Gregory Benford Quotes

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Gregory Benford

Profession : Physicist

Birth : January 30, 1941

To deliver vast new resources to humanity, we must pioneer and occupy the moon, Mars, and perhaps even beyond.

Gregory Benford

Our moon was born too small to harbor life. It came from the collision of a Mars-sized world into the primordial Earth. From that colossal crunch spun a disk of rocks that condensed into a satellite.

Gregory Benford

The moon's closeness is a huge advantage: To make it habitable, we would first have to bombard it with water-ice comets, a tricky endeavor best attempted with the many resources waiting on and near Earth.

Gregory Benford

It turns out that if you optimize the performance of a car and of an airplane, they are very far away in terms of mechanical features. So you can make a flying car. But they are not very good planes, and they are not very good cars.

Gregory Benford

A view of nature as dense and nonlinear is at the core of our contemporary science. Process and order emerge subtly.

Gregory Benford

The world is neither running down nor deterministic, and a strict division of order versus chaos is just wrong.

Gregory Benford

In the end, postmodern art is obscene not because it is offensive, but because it is boring.

Gregory Benford

Nostalgia is eternal for Americans. We are often displaced from our origins and carry anxious memories of that lost past. We fear losing our bearings.

Gregory Benford

The thing that most critics miss about Faulkner is that his famous storytelling voice is, in fact, a standard Southern storytelling voice that is typical of the Gulf Coast - Mississippi, Alabama and so on.

Gregory Benford

Aging is mostly the failure to repair.

Gregory Benford

I like audacious ideas.

Gregory Benford

My feeling is that science is virtually an unexplored ground. It's very visible - more so all the time - but there's no fiction that tells us how scientists think, and they really don't think the way that other people do.

Gregory Benford

When Joseph Wambaugh writes about the LAPD, you listen because you know he knows the scene. Lots of people write cop novels, but they don't have that authenticity.

Gregory Benford

It really helps if you know your subject matter immediately. I find that enormously useful because then you can concentrate on all the usual novelistic things - the character, the plot and so forth - and you don't have to spend an enormous amount of time learning another trade, essentially.

Gregory Benford

This was the 1940s; there was no television. It was a different age - it was not swamped by media; it was swamped by reality, and storytelling was a very big art where I came from.

Gregory Benford

Science would lead you to a more interesting life than something else.

Gregory Benford

The people who built the space program - both Soviet and U.S. - were readers of science fiction.

Gregory Benford

The talk shows I've done are all radio for exactly this reason: I don't want to wear a rubber mask.

Gregory Benford

Because I've been a full professor doing research and lecturing at the University of California, I didn't have a lot of time to write, so I have always used my unconscious a great deal to do the really heavy lifting.

Gregory Benford