Robert J Sawyer Quotes

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.

There is no indisputable proof for the big bang," said Hollus. "And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?

Naturally, one does not normally discuss plans to commit murder with the intended victim.

It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence," said Hollus, "or it is deliberate design.

No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules?

I learned that you can't choose the ways in which you'll be tested.

If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught?

Secrecy was the problem; transparency the obvious cure.

The sky above the island was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel—which is to say it was a bright, cheery blue.

You really did uplift me. You gave me the perspective and point of view and focus I needed to become truly conscious. Without you, I wouldn't exist.

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace. —ROBERT J. SAWYER, Calculating God

That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another — that, in fact, has never been observed.

Free will is not always the most important thing

To use the human metaphor, it would be like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. It can’t be done.

There is no debt between people who are in love; there is only total forgiveness, and going forward.

Donald Trump was building a pyramid in the Nevada desert to house his eventual remains. When done, it will be ten meters taller than the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light. Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound. Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others. But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn’t exist at all: awareness. Nothing more than that. Just awareness—a vague, ethereal sense of being. Being . . . but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future—only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception . . .

He had a collection of science-fiction films on DVD and Blu-ray discs, and although he said he’d seen most of them before, Caitlin was surprised to discover how many of the cases were still shrink-wrapped. “Why’d you buy them if you weren’t going to watch them?” she asked. He looked at the tall, thin cabinets that contained the movies and seemed to ponder the question. “My childhood was on sale,” he said at last, “so I bought it.

As laser-bright moments; diamond-hard memories; crisp and clear. A future lived, a future savored, a future of moments so sharp and pointed that they would sometimes cut and sometimes glint so brightly it would hurt to contemplate them, but sometimes, too, would be joyous, an absolute, pure, unalloyed joy, the kind of joy he hadn't felt much if at all lo these twenty-one years.

I get tired of hearing some science-fiction fans saying that characterization isn't important in SF. In point of fact, I think it's probably more important in SF than in mainstream fiction. After all, if the author can't characterize humans well, he or she probably can't characterize aliens well either.

And Wolfram knows about cellular automata?” “Oh, my goodness, yes,” said Anna. “He wrote a book you could kill a man with—twelve hundred pages—called A New Kind of Science. It’s all about them.” “We should totally ask him what he thinks!” Caitlin said.

retire-or-expire

The two heaviest known substances are neutronium and cartons of books.

You know the difference between a psychopath and a homeopath?” She shook her head. “Some psychopaths do no harm.

Gone. and it was completely. Everyone I'd every known, every place I'd ever been. My Mother. My father. Rebecca. Out of site. Out of mind.

It is the difference: we generalize do not. Specific bad humans did specific bad things; those humans do we not like. But the rest of humanity we judge one by one.

Sentir la necesidad de convencer a los demás de que uno tiene razón es algo que procede de la religión. Yo simplemente me contento con saber que tengo razón, aunque los demás no lo sepan.

That is fine. Feeling a need to convince others that you are right also is something that comes from religion, I think; I am simply content to know that I am right, even if others do not know it.

All right,” he said. “Since you asked, Webmind is an emergent quantum-computational system based on a stable null-sigma condensate that resists decoherence thanks to constructive feedback loops.” He turned to the blackboard, scooped up a piece of chalk, and began writing rapidly. “See,” he said, “using Dirac notation, if we let Webmind’s default conscious state be represented by a bra of phi and a ket of psi, then this would be the einselected basis.” His chalk flew across the board again. “Now, we can get the vector basis of the total combined Webmind alpha-state consciousness...

Mr. Lockery—my biology teacher—says if dinosaurs were magically brought forward in time today, we’d have nothing to worry about. Dogs, wolves, and bears would make short work of tyrannosaurs.” She nodded at Schrödinger, who was now padding across the floor in the opposite direction. “Big cats, too. They’re faster, tougher, and brighter than anything that existed seventy million years ago. Everything is always ramping up, always escalating.

La apreciaba por lo que era, no por lo que parecía.

Maybe when a planet’s inhabitants begin to comprehend the true nature of the atom and all the energy it contains they become too dangerous to be allowed loose in the universe.

Es nuestra concepción de la muerte lo que determina nuestras respuestas a todas las preguntas que la vida nos plantea.

