#sci

I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to—I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more. —John Cavil, Cylon Model Number One, “No Exit ↗

— Patrick DiJusto

#science

The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#science

In case you haven't noticed, they're moving a lot faster. I don't know about the laws of physics on your planet, but where I come from an object moving at subclass speed can't catch up to one running at starclass. But if you know something about turbines, thrusters and engines, quantum or classical physics that I've somehow missed, then please enlighten me. - Caillen Dagan to Desideria Denarii ↗

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

#desideria #romance #science-fiction #sherrilyn-kenyon #science

By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#big-bang #science #space #time #science

Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it. ↗

— David Eagleman

#reality #science #science

Both the old and new physics were dealing with shadow-symbols, but the new physics was forced to be aware of that fact - forced to be aware that it was dealing with shadows and illusions, not reality. ↗

— Ken Wilber

#science #science

[A] couple I had known - who were old friends - asked me what I was going to work on next. I told them I wanted to write a near future book about AIDS concentration camps. They were vehement in their response: they thought it was a terrible idea. Their words both shocked and saddened me. "Do you really want to write a book about homosexuals?" they asked me. "Won't people who read your work be influenced toward sin?" I notice that I don't hear from them much lately. ↗

— Tracy Hickman

#gay-rights #intolerance #science-fiction #science

There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality. ↗

— Arthur C. Clarke

#future-prediction #reality #science-fiction #science

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox... ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#cycles #despair #emotion #fear #free-will

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them ↗

— William Lawrence Bragg

#science