Isaac Asimov is, in reality, based on something I had invented a few years previously.
The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.
Astronomy, as nothing else can do, teaches men humility.
The exploration of the planets is now closer to us in time than the exploration of Africa by Stanley and Livingstone.
Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it.
Those meaningless and unanswerable questions the minds keep returning to, like a tongue exploring a broken tooth.
Training was one thing, reality another.
When the Sun shrinks to a dull red dwarf, it will not be dying. It will just be starting to live and everything that has gone before will merely be a prelude to its real history.
The only real problem in life is what to do next.
When all else failed, you had to rely on eyeball intrumentation.
Any smoothly functioning technology will have the appearance of magic.
It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible.
Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what’s over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you’d go crazy.
Only small minds are impressed by large numbers.
No one of intelligence resents the inevitable.
Space can be mapped and crossed and occupied without definable limit; but it can never be conquered.
Perhaps no other year before or since 1984 has been awaited with such eager anticipation.
If children have interests then education happens.
We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began.
The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers – and thermonuclear weapons.