The rocket lay on the launching field, blowing out pink clouds of fire and oven heat. The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land…
Come on, Rory! It isn’t rocket science, it’s just quantum physics!
And the truth is, versions of me probably have deserted; however stable my personality, it’s hard to believe that there are no valid quantum permutations entailing such an action. Whatever the physically possible choices are, my alter egos have made – and will continue to make – every single one of them.
It’s an event horizon made up of quantum particles that form a wormhole.
The fourth approved approach for the problem of frontally attacking a guarded wormhole was to shoot the officer who suggested it.
“Have we no commanders competent in this sort of exercise?”
“If you define competence as the ability to defy the laws of physics, then no, my lord. We do not.”
Yuen said, “To us, their structure wouldn’t look like ‘structure’ at all. The simplest unit might involve a group of thousands of atoms – representing a trans-astronomical number – not necessarily even bonded together in any conventional way, but breaking the normal consequences of the laws of physics, obeying a different set of high-level rules which arise from the alternative mathematics.
They knew enough of vector analysis to find their way around unassisted in electrical engineering and electronics; they knew classical geometry and trigonometry well enough for the astrogating of a space ship, and they had had enough of non-Euclidean geometry, tensor calculus, statistical mechanics, and quantum theory to get along with an atomic power plant.
But it had never occurred to them that they had not yet really penetrated the enormous and magnificent field of mathematics.
“XVI plus IXX,” Ganil said impatiently, “what the devil, boy, can’t you add?” The apprentice flushed red. “Isn’t it XXXVI, then, Master Ganil?” he asked feebly. For answer Ganil jammed one of the rods the boy had been machining into its place in the steam engine that was being repaired; it was too long by an inch.
“It’s because my rule of thumb’s so long, sir,” the boy said, displaying his knobby hands. The distance between first and second thumb-joint was in fact unusually long. “So it is,” Ganil said. His dark face darkened. “Very interesting. But it doesn’t matter how long your inch is so long as you use it consistently. And what matters, you blockhead, is that XVI and IXX don’t make XXXVI, never have, never can, never will till the world ends—you incompetent gentile!”
Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.
A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty."
Q. You are sure that your statement represents scientific truth?
A. I am.
Q. On what basis?
A. On the basis of the mathematics of psychohistory.
Q. Can you prove that this mathematics is valid?
A. Only to another mathematician.
“You are a slow learner, Winston."
“How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
"Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
“Why is your number 7/8?”
“All the whole numbers have been retired.”
After an hour, I was so jumpy that it was a miracle I hadn’t blown my foot off. I unloaded the gun, then sat playing Russian roulette with the empty barrel. In spite of everything, I still wasn’t ready to put a bullet in anyone’s brain for the sake of defending the axioms of number theory.
The revolution lasted six minutes and covered one hundred an twelve meters.
“Fantasy. Lunacy.
All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.”
She got up so hastily that she lurched, and grabbed at the chairback to make sure she did not fall. She went down the hall to the bathroom and looked in the big mirror there. Her grey knot was loose and droopy, she hadn’t done it up well before breakfast. She struggled with it a while. It was hard to keep her arms up in the air. Amai, running in to piss, stopped and said, “Let me do it!” and knotted it up tight and neat in no time, with her round, strong, pretty fingers, smiling and silent. Amai was twenty, less than a third of Laia’s age. Her parents had both been members of the Movement, one killed in the insurrection of ’60, the other still recruiting in the South Provinces. Amai had grown up in Odonian Houses, born to the Revolution, a true daughter of anarchy. And so quiet and free and beautiful a child, enough to make you cry when you thought: this is what we worked for, this is what we meant, this is it, here she is, alive, the kindly, lovely future.
Rumored to be a thousand murdered dissidents, they said he was a ghost. A walking dead man. A symbol of rebellion that would never fade as long as the system survived. Anarchy in black.
“Don’t come back till you have him!" the Ticktockman said, very quietly, very sincerely, extremely dangerously.
They used dogs. They used probes. They used cardioplate crossoffs. They used teepers. They used bribery. They used stiktytes. They used intimidation. They used torment. They used torture. They used finks. They used cops. They used search&seizure. They used fallaron. They used betterment incentive. They used fingerprints. They used the Bertillon system. They used cunning. They used guile. They used treachery. They used Raoul Mitgong, but he didn’t help much. They used applied physics. They used techniques of criminology.
I’ll bring you the alien, the creature, the being, right here on your table.