Scientific Speculation Quotes

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore, in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

The 1890s was perhaps the most Gothic decade ever: 'Dracula,' 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' and 'The Time Machine,' not to mention 'Heart of Darkness' and 'The Interpretation of Dreams,' were all written between 1890 and 1899.

Remember in 1973 the same science chatter said that the coming Ice Age is going to occur, we're going to lose millions of people. And the politicians knew how to solve it, they just didn't have the courage to solve it; they were going to put coal dust on the Arctic.

In science fiction a fantastic event or development is considered rationally.

Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: 'There is change. Look, today's fantastic story is tomorrow's fact.

Attempting to define science fiction is an undertaking almost as difficult, though not so popular, as trying to define pornography... In both pornography and SF, the problem lies in knowing exactly where to draw the line.

We all confidently believe that there are at present, and have been from time immemorial, many worlds of life besides our own. . . . [This] may seem wild, and visionary; all I maintain is that it is not unscientific.

Realizing how often ingenious speculation in the complex biological world has led nowhere and how often the real advances in biology as well as in chemistry, physics and astronomy have kept within the bounds of mechanistic interpretation, we geneticists should rejoice, even with our noses on the grindstone (which means both eyes on the objectives), that we have at command an additional means of testing whatever original ideas pop into our heads.

To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational.

His subject is the "Origin of Species," & not the origin of Organization; & it seems a needless mischief to have opened the latter speculation at all.

[T]he one indispensable ingredient of science fiction [is] a belief in a world being changed by man's intellect, a conviction that what was being written could really happen.

The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.

I'm a fan of hard science fiction, which is science fiction that is possible.

But do you really mean, Sir," said Peter, "that there could be other worlds-all over the place, just round the corner-like that?" "Nothing is more probable," said the Profesor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, "I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.

There is no such thing as science fiction, there is only science eventuality.

I love the writing of Walter Tevis and what he views as the possibilities of science rather than science fiction.

Sci-fi is just as much about social science as technology.

I define science fiction as fiction in which things happen that are not possible today - that depend, for instance, on advanced space travel, time travel, the discovery of green monsters on other planets or galaxies, or that contain various technologies we have not yet developed.

The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience. Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation.

Science-fiction ... can be defined as: Imaginative extrapolation of true natural phenomena, existing now, or likely to exist in the future.

A century ago, scientists believed there was only one obvious stomping ground for alien biology in our solar system: Mars. Because it was reminiscent of Earth, Mars was assumed to be chock-a-block with animate beings, and its putative inhabitants got a lot of column inches and screen time.

Science fiction, as I mentioned before, writes about what is neither impossible nor possible; the fact is that, when the question of possibility comes up in science fiction, the author can only reply that nobody knows. We haven't been there yet. We haven't discovered that yet. Science fiction hasn't happened.

It's often better to read first-rate science fiction than second-rate science - it's far more stimulating, and perhaps no more likely to be wrong.

'Interstellar' may never equal the blast of scientific speculation and cinematic revelation that was Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey,' but its un-Earthly vistas are spectral and spectacular.