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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3fc6db3 | It was a hopeless thing, he thought, this obsession of his to present the people of the Earth as good and reasonable. For in many ways they were neither good nor reasonable; perhaps because they had not as yet entirely grown up. They were smart and quick and at times compassionate and even understanding, but they failed lamentably in many other ways. But if they had the chance, Enoch told himself, if they ever got a break, if they only coul.. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 1a33565 | of Wisconsin | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 6f1feb1 | The whole procedure of his thinking, Jason knew, was an imbecilic exercise; there was no compelling reason for him to seek an answer. And yet his mind bored on and on and he could not stop it, hanging with desperation to an impossibility to which it never should have paid attention. | mind thinking worry | Clifford D. Simak | |
| ad3ea78 | The world had opened out and so had the universe, or what she since had thought must have been the universe, lying all spread out before her, with ever nook revealed, with all the knowledge, all the reasons there - a universe in which time and space had been ruled out because time and space were only put there, in the first place, to make it impossible for anyone to grasp the universe. Seen for a moment, half-sensed, a flash of insight that.. | insight life | Clifford D. Simak | |
| 45ce306 | Nothing definite, of course. But say a hundred years to get themselves established as a viable society, perhaps three hundred to rebuild an approximation of the kind of technological setup they had here on Earth. And from there they built on the basis of what they had, with the advantage of being able to drop a lot of ancient millstones they carried around their necks. They build from scratch and to start with there was no need to struggle .. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 9769073 | In the novel All Flesh Is Grass, one of Cliff's characters, Nancy, who was a writer herself, would say of that profession: "It's a thing you don't talk about--not until you're well along with it. There are so many things that can go wrong with writing. I don't want to be one of those pseudo-literary people who are always writing something they never finish, or talking about writing something that they never start." | writers-on-writing | David W. Wixon | |
| 0d7851c | Man was spread thin throughout the galaxy. A lone man here, a handful there. Slim blobs of bone and brain and muscle to hold a galaxy in check. Slight shoulders to hold up the cloak of human greatness spread across the light-years. For Man had flown too fast, had driven far beyond his physical capacity. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 94e7be3 | But five men had died, three humans and two androids, beside a river that flowed on Aldebaran XII, just a few short miles from Andrelon, the | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| d00a34d | An android voice answered, "It's Mr. Thorne, sir, on the mentophone from Andrelon." "Thank you, Alice," Adams said." -- | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| d3dfcc2 | Thousands of listeners listening in on the random thoughts of random time and space listening in for clues, for hints, for leads. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 706066b | If Man had taken a different path, might, he not, in time to come, have been as great as Dog? | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| d9f0135 | The man was a somewhat seedy character. He might not actually have slept in his clothes, although the first impression was that he had. He clutched a threadbare cap with stubby, grimed fingers. The fingernails were rimmed with the blue of dirt. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 1b07e68 | We'd like to talk to you, sir, if you don't mind," said the woman of the trio. "You see, we're a sort of delegation." | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 6cf1d88 | She folded fat hands over a plump stomach and did her best to beam at him. The effect of the beam was spoiled by the wispy hair that straggled out from beneath her dowdy hat. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 766302d | We want you to sign a petition," said Mrs. Jellicoe." | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| da88990 | It seems to be a social axiom that as misery and privation increase for the many, the few rise ever higher in luxury and comfort, feeding on the misery. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| f965081 | She was a creature of the woods and hills, of springtime flower and autumn flight of birds. She knew these things and lived with them and was, in some strange way, a specific part of them. She was one who dwelt apart in an old and lost apartment of the natural world. She occupied a place that Man long since had abandoned, if, in fact, he'd ever held it. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 909e23f | Moments ago the creature in the tank had rested in another tank in another station and the materializer had built up a pattern of it -- not only of its body, but of its very vital force, the thing that gave it life. Then the impulse pattern had moved across the gulfs of space almost instantaneously to the receiver of this station, where the pattern had been used to duplicate the body and the mind and the memory and the life of the creature .. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 7b6be6b | When I was a teenager I had posters of all of my favorite musicians up on my bedroom walls--David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Edgar Winter's They Only Come Out at Night, and the first KISS album. My dad didn't really know what to make of it. One time he came into my room while I was listening to music and looked at all the posters and said, "You're a fag, aren't you?" This was an actual one-sided conversation we had." | Keith Morris | ||
| b9318db | England had been conquered by the Vikings, and its ancient royal family were in exile - in Normandy. | Marc Morris | ||
| 8b9a971 | In the final analysis, therefore, the tomb of Edward I may stand, like the unfinished castle at Caernarfon, not only as a monument to the past, but also as a warning to the future: a final reminder of the power of myth to shape men's minds and motives, and thus to alter the fate of nations. | Marc Morris | ||
| 4dfcbac | Indeed, according to William of Malmesbury, one of them staged something of a counter-demonstration by dropping his trousers and farting loudly in the king's general direction. | Marc Morris | ||
| ec189f7 | In his effort to appease his Christian taxpayers in parliament, Edward stripped away the traditional protections that earlier kings of England had extended towards the country's Jewish community. During his rule the Jews were forbidden to lend money at interest, stigmatised as infidels and ultimately expelled. Modern commentators have naturally judged Edward harshly for this, though they often err in presenting him as a pioneer. He was, it .. | Marc Morris | ||
