Gregory Benford: Quotes about science

Gregory Benford is Science fiction author and astrophysicist. Explore interesting quotes on science.
Gregory Benford: 174 quotes0 likes

“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.”

Gregory Benford book Timescape

Afterword (p. 498)
Timescape (1980)

“It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.”

Gregory Benford book Timescape

Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 39 (p. 411)

“I would have to look, try to find a bridge that would make plausible what I knew but could scarcely prove. The standards of science are austere, unforgiving—and who would have it differently? I would have to hedge, to take one step back for each two forward, to compare and suggest and contrast, always sticking close to the data. And despite what I thought I knew now, the data would have to lead, they would have to show the way.”

Gregory Benford

Exposures, p. 244
In Alien Flesh (1986)

“A science fiction writer is—or should be—constrained by what is, or logically might be. That can mean simple fidelity to facts (which, in science, are always more important than theories—though Lord knows the two help shape each other, undermining the convenient, complacent separation of observer and observed). To me it also means heeding the authentic, the actual and concrete. Bad fiction uses the glossy generality; good writing needs the smattering of detail, the unrelenting busy mystery of the real.”

Gregory Benford

Afterword to Exposures, p. 246
In Alien Flesh (1986)

“Science is about continuity of ideas, a web of connections.”

Gregory Benford

“A Scientist’s Notebook: Life on Mars?” in Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1997, p. 119

“Science’s success did not need a God to explain it; the world was enough.”

Gregory Benford

Cosm (1998), Part 6, Chapter 3 (p. 325)

“Puzzled frowns in the audience. Science reporters they might be, but high school chemistry was going a bit too deep for most.”

Gregory Benford book The Sunborn

Part II, Chapter 4, “Disbelief” (p. 104)
The Sunborn (2005)