The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe.
One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.
The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.
I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis ...
Economists should be modest and be aware that they are part of the broader social science community. We need to be pragmatic about the methods we use. When we need to do history, we should do history. When we need to study political science, we shoul...
I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happe...
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer - about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
Science fiction has done a really good job of scaring us into thinking that computers shouldn't get too smart, because as soon as they get really smart, they're going to take over the world and kill us, or something like that. But why would they do t...
When people think about computer science, they imagine people with pocket protectors and thick glasses who code all night.
I've been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college.
Computer science is one of the worst things that ever happened to either computers or to science.
When you're doing Sebring in the back straight at 185 or 187, and the car's moving, you gotta know what to do with it, how to read it. Just the science of understanding shocks - forget spring rates - is mind-boggling.
We didn't care about salaries and having a nice car. We just cared about science and were really ambitious.
I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last '60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings.
Not at all, I wanted to go into medicine. I took science in college. But my dad was a Producer - Director in Kannada films, and someone saw me, and one thing led to another.
When I was born in 1970 with a rare genetic disorder called spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita (SED), medical science wasn't what it is today and my mum and dad were treated terribly by the medical profession.
And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.
While I was at community college, I studied industrial design because I thought maybe I'd be an automotive designer - I grew up in Detroit - and I also studied, geology because I was interested in science, a little bit.
Looking back, video game design seems a natural fit, although there was no such thing when I was growing up. I built a Tic-Tac-Toe playing machine in my teens which went up in smoke on the night it was scheduled to go to a science fair.
