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and oxygen and then burning it and solving the energy problems of the world and I listened and I said it's impossible it's a perpetual-motion machine, it goes against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and he told me it's not. And I said there is no reason to argue about it. If you will make it work I will cheerfully admit I'm wrong. And to my way of thinking, this is my feeling. Here is a person who I can clearly see is in a sense irrational, or at least he supports something which cannot be supported by rationality. I oppose that with what I consider a rational statement. He denies it, why argue? Since it is irrational, it's not going to work. When it does work, we'll talk about it. In a way, it's a way of retreating from something that is too painful to immerse yourself in fully. I once received a postcard from someone who said what would you do this was after an argument about Velikovsky what would you do if some scientific discovery tomorrow proved that Velikovsky was correct? I replied, saying in that case I would cheerfully accept Velikovskyism and admit I had been wrong. I would also go skating in hell, which by that time will have frozen over. |
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Gunn: You mention in many places that you have a remarkable memory. From one who does not have a very good memory do you have any clues as to how your memory works? Not how you got it, but was it just something that you know how it operates or is it something that is sheer magic and simply comes up with what you want to know? |
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A.: It has to be sheer magic. Talking to somebody about when people realized that sound was a wave phenomenon, I said that I thought it couldn't be before somebody had worked up a system in which they would spread sand over a flat surface, a flat, level surface, and then draw a bow, a fiddle bow along one end of it and set it to vibrating, so that the sand would be thrown off the parts that vibrated and you get interesting little symmetrical patterns and that made it clear, at least as I remember, that sound was a wave phenomenon. Now what bothered me at the time is that I couldn't remember, and invariably I go into a kind of panic when that happens. |
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This is where the battery ran out and the rest is too faint for transcription. But I recall that Asimov went on to say that his memory almost always supplies the information he needs, so that when it doesn't he feels the kind of panic he expressed here. And he mentioned an occasion when he was addressing a group of Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiasts and for a moment couldn't recall a line of one of the lyrics and panicked, and then the line came to him and he went on. He didn't think anyone else noticed, but he thought this is what most people must feel most of the time. |
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