden critical point has been passed. The move away from a steady state is signalled in many ways: by increasing ocean temperatures, by drought and flood, by widespread loss of topsoil, by massive crop failure, and by the collapse of worldwide fishing industries."

"Where orbits are wildly varying, life has no chance to develop. Changes are too extreme. Temperatures melt tin, then solidify nitrogen. If it is once established, life is persistent; it can adapt to many extremes. But there is a fragility in the original creation that calls for a long period of tightly-controlled variations."

"“It sounds reasonable to me.” “Reasonable, but not true. Big difference.”"

"See, everybody looks at the world from his own point of view. I call it the ground state of the resting mind. And your brain does the same thing, left alone it returns to and thinks about what it’s really interested in."

"“Lop the top-end tail off the distribution of human intelligence and creativity,” he went on, “and it would make no measurable difference to the population. Only one person in a billion is out beyond the six-sigma level. That’s what we’re talking about here. But eventually those one-in-a-billion make a huge difference. Ninety-five percent of all human progress comes from less than one thousandth of one percent of the population.”"

"“It is my personal belief that nothing can exceed light speed,” said Sy at last. “I will mistrust anyone, government or Immortal, man or woman, human or alien, who attempts to tell me otherwise without providing convincing evidence.”"

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

"He had defined intuition for Sondra: it was what remained after all the facts had been forgotten. But intuition could also be something else. Sometimes it was the subconscious mind, establishing deep connections long before the thinking part of the brain could explain them."

"When in doubt, follow the money trail. People could lie, motives could be disguised, even acts could be misunderstood. Money was as constant as human nature."