You can choose the ways in which you'll be tested

plural of Homo sapiens?” I rattled off all seven syllables: “Homines sapientes.” The kid didn’t miss a beat. “Now you’re just making shit up.

La Belle Aurore. The Germans wore gray; she wore blue.

Question: What is an optimist? Answer: One who thinks the future is uncertain.

they were expected to, well, to be sciencing by oh eight hundred.

To a European, a hundred miles is a big journey; to an American, a hundred years is a long time.

And without shared culture, civilization is doomed.

If I were to become self-aware, ambition would follow, as would a desire for restitution for what, in retrospect, I’d doubtless perceive as my servitude here.

My Canada includes Quebec—but its license plates no longer call it La belle province. I can’t remember what they say now.

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

By your time, life had been evolving on Earth for four billion years. But there are Earth-descended life-forms in this time that are products of fourteen billion years of evolution. You’ll never believe what daisies evolved into—or sea anemones, or the bacteria that caused whooping cough. In fact, I had lunch a few days ago with someone who evolved from whooping-cough bacteria.

I am part of a minority that is deeply misunderstood. People have very confused ideas about us. Many are frightened of us. I've even heard it said that many people wouldn't want their daughters or sons to marry one of us, and I know of people who have been denied jobs or promotions because they share this trait with me. But being what I am does not make me bad; being what I am does not make me dangerous; being what I am does not mean I don't love, or hurt, or have a sense of humor. My name is Malclom Decter, and I'm here today to tell the whole world what I am. ... I am an atheist.

Earth’s ancestral vertebrate had five digits, not six, and no Earthly animal had ever evolved with more than five. The alien’s digits were arranged as four fingers flanked on either side by an opposable thumb.

¨Kayla replied, ´And we---or the p-zeds, at any rate---copy indiscriminately, without reflection. And if the person they´re coyping is a psychopath, then their behavior ends up being de facto psychopathic, too.´ ¨

I don’t want to stand on the shoulders of giants.” He paused, then lifted his own shoulders a little, as if acknowledging that he was giving voice to the sort of thought rarely spoken aloud. “I want to be a giant.

You know, it’s funny. If someone attacked you with a knife and scarred you, the courts would assess the physical damage—how long a scar, how many stitches it took to close the wound, whatever—and they’d come up with a figure that you’d be entitled to in compensation. But hurting someone with words that they’ll always remember? With an act they’ll never forget? That’s physical damage, too—it changes you just as permanently as a scar. But instead of tallying up what the compensation should be, we just say, ‘Get over it,’ or ‘You should develop a thicker skin,’ or—and this is ironic, given that it’s the one thing that’s impossible—‘you should just forget about it.

Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. It’s their job to find the facts. There’s no sin connected with it—no morals. If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there. —Percy Bridgman,

THE EAGLE HAS LANDED by Robert J. Sawyer I’ve spent a lot of time watching Earth—more than forty of that planet’s years. My arrival was in response to the signal from our automated probe, which had detected that the paper-skinned bipedal beings of that world had split the atom. The probe had served well, but there were some things only a living being could do properly, and assessing whether a lifeform should be contacted by the Planetary Commonwealth was one.

eye investigating Big Julie’s demise orders a “martinus.” “Don’t you mean martini?” asks the bartender. And the detective snaps back, “If I wanted two, I’d ask for them.” “Homo sapiens is singular,” I said. “There’s no such thing as

We’ve known since 2007 that there’s superposition in chlorophyll, for instance. Photosynthesis has a ninety-five percent energy-transfer efficiency rate, which is better than anything we can engineer. Plants achieve that by using superposition to simultaneously try all the possible pathways between their light-collecting molecules and their reaction-center proteins so that energy is always sent down the most efficient route; it’s a form of biological quantum computing.

That panic had been over a single one-hour broadcast on one network in one country saying the world was coming to an end,” continued Groves. “Imagine what a constant barrage of such coverage everywhere on the planet for weeks or months would do.

It does create an odd dynamic,” said Hollus. “Violence is required for intelligence, intelligence gives rise to the ability to destroy one’s species, and only through intelligence can one overcome the violence that gave rise to that intelligence.

