I didn't have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism.
It is hard to rationalise or explain why you love what you love. But I have always been interested in science and maths, and in high school I was struck that you could use maths to understand nature and science.
It is this mythical, or rather symbolic, content of the religious traditions which is likely to come into conflict with science. This occurs whenever this religious stock of ideas contains dogmatically fixed statements on subjects which belong in the...
Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views - on politics, sexuality, religion, and many other contentious topics - than Robert Heinlein.
Science fiction is the arena of the not-yet, and every science fiction story has this element of not-yet-ness usually a bit of technology or a scientific discovery that we don't know about in the real world of the present but that might be a possi...
Another glorious feature of many modern science museums is a movie theater showing IMAX or OMNIMAX films. In some cases the screen is ten stories tall and wraps around you. The Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museu, the popular museum on Earth, ha...
In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have p...
..."science" as defined in our culture has a philosophical bias that needs to be exposed. On the one hand, science is empirical. This means that scientists rely on experiments, observations and calculations to develop theories and test them. On the o...
and , in this country, resumed the work of the Italians and of ; and the former, aided by a marvellous power of clear exposition, placed upon an irrefragable basis the truth that natural causes are competent to account for all events, which can be pr...
If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Lectures on Physics. There's a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only r...
We used to think God made us in His image, and that meant we were special, until science told us we just evolved that way because it suited a landscape of trees and savannas. That's what science does: it says, look again and you'll see . But economic...
These estimates may well be enhanced by one from F. Klein (1849-1925), the leading German mathematician of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 'Mathematics in general is fundamentally the science of self-evident things.' ... If mathematics is...
Scientific theories are tested every time someone makes an observation or conducts an experiment, so it is misleading to think of science as an edifice, built on foundations. Rather, scientific knowledge is more like a web. The difference couldn’t ...
The word 'proof' should strictly only be used when we are dealing with deductive inferences.... Popper claimed that scientists only need to use deductive inferences.... So if a scientist is only interested in demonstrating that a given theory is fals...
Please don’t make the mistake of thinking the arts and sciences are at odds with one another. That is a recent, stupid, and damaging idea. You don’t have to be unscientific to make beautiful art, to write beautiful things. If you need proof: Twai...
Science’s skeptical core makes it a poor competitor for human hearts and minds, which recoil from its ongoing controversies and prefer the security of seemingly eternal truths. If the scientific approach were just one more interpretation of the cos...
Majority thinks that philosophy is useless not because of being completely uninterested in philosophical questions. In contrast, they would like to know at least from where they came, why they live and what will happen afterdeath. Majority underestim...
Things that look like they were designed, probably were... If intelligence is an operative component of the universe, a science that methodologically excludes its existence will be susceptible to being trapped in an endless chase for materialistic ca...
When I was little, I was out riding my brand-new blue bicycle when I decided to see how far I could keep going without looking back even once. I could feel with my back how my neighborhood was receding, further and further away... but I kept pedaling...
Dory: [about the humpback whale] Maybe he only speaks whale. [slowly and deeply, imitating the whale] Dory: Mooo... Weeee neeeed... Marlin: Dory? Dory: ...tooo fiiind hiiis sooon. Marlin: What are you doing? Are you sure you speak whale? Dory: Caaaan...
What's poetry?" I've never heard the word before, but I like the sound of it. It sounds elegant and easy, somehow, like a beautiful woman turning in a long dress.
