
“Not too much science but too little science is at the root of our troubles.”
"The Kingdom of Man" https://archive.org/details/kingdomofman289cham (1938)
Source: Letters to a Young Scientist (2013), chapter 5, "The Creative Process", page 69.
“Not too much science but too little science is at the root of our troubles.”
"The Kingdom of Man" https://archive.org/details/kingdomofman289cham (1938)
“Science Fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.”
De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: There are books that have devastated continents, destroyed thousands. What war hasn’t been a war of fiction? All the religious wars certainly, or the fiction of communism versus the fiction of capitalism – ideas, fictions, shit that people make. They have made a vast impression on the real world. It is the real world. Are thoughts not real? I believe it was Wittgenstein who said a thought is a real event in space and time. I don’t quite agree about the space and time bit, Ludwig, but certainly a real event. It’s only science that cannot consider thought as a real event, and science is not reality. It’s a map of reality, and not a very good one. It’s good, it’s useful, but it has its limits. We have to realise that the map has its edges. One thing that is past the edge is any personal experience. That is why magic is a broader map to me, it includes science. It’s the kind of map we need if we are to survive psychologically in the age that is to come, whatever that is. We need a bigger map because the old one is based on an old universe where not many of us live anymore. We have to understand what we are dealing with here because it is dangerous. It kills people. Art kills.
The Twilight Zone, "The Fugitive" (1962).
The Twilight Zone
Source: In a letter addressed to George Stokes dated December 20, 1857, as quoted in Fluid Mechanics in the Next Century https://doi.org/10.1115/1.3101925 (1996), by Mohamed Gad-el-Hak and Mihir Sen.
“All good science is art. And all good art is science.”
Daniel Martin (1977)
The Twilight Zone, "The Fugitive" (1962).
The Twilight Zone
Variant: Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable.
Context: It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable.
“Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.”
Science and the Unseen World (1929), VIII, p.83