Physicists From England

"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."

"“Any other instructions?” “Not without breaking one of my own golden rules. In an unpredictable situation, the man or woman on the spot should make the decisions, not the general sitting on his ass a million miles away from the action.”"

"Forrest Singer, it always seemed to Saul, spoke as though the two of them were equals. Saul possibly held the slightly inferior position in the doctor’s eyes. Saul was the President of the United States, true; but Forrest Singer was an M.D."

"It was improbable for him to meet his old friends here? Fine, so it was improbable; but it had happened. “Improbable” was something you could only apply to future events."

"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."

"Decisions based on incomplete information are one thing, a fact of political life. Decisions made with no information are another."

"There was one good argument against cloning, and only one. It increased the total number of people, and to me that number already felt far too large."

"Everyone was somebody’s cousin, or uncle, or bedmate, or best college friend. Sometimes he felt that the whole of Washington was glued together into one vast, incestuous, and inefficient snotball."

"Luck is infatuated with the efficient."

"The first ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang is far more interesting that the entire rest of the history of the universe."

"The superior strain of peas is the one whose genetic composition allows it to adapt to whatever environment it is presented with. People are not peas, but in one respect they are not very different from them: some have superior genetic composition to others."

"Everyone agreed what an interesting concept it was—the sort of thing that ought to be true, in an interesting world."

"I worry when I hear talk of “this many millions” and “that many billions” from officials who I know have trouble calculating a restaurant tip."

"It is one of the unfortunate aspects of the legal profession that excess carries no penalty. There is never, for a lawyer, such a thing as too much."

"The more foolproof you think something is, the worse the failure when it happens."

"We got the way we are, Jeanie, because life on Earth is one long fight for limited resources. Our bloody-mindedness all started out as food battles, three billion years ago."

"The possible future is not just longer than the past. It is unimaginably longer."

"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."

"“Captain Roker, I don’t like your insinuation,” he said. “McAndrew is a physicist—so am I. You may not be smart enough to realize it, but physics is a field of study, not a surgical operation. Castration isn’t part of the Ph.D. Exams, you know.”"

"The first space colonies had been conceived as utopias, planned by Earth idealists who wouldn’t learn from history. New frontiers may attract visionaries, but more than that they attract oddities. Anyone who is more than three sigma away from the norm, in any direction, seems to finish out there on the frontier. No surprise in that. If a person can’t fit, for whatever reason, he’ll move away from the main group of humanity. They’ll push him, and he’ll want to go."

"As usual he looked tired, but that was normal. Geniuses worked harder than anyone else, not less hard."

"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."

"I’ll say only this: if we’re going to throw the idea of the Big Bang overboard, we won’t have much left of current astrophysics and cosmology."

"Data are not the same as information. Before you can get the answers you want, you have to ask the right question."

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

"“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.”"

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"“Hormones are everything, Turpin,” she said to the bird on her shoulder. “Brains are nice, and looks are nice, and logic’s even nicer; but hormones run the show. For everyone, even for me and you.”"

"“I wonder why somebody would go to all that trouble to make a complete fool of himself.” “Come on, Gina, we both know why.” “Oh, I guess you’re right. Money will always do it.” Of course."

"It is remarkable that observation of the faint agglomerations of stars known as galaxies leads us, very directly and cleanly, to the conclusion that we live in a Universe of finite and determinable age. A century ago, no one could have offered even an approximate age for the Universe. For an upper bound, most nonreligious scientists would probably have said “forever.” For a lower bound, all they had was the age of the Earth."

"The Asteroid Belt contains everything from substantial bodies like Ceres, seven hundred and fifty kilometers across, all the way down to house-sized boulders, pebbles, and grains of sand. One good rule of thumb is that for every object of a given size, there will be ten times as many one-third that size."

"It’s the usual sensation mongering; the news services will say anything for an effect."

"“I think I’ll have a sign made for that far wall,” said Bey at last. “Indeed?” “Yes. It will say, ‘If you have nothing to do, please don’t do it here’.”"

"The ship climbed steadily and laboriously up, away from the plane of the ecliptic. Finally, the parallax was sufficient to move the planets from their usual apparent positions. Mars, Earth, Venus, and Jupiter all sat in constellations that were no part of the familiar zodiac. Mercury was cowering close to the sun. Saturn alone, swinging out at the far end of her orbit, seemed right as seen from the ship. Bey Wolf, picking out their positions through a viewport, wondered idly how the astrologers would cope with such a situation. Mars seemed to be in the House of Andromeda, and Venus in the House of Cygnus. It would take an unusually talented practitioner to interpret those relationships and cast a horoscope for the success of this enterprise."

"The bad thing about being a world-class worrier was that being right was worse than being wrong."

"When you pay somebody off, it only increases their demands. I know, only too well. They are never satisfied with what they get."

"When hard times come to the party, dignity is one of the first guests to leave."

"“Did you do what I asked you to?” “As much as I could. Have you ever tried to brief your boss, without telling her what’s going on?” “A hundred times. It’s the first rule of self-preservation.”"

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

"Not one word of what I’d said had got through to him. It didn’t much matter, I’d really been speaking for the media anyway, but it was a shame to see bigotry masquerading as public-spirited behavior."

"Only the final choice would require a human decision: enter the Link, or decline to do so? It occurred to Chan that perhaps this was the choice that humans were least qualified to make. He recognized in himself the tendency to say, we’ve come so far, we can’t possibly change our minds now. People following that philosophy died climbing mountains, they signed disastrous contracts, they flew into hurricanes, and they embarked on lifelong commitments to the wrong mates. Perhaps they headed to the stars for the same reason."

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

"It had been designed for “peacekeeping,” which meant that it had been fitted out from stem to stern with the most hideous weapons of war that the human mind could conceive."

"I learned a long time ago that it’s a bad habit to waste effort counting your friends. It’s your enemies you need to look out for."

"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."

"When you got right down to it, every important decision in life was made with inadequate information."

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