Do we use models to help us find the truth? Or do we know the truth first, and then develop the mathematics to explain it?
Children grow fast in this low gravity. But they don’t age so quickly—they’ll live longer than we do. Floyd stared in fascination at the self-assured little lady, noting the graceful carriage and the...
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Eart...
After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization.
I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.
Had often been said that the only thing that could unite Mankind was a threat from space.
Turing had pointed out that, if one could carry out a prolonged conversation with a machine—whether by typewriter or microphones was immaterial—without being able to distinguish between its replies an...
There was nothing left of Earth. They had leeched away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them, through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a...
There could be no ghosts upon a world that had never known life.
The trouble with cliché's, some philosopher remarked, probably with a yawn, is that they are so boringly true. But love at first sight is never boring.
The suggestion that the cores of the gas giants might consist of diamond was first made by Marvin Ross of the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in a classic paper The i...
The fax machine now allows us to exchange ideas almost in real time; it’s far more convenient than the Electronic Mail
The confrontation lasted about five minutes; then the display died out as quickly as it had begun, and everyone drank his fill of the muddy water. Honor had been satisfied; each group had staked its c...
Some dangers are so spectacular and so much beyond normal experience that the mind refuses to accept them as real, and watches the approach of doom without any sense of apprehension. The man who looks...
So this, thought Jan, with a resignation that lay beyond all sadness, was the end of man. It was an end that no prophet had foreseen – an end that repudiated optimism and pessimism alike.Yet it was fi...
So the problem of Evil never really existed. To expect the universe to be benevolent was like imagining one could always win at a game of pure chance.
On the placidly flowing river of time, he wished only to make a few ripples: he shrank from diverting its course.
Now they were lords of the galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. But despite their godlike p...
No single individual, however eccentric or brilliant, could affect the enormous inertia of a society that had remained virtually unchanged for over a billion years.
Myron, like countless NCO’s before him, had discovered the ideal compromise between power and responsibility.