Speculative Ideas Quotes

Goddard represented a unique combination of visionary dedication and technological brilliance. He studied physics because he needed physics to get to Mars. In reading the notebooks of Robert Goddard, I am struck by how powerful his exploratory and scientific motivations were - and how influental speculative ideas, even erroneous ones, can be on the shaping of the future.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

I'll tell you an explanation that I find commonly overrated and speculative in the extreme: the idea that things that succeed in popular culture do that because they hit the temper of the times.

... people have founded vast schemes upon a very few words.

It's OK to pursue speculative ideas because we don't want to be too cozy and safe and assume that we know everything about life in the universe. However, we have to be rigorous and careful and honest and logical and scientifically meticulous when we speculate.

I love incredibly imaginative, speculative sci-fi.

You can’t be too firm. What the public meetings want is nonsense, not politics: something quite shadowy, speculative, and not practical.

Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment.

I have written occasionally on links between my scientific work and political thinking, but not much, because the links seem to me abstract and speculative.

Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.

(Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.

So I ask that these papers be taken for what they merely are: exercises, trials, tryouts, a means of displaying possibilities, not establishing fact.

Dreams of warp drives and hyperspace are just that - dreams.

I have always loved science fiction. One of my favorite shows is 'Star Trek.' I like the trips, where it drops my mind off, because they give you a premise and all of a sudden, you say, 'Oh!' and I'm fascinated by it.

If there's a story I absolutely cannot tell without faster-than-light travel, then I am quite prepared to accept it - even though I don't personally believe it is possible.

Theories are just fantasies. And they change.

The science fiction world has a lot of people doing seriously imaginative thinking.

The Universe may be stranger than we can imagine, but it's going to have a tough time outdoing Egan.

A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.

We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.

Not only did he teach by accomplishment, but he taught by the inspiration of a marvelous imagination that refused to accept the permanence of what appeared to others to be insuperable difficulties: an imagination of the goals of which, in a number of instances, are still in the realms of speculation.

The greatest sci-fis, in my mind, are two things: They're what-ifs - what if this happened, and you get to see it - but they're also these philosophical cautionary tales. They deal with the underlying themes beneath the what-if.

Science Fiction will never run out of things to wonder about until the human race ceases to use its brain.

My final remark to young women and men going into experimental science is that they should pay little attention to the speculative physics ideas of my generation. After all, if my generation has any really good speculative ideas, we will be carrying these ideas out ourselves.