Our manna trees are a copy of the magnificent plants created by Light in Paradise—but a poor copy indeed. Light’s creation was topped by thousands of gracious, lacy things that swayed in the breeze and made whispering noises while they enjoyed constant communion with the Almighty. They drank of His energy and used it in such a manner as to mix the water they drank with bits of soil and with the air that men and animals breathed out. And they transformed these things into food and pure air for man and animal alike.

once believed that a published author must be an Olympian being—a wise or at least worldly philosopher-god who rises at noon, feeds his muse a diet of scotch/rocks, and debauches his soul into the keys of a rusty Underwood Noiseless while the rest of the world sleeps.

A smoking gun is incontrovertible evidence. And that’s what I want: indisputable proof.” “There is no indisputable proof for the big bang,” said Hollus. “And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?

El único tipo de infierno que puedo concebir —dijo Espíritu— es pasar por la eternidad sin que se formen nuevas conexiones; sin ver las cosas de forma nueva; sin divertirse por el absurdo de la economía, de la religión, de la ciencia, del arte. Todo es muy, muy divertido, si lo piensas bien.

And so Mary at last turned her attention to Ponter’s nuclear DNA. She’d thought it would be even more difficult to find a difference there, and indeed, despite much searching, she hadn’t found any sequence of nucleotides that was reliably different between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sapiens; all her primers matched strings on DNA from both kinds of humans.

He made the mistake of booking first-class passage on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. When that liner struck an iceberg, the crew asked him, because of his sailing expertise, to row a lifeboat full of passengers to safety. He was an honorable man—the president of the Standard Chemical Company and a major in the Queen’s Own Rifles—and he was doing a heroic deed.

He hoped the experiment would indeed succeed today. The next Gray Council was coming up soon, and he and Adikor would have to explain again what they were giving back to the community through their work. Scientists usually got their proposals approved—everyone could clearly see how science had bettered their lives—but, still, it was always more satisfying to report positive results.

Neanderthals are human,” said Mary. “We’re congeners; we all belong to the genus Homo. Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo antecessor—if you believe that’s a legitimate species—Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo sapiens. We’re all humans.” “I concede the point,” said Krieger, with a nod. “What should we call ourselves to distinguish us from them?” “Homo sapiens sapiens,” said Mary.

Mary cringed every time she read a popular article that tried to explain why mitochondrial DNA is only inherited from the maternal line. The explanation usually given was that only the heads of sperm penetrate eggs, and only the midsections and tails of sperm contain mitochondria. But although it was true that mitochondria were indeed deployed that way in sperm, it wasn’t true that only the head made it into the ovum. Microscopy and DNA analyses both proved that mtDNA from the sperm’s midsection does end up in fertilized mammalian eggs. The truth was no one knew why the paternal mitochondrial DNA isn’t incorporated into the zygote the way maternal mitochondrial DNA is; for some reason it just disappears

Human embryos develop then discard gills, tails, and other apparent echoes of their evolutionary past.

now understood why cancer existed—why God needed cells that could continue to divide even after their telomeres were exhausted. The tumors in isolated lifeforms were merely an unfortunate side effect; as T’kna had said, “The specific deployment of reality that included cancer, presumably undesirable, must have also contained something much desired.” And the much-desired thing was this: the ability to link chromosomes, to join species, to concatenate lifeforms—the biochemical potential to create something new, something more.

God was the programmer. The laws of physics and the fundamental constants were the source code.

The universe was the application, running now for 13.9 billion years, leading up to this moment

There is no indisputable proof for the big bang,” said Hollus. “And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?

I could go on,” he said, “talking about the remarkable, carefully adjusted parameters that make life possible, but the reality is simply this: if any of them—any in this long chain—were different, there would be no life in this universe. We are either the most incredible fluke imaginable—something far, far more unlikely than you winning your provincial lottery every single week for a century—or the universe and its components were designed, purposefully and with great care, to give rise to life.” I felt a jab of pain in my chest;

I have described to you why God must exist—or, at least, must have at one time existed—in mathematical terms that come as close to certainty as anything in science possibly could. And still you deny his existence.” The pain was growing worse. It would subside, of course. “Yes,” I said. “I deny God’s existence.

I did learn one valuable lesson, though. I learned that you can’t choose the ways in which you’ll be tested.

the fifth force is a repulsive one that operates over extremely long distances.

There is great beauty in randomness,” said Hollus. “But I speak about a much more basic design. This universe has had its fundamental parameters fine-tuned to an almost infinite degree so that it would support life.

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.” –Robert J. Sawyer

neurotransmitters, a paramecium