I ran an experiment and I got a result. That’s more useful to us than fifty years of theorising. - Alastair Reynolds

How did you…pass the time?" Sunday asked. "You couldn't just ching out of it, could you?" "We had a different form of chinging," Eunice said. "An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it 'reading.'

No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.

“Tell me, scientist to scientist, do you honestly think it will work?”
“We won’t know until we try,” Naqi said. Any other answer would have been politically hazardous: too much optimism and the politicians would have started asking just why the expensive project was needed in the first place. Too much pessimism and they would ask exactly the same question.