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" My feeling is that science is virtually an unexplored ground. It's very visible - more so all the time - but there's no fiction that tells us how scientists think, and they really don't think the way that other people do. "

Gregory Benford

People

Feeling

Science

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" We hope we can slow or possibly reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's. "

" Reared in rural southern Alabama, we enjoyed an idyllic Huck Finn boyhood. But education there was casual at best. Our mother and father were high school teachers and challenged the pervasive easy-going ignorance. "

" To deliver vast new resources to humanity, we must pioneer and occupy the moon, Mars, and perhaps even beyond. "

" Electromagnetic theory and experiment gave us the telephone, radio, TV, computers, and made the internal combustion engine practical - thus, the car and airplane, leading inevitably to the rocket and outer-space exploration. "

" Enzymes - plainly the most important biotechnology of our era - already permeate many industrial processes. Unlike fossil fuels, they carry chemical programming which drives complex reactions, are renewable, and work at ordinary pressures and temperatures. "

" The simplest way to remove carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is to grow plants - preferably trees, since they tie up more of the gas in cellulose, meaning it will not return to the air within a season or two. Plants build themselves out of air and water, taking only a tiny fraction of their mass from the soil. "

" As we all saw in grade school, once you learn how to read a book, somebody is going to want to write one - that's how authors are made. Once we know how to read our own genetic code, someone is going to want to rewrite that 'text,' tinker with traits - play God, some would say. "

" Certainly I see no reason why society should prevent grieving parents from having a baby cloned from the cells of a dead child if they wish. "

" Nostalgia is eternal for Americans. We are often displaced from our origins and carry anxious memories of that lost past. We fear losing our bearings. "

" At the end of the day, I sit down for about five minutes and review all the problems I'm working on, research problems or writing problems, and I go to sleep. Then when I wake up in the morning, I've trained myself to not open my eyes and to just lie there and recall the problems and see if there's anything there. "

" Congress came to see NASA primarily as a jobs program, not an exploratory agency. "

" The world is neither running down nor deterministic, and a strict division of order versus chaos is just wrong. "

" The talk shows I've done are all radio for exactly this reason: I don't want to wear a rubber mask. "

" Dinner at college high table is one of the legendary experiences of England. I could remember keenly each one I had attended; the repartee is sharper than the cutlery. "

" As fandom grew more variegated, genzines reflected a broadening of interests, carrying personal columns of humor and reflection, science articles, amateur fiction, stylish gossip, and inevitably, thoughtful pieces on the future of fandom. "

Gregory Benford

Science

Reflection

" It turns out that if you optimize the performance of a car and of an airplane, they are very far away in terms of mechanical features. So you can make a flying car. But they are not very good planes, and they are not very good cars. "

" Science would lead you to a more interesting life than something else. "

" I've always felt that specialization is best left to the insects. "

" This was the 1940s; there was no television. It was a different age - it was not swamped by media; it was swamped by reality, and storytelling was a very big art where I came from. "

" The common liberal orthodoxy that living close to the land leads to eco-awareness is historically naive, considering that Mesopotamia, northern Africa, and the Mayan civilization were ruined by people who had lived there quite a long while. "

" In temperate zones, winter is the best insecticide; it keeps the bugs in check. The tropics enjoy no such respite, so plants there have developed a wide range of alkaloids that kill off nosy insects and animals. "

" A view of nature as dense and nonlinear is at the core of our contemporary science. Process and order emerge subtly. "

" It really helps if you know your subject matter immediately. I find that enormously useful because then you can concentrate on all the usual novelistic things - the character, the plot and so forth - and you don't have to spend an enormous amount of time learning another trade, essentially. "

" In science fiction, basic doubts featured prominently in the worlds of Philip K. Dick. I knew Phil for 25 years, and he was always getting onto me, a scientist. He was a great fan of quantum uncertainty, epistemology in science, the lot. "

" Experience shows that if you put more ethicists on a problem, you can end up with more problems. "

" Star Trek's insight lay in the promise of going to the stars together, with well-defined stereotypes who could supply the emotional frame for the potentially jarring truths of these distant places. "

" The people who built the space program - both Soviet and U.S. - were readers of science fiction. "

" Genre pleasures are many, but the quality of shared values within an ongoing discussion may be the most powerful, enlisting lifelong devotion in its fans. "

" Mathematics cannot handle physical quantities like density that literally go to infinity. "

Gregory Benford

Mathematics

" Invoking nature with its implied supremacy ignores that many cultures have fundamentally differing ideas of even what nature is, much less how it should work. "