"We know that there is an infinite, and we know not its nature. As we know it to be false that numbers are finite, it is therefore true that there is a numerical infinity. But we know not of what kind; it is untrue that it is even, untrue that it is odd; for the addition of a unit does not change its nature; yet it is a number, and every number is odd or even (this certainly holds of every finite number). Thus, we may quite well know that there is a God without knowing what He is." (Blaise Pascal, "Pensées", 1670)
"One microscopic glittering point; then another; and another, and still another; they are scarcely perceptible, yet they are enormous. This light is a focus; this focus, a star; this star, a sun; this sun, a universe; this universe, nothing. Every number is zero in the presence of the infinite." (Victor Hugo,"The Toilers of the Sea", 1874)
"While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what anyone man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician." (Sir Arthur C Doyle, "The Sign of Four", 1890
"The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language." (Anton Chekhov, [letter to A.S. Suvorin] 1892)
"Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There is no final revolution, no final number. The social revolution is only one of an infinite number of numbers; the law of revolution is not a social law, but an immeasurably greater one. It is a cosmic, universal law - like the laws of the conservation of energy and of the dissipation of energy (entropy)." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)
"Except under controlled conditions, or in circumstances where it is possible to ignore individuals and consider only large numbers and the law of averages, any kind of accurate foresight is impossible." (Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop", 1944)
"Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude toward one another, have varied from age to age; but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other." (George Orwell, "1984", 1949)
"There are and have been worlds and cultures without end, each nursing the proud illusion that it is unique in space and time. There have been men without number suffering from the same megalomania; men who imagined themselves unique, irreplaceable, irreproducible. There will be more [...] more plus infinity. (Alfred Bester, "The Demolished Man", 1953)
"And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past - except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe." (Clifford D Simak,"Ring Around the Sun", 1954)
"'If you had high hopes, how would you know how high they were? And did you know that narrow escapes come in all different widths? Would you travel the whole wide world without ever knowing how wide it was? And how could you do anything at long last', he concluded, waving his arms over his head, 'without knowing how long the last was? Why, numbers are the most beautiful and valuable things in the world.'" (Norton Juster, "The Phantom Tollbooth", 1961)
"Words and numbers are of equal value, for, in the cloak of knowledge, one is warp and the other woof. It is no more important to count the sands than it is to name the stars." (Norton Juster, "The Phantom Tollbooth", 1961)
"Why, numbers are the most beautiful and valuable things in the world.’" (Norton Juster, "The Phantom Tollbooth", 1961)
"Science is not a sacred cow - but there are a large number of would-be sacred cowherds busily devoting quantities of time, energy and effort to the task of making it one, so they can be sacred cowherds." (John W. Campbell Jr., "Prologue to Analog", [introduction] 1962)
"Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive." (Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965)
"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there’s the real danger." (Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965)
"A scientist can not be measured quantitatively by the number of degrees or the accumulation of information. A true scientist should have a measure of courage to correct error and seek truth - no matter how painful. The alternative is more painful. To build error upon error is to drift into dogmas, metaphysics, science fiction, and mythology." (Alexander Wilf, "Origin and Destiny of the Moral Species", 1969)
"If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foundations of the world. And they were solid." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia", 1974)
"Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single fact took the scientific world by storm." (Douglas N Adams, "Life, the Universe and Everything", 1982)
"Data in isolation are meaningless, a collection of numbers. Only in context of a theory do they assume significance […]" (George Greenstein, "Frozen Star", 1983)
"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking - there's the real danger." (Frank Herbert, "God Emperor of Dune", 1984)
"Numbers have souls, and you can’t help but get involved with them in a personal way." (Paul Auster, "The Music of Chance", 1990)
"Adam and Eve are like imaginary number, like the square root of minus one… If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it." (Philip Pullman, "The Golden Compass", 1995)
"Most human communities demand anti-survival behavior from large numbers of their members." (Orson Scott Card, "First Meetings in Ender's Universe", 2002)
"To describe how quantum theory shapes time and space, it is helpful to introduce the idea of imaginary time. Imaginary time sounds like something from science fiction, but it is a well-defined mathematical concept: time measured in what are called imaginary numbers. […] Imaginary numbers can then be represented as corresponding to positions on a vertical line: zero is again in the middle, positive imaginary numbers plotted upward, and negative imaginary numbers plotted downward. Thus imaginary numbers can be thought of as a new kind of number at right angles to ordinary real numbers. Because they are a mathematical construct, they don't need a physical realization […]" (Stephen W Hawking, "The Universe in a Nutshell", 2001)
"The more science I studied, the more I saw that physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers. The farther you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, 'Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.'" (Dan Brown, Today Show [interview], 2009)
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