Hardin, as he sat at the foot of the table, speculated idly as to just what it was that made physical scientists such poor administrators. It might be merely that they were too used to inflexible fact and far too unused to pliable people.
Baley needed a friend and he was in no mood to cavil at the fact that a gear replaced a blood vessel in this particular one.
Ideally, the Jump took zero-time – literally zero – and, if it were carried through with perfect smoothness, there would not, could not be any biological sensation at all. Physicists maintained, however, that perfect smoothness required infinite energy so that there was always an “effective time” that was not quite zero, though it could be made as short as desired. It was that which produced that odd and essentially harmless feeling of inversion.
A mathematician, however, who could back his prophecy with mathematical formulas and terminology, might be understood by no one and yet believed by everyone.
The Dantean conceptions of Inferno were childish and unworthy of the divine imagination: fire and torture. Boredom is much more subtle. The inner torture of a mind unable to escape itself in any way, condemned to fester in its own exuding mental pus for all time, is much more fitting.
Pions are the mediating particles of the strong nuclear interaction. The intensity of the interaction depends on the mass of the pions and that mass can, under certain specialized conditions, be altered. The Lunar physicists have developed an instrument they call the Pionizer, which can be made to do jut such a thing. Once the pion’s mass is decreased, or increased for that matter, it is, effectively, part of another Universe; it becomes a gateway, a crossing point.
We can’t give up just because the Universe does.
He who is needed must learn to endure flattery.
In fact, it was part of the Tyrannian military tradition that a little discomfort on the part of the soldier was good for discipline.
You seek to trap me into an inconsistency. If you were an amoeba who could consider individuality only in connection with single cells and if you were to ask a sperm whale, made up of thirty quadrillion cells, whether it was one or many, how could the sperm whale answer in a way that would be comprehensible to the amoeba?
All they have to do is refuse to believe it means death. The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.
Any decent politician is masochistic enough to dream now and then of going down in flames while the angels sing.
Once it was well known that cigarettes increased the incidence of lung cancer, the obvious remedy was to stop smoking, but the desired remedy was a cigarette that did not encourage cancer. When it became clear that the internal-combustion engine was polluting the atmosphere dangerously, the obvious remedy was to abandon such engines, and the desired remedy was to develop non-polluting engines.
It worked out neatly, yet it had all changed for him, and what was broken could not be made whole again.
There was so much more in the past, so much less in the future, that the mind turned away from the looming shadow ahead to contemplate the safety of what had gone before.
To the philosophical mind, these items might seem scarcely worth any great trouble to acquire. Yet no one, however philosophical, could give up those privileges, once acquired, without a pang. That was the point.
We are gaining the knowledge; science is giving us that. Now we need wisdom as well.
Imagine that. Terrible, terrible, the way we have all bent to the yoke; the affection we have for the harness about us.
And it was the amount of energy a single human could produce that dictated military potential, standard of living, happiness, and all besides.
And as long as it is so believed, Procurator, and as long as we of Earth are treated as pariahs, you are going to find in us the characteristics to which you object.