Gregory Benford Quotes

She felt a tingling, curiously pleasurable: her “curiosity reflex,” she had called it in high school, when she had first glimpsed the serene certainties of physics, starkly contrasting with the world’s raw hubbub.

The problem with the unknown was its lack of road signs.

So he looks like a potential Mr. Right?" "No, just Mr. Right Now.

Teaching was all very fine, but research made the heart sing.

Engineers never liked the unexplained, whereas physicists lived for it.

A particle detector that ran beautifully was either obsolete or hadn’t been designed close enough to the cutting edge of the technology.

He watched her putting away bacon and toast.
“I remember breakfasts like that.”
“First Law of Thermodynamics still applies. If you eat it, and you don’t burn it off, you sit on it.”
“You burn it, looks like. Exercise?
“Worry. Saves time and you don’t have to shower.”

Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.

Hubris. They disliked questions unless there were clear answers. They believed so much in their method that they conjured up certainty out of undeniable risk.

In popularizing a scientific development it was always crucial to sail the narrow strait between the Scylla of professional contempt and the Charybdis of public befuddlement.

This was what never failed to stir her—the unfathomable gulf between today’s thinking and the way the ancients thought. They were truly alien, not merely innocent agrarians with a foolish faith.

Still, Claire hated Charlotte Brontë’s comment that she would have given all her talent to be beautiful. That condemned you always to play somebody else’s game—and, when your looks failed—finally to lose.

She always dressed well, but he recognized the signs of insecurity; certitude was inversely proportional to the amount of makeup.

Just because something’s crazy, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

Maybe is not a theory, you know, it is merely maybe.