One of the laws of nature, Gordon said, is that half the people have got to be below average. For a Gaussian distribution, yeah, Cooper said. Sad, though.
naturepeople
It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.
resultsscienceworth
Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.
literaturerightssciencewrongs
Religions do not teach doubt.
doubtreligion
Disintegration of structure equals information loss.
information
It was an example of what he thought of as the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.
controversyexampleinformation
If you were damned certain you weren't looking for something, there was a very good chance you wouldn't see it.
chance
The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.
nations
Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.
technology
(Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.
rules
Yes, perhaps that was it. For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable. Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right.
rights
All right, he thought, so the details were not perfect. But maybe, in a sense, that was part of the magic, too.
magicrights
No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.
plans
The peers just fill the air with their speeches. And from what I've seen, vice versa.
vices