“Tell me, scientist to scientist, do you honestly think it will work?”

“We won’t know until we try,” Naqi said. Any other answer would have been politically hazardous: too much optimism and the politicians would have started asking just why the expensive project was needed in the first place. Too much pessimism and they would ask exactly the same question.

Turquoise Days, Chapter 2 (pp. 240-241)
Short fiction, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days (2003)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Tell me, scientist to scientist, do you honestly think it will work?" by Alastair Reynolds?
Alastair Reynolds photo
Alastair Reynolds 198
British novelist and astronomer 1966

Related quotes

Alastair Reynolds photo
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan photo
Edward O. Wilson photo

“The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

Source: Letters to a Young Scientist (2013), chapter 5, "The Creative Process", page 74.

Jim Al-Khalili photo

“All scientists must communicate their work, for what is the point of learning new things about how the world works if you don't tell anyone about them?”

Jim Al-Khalili (1962) British theoretical physicist, author and broadcaster

We can't hide in our labs and leave the talking to Dawkins http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/25/comment-science-secularism-society-dawkins, The Guardian, Tuesday 25 November 2008.

Barbara Kingsolver photo
James P. Hogan photo
Ben Stein photo

“When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers, talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

Ben Stein interviewed by Paul Crouch Jr. on Trinity Broadcasting Network, First To Know with Paul Crouch Jr., April 21, 2008, 21 April 2008, 2011-12-19 http://www.tbn.org/video_portal/?which=bts,

James E. Lovelock photo
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan photo
Linus Pauling photo

“I think I think harder, think more than other people do, than other scientists.”

Linus Pauling (1901–1994) American scientist

Interview at Big Sur, California http://web.archive.org/web/20101212203431/http://achievement.org/autodoc/page/pau0int-3 (11 November 1990).
1990s
Context: I've been asked from time to time, "How does it happen that you have made so many discoveries? Are you smarter than other scientists?" And my answer has been that I am sure that I am not smarter than other scientists. I don't have any precise evaluation of my IQ, but to the extent that psychologists have said that my IQ is about 160, I recognize that there are one hundred thousand or more people in the United States that have IQs higher than that. So I have said that I think I think harder, think more than other people do, than other scientists. That is, for years, almost all of my thinking was about science and scientific problems that I was interested in.

Related topics