| 84e6386 | According to Harris, Dawkins and other prominent neoatheists (Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett round out the self-styled "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"), science education is a natural antidote to sacred terror. But independent studies by Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta, forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman, and journalist and political scientist Peter Bergen indicate that a majority of al-Qaeda members and associates went to coll.. | Benny Morris | ||
| 1cc5e2c | whole universe can be thought of as a delayed-choice experiment in which the existence of observers who notice what is going on is what imparts tangible reality to the origin of everything. Following | John Gribbin | ||
| 150e7c4 | The image that emerges from quantum physics is similar in some ways to the way that the illusion that air, or water is a continuous fluid emerges. Myriad tiny particles separated by tiny gaps feels to you like a smooth fluid. Myriad quantum states separated by tiny gaps feels to you like a smooth flow of time. Zeno was right. The arrow of time points, but it does not move. THE | John Gribbin | ||
| b973be9 | The theoretical understanding of what was going on was developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century using statistical mechanics -an approach to thermodynamics that is based on applying the laws of statistics to the behaviour of large numbers of particles, such as the huge number of atoms or molecules present in a box of gas, each of them acting in accordance with Newton's laws. | John Gribbin | ||
| 9e83dbd | The natural effect of processes going on in the Universe is to move from a state of order to a state of disorder, unless there is an input of energy from outside | John Gribbin | ||
| 2145a0e | Curiously, though, we only have to look at one of the two slits for the outcome of the whole experiment to be affected, as if the electrons passing through the other slit also knew what we were doing. This is an example of quantum "non-locality," which means that what happens in one location seems to affect events in another location instantly. Non-locality is a key feature of the central mystery of quantum mechanics, and a vital ingredient.. | John Gribbin | ||
| 8597103 | As I understood it, what really mattered was simply that some systems ('system' is just a jargon word for anything, like a swinging pendulum, or the Solar System, or water dripping from a tap) are very sensitive to their starting conditions, so that a tiny difference in the initial 'push' you give them causes a big difference in where they end up, and there is feedback, so that what a system does affects its own behaviour. | John Gribbin | ||
| 0a933f4 | It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. | John Gribbin | ||
| 0fb9673 | A black hole with the mass of the Sun would take 1066 years for this to occur, even if it never swallowed any outside matter along the way. A black hole with the mass of a galaxy will evaporate in 1099 years, and even a hole containing the mass of a supercluster of galaxies - the biggest ever likely to form - will be gone in 10117 years. That | John Gribbin | ||
| 6f95881 | Reality' is the idea that there is a real world that exists whether or not anyone is looking at it, or measuring it. | John Gribbin | ||
| a069ab6 | People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Einstein | John Gribbin | ||
| 71772f1 | it is not the way of science to sit idly back and hope that someone will come up with a "better" answer to our problems. In the absence of a better answer, we have to face up to the implications of the best answer we've got." | John Gribbin | ||
| 82ff9a6 | The existence of life must be considered as an elementary fact that cannot be explained, but must be taken as a starting point in biology, in a similar way as the quantum of action, which appears as an irrational element from the point of view of classical mechanical physics, taken together with the existence of elementary particles, forms the foundation of atomic physics. The asserted impossibility of a physical or chemical explanation of .. | John Gribbin | ||
| ae101ec | These examples both demonstrate that the laws of physics, notably Newton's laws, are time-reversible. They work just as well backwards in time as forwards, and there is no place in them for the second law of thermodynamics. The fundamental laws of physics do not distinguish between past and future. | John Gribbin | ||
| afe29ae | The Big Bang was not the beginning of the Universe. | John Gribbin | ||
| ab1b1a8 | action, and there are also structures so distinct from the rest of the cell 'jelly', like cells within cells, that the best explanation of their presence is that that is indeed what they are. These semi-autonomous 'cells within the cell' are called organelles. As we saw in Chapter Four, Lynn Margulis has explained how the ancestors of the organelles used to be separate, bacteria | John Gribbin | ||
| 4ab246d | El destino al que esta abocado cualquier especialista de cualquier area de la ciencia es cenirse cada vez mas estrechamente al tema de su especialidad, aprendiendo cada vez mas sobre cada vez menos materia, hasta acabar finalmente sabiendolo todo sobre nada. | John Gribbin | ||
| dd9ee65 | spacetime is flat, that about 5 per cent of the mass of the Universe is in the form of baryons (including bright stars and gas and dust), some 27 per cent is in the form of cold dark matter, and 68 per cent is in the form of the lambda field, also known as dark energy. | John Gribbin | ||
| 70fa010 | Every problem in quantum physics had to be first "solved" using classical physics, and then be reworked by the judicious insertion of quantum numbers more by inspired guesswork than cool reasoning." | John Gribbin | ||
| 8c958c7 | Poincare took Laplace's argument to its logical conclusion. He proved, using the full rigour of mathematics, that if you have a box of gas containing a definite number of particles (as many as you like, as long as it is not actually infinite) and the particles strictly obey Newton's laws of motion, then after a sufficiently long interval of time the distribution of the particles in the box must return to its original state, with each partic.. | John Gribbin | ||
| 6807ba0 | If what you learn about quantum physics here excites you as much as it does me, you should explore quantum physics in greater depth by reading some of the authors I follow with devotion. For starters, I highly recommend: Brian Greene (The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, New York: Vintage, 2011), Stephen Hawking (The Grand Design, New York: Bantam, 2012), Amit Goswami (The Self Aware Universe, New York: Ta.. | Greg Kuhn |