In effect, therefore, this book is a call for a return to the medieval vision of a rational God who created rational creatures equipped to discover the verities of nature. In other words, to do science.
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At last, the end of materialism escapes the lecture room; it becomes a story about real people in real time in the midst of a civilizational struggle.
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If I could go back in time and rename conservation of information with a single word, I’d go with “offload” (verb form) or “offloading” (noun form).
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As long as the aliens’ technology is advanced beyond humanity’s comprehension, then there’s no real way to pick apart how they turned the gas planet into a star.
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People can be agnostic on many things, such as historical events, like the authenticity of the moon landings, who shot JFK, or even the existence of the external world.
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If the robot figures out that he isn’t returning to Earth with the crew, he might object to the plan and decide to continue the mission himself, just like he’d done with Bowman’s crew.
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When Chandra finds the hidden order, he also finds Floyd’s message, which Bowman had discovered after turning off HAL
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Making a story easy to follow isn’t just a matter of artistic preference; it’s tied to the suspension of disbelief and an audience member’s investment.
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For the fans of 2001, the mystery is the point, and for those more devoted to secular causes, the concept of aliens as divine beings is the point.
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For one thing, I disagree with the philosophy behind it. I don’t think evolution is true, and I certainly don’t think that death is a necessary part of life.
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The movie ends with the baby staring at the earth, leaving the audience to either wonder what’s going on or what’s going to happen next.
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Clarke seems to be going for something more religious: technology gives mankind the means to become God, and our alien overlords will be there to help once mankind is worthy.
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Initially, many scientists felt that non-locality or “action at a distance” was too spooky to be correct. But it is correct.
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Or just an end to conundrums that aren’t really conundrums if that fact is faced. There is a lot we could be doing with the same expenditure of time, energy, and intellectual skill.
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Perhaps more of us should start calling out these assumptions that arise not from observing nature but from the intellectual commitments of those who make them.
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He notes, if our brains evolved merely to help us stay alive, then it’s strange that those same mental states could invent the telescope to explore the cosmos.
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The great Catholic theologian Aquinas noted that “what happens in the working of nature is either always, or mostly, for the better,” which rules out chance.
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The doctrine of most religious traditions that the soul is not destroyed with the body is not presented as a comfort so much as a plain fact, with consequences.
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If we want to play around with infinity concepts, we can have fun. But we can’t use them to decide what might or might not happen in our finite universe.
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Georges Lemaître’s work provided the first interpretation of cosmological redshifts as a natural effect of the universe’s expansion within the framework of general relativity.
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