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Other authors named Arthur:
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Author's popularity: 0
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Popularity: 1
Vote: | Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: (1) It's completely impossible. (2) It's possible, but it's not worth doing. (3) I said it was a good idea all along. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius and we're skeptical. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in her. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God-but to create him. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can't be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along! |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading manuals without the software. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non-existence of Zeus or Thor - but they have few followers now. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. |
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Biography
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Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (born December 16, 1917) is a British author and inventor, probably most famous for his science fiction novel '. For many years he was considered one of the Big Three of science fiction, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.
2001: A Space Odyssey was written concurrently with the by Stanley Kubrick. It was loosely inspired by Clarke's short story "The Sentinel", but it became its own novel while he was collaborating on a screenplay with Kubrick. Kubrick approached Clarke about writing a novel for the express purpose of making "the proverbial good science-fiction movie", and the novel was still being written while the film was being made. This resulted in one of the truly unique collaborations in media history.
Clarke has written numerous other books, including the Rama novels and several sequels to 2001, and many short stories, including The Star, about a Jesuit priest's spiritual dilemma.
There is an asteroid named in his honour, 4923 Clarke, as well as a species of Ceratopsian dinosaur, Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei, discovered in Inverloch, in Australia.
He lives on Sri Lanka, and survived the tsunamis of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, but lost his diving school on Hikkaduwa ((http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=13638567) (http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2004/12/30/latest/20462ArthurC&sec=latest)).
Biography
Clarke was born in Minehead, Somerset, England, and as a boy enjoyed stargazing and enthusiastically read old American science fiction magazines (many of which made their way to England as ballast in ships). After secondary school, he was unable to afford university and consequently acquired a job as an auditor in the pensions section of the Board of Education.
During World War II, he served in the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a radar specialist and was involved in the early warning radar defense system which contributed to the Royal Air Force's success during the Battle of Britain. After the war, he obtained a first class degree in mathematics and physics at King's College, London.
His most important contribution may be the conception that geostationary satellites would be ideal telecommunications relays. He proposed this concept in a paper titled "Extra-Terrestrial Relays - Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?", published in Wireless World in October 1945. The geostationary orbit is now sometimes known as the Clarke orbit in his honour. However, it is not clear that his article was actually the inspiration for modern telecommunications satellites. John R. Pierce, of Bell Labs, arrived at the idea independently in 1954, and he was actually involved in the Echo satellite and Telstar projects. Pierce felt that the idea was "in the air" at the time, so he may have picked it up indirectly from Clarke.
In the early 1940s, while he was in the RAF, Clarke began selling his science fiction stories to magazines. Clarke worked briefly as Assistant Editor of Science Abstracts before devoting himself to writing full-time from 1951. He has been chairman of the British Interplanetary Society and a member of the Underwater Explorers Club.
He has lived in Colombo, Sri Lanka, since 1956, immigrating when it was still called Ceylon. This inspired the locale for his novel, The Fountains of Paradise, in which he describes a space elevator. This, he figures, will ultimately be his legacy, more so than geostationary satellites, once space elevators make space shuttles obsolete.
Early in his career, Clarke had a fascination with the paranormal, and has stated that it was part of the inspiration for his novel Childhood's End. He has also said that he was one of several who were fooled by a Uri Geller demonstration at Birkbeck College. Although he has long since dismissed and distanced himself from most pseudo-science, he still advocates for research into purported instances of telekinesis and other similar phenomena.
Clarke is known to many for his television programmes Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (1981) and Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers (1984).
In 1988 he was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome and has since been confined to a wheel-chair.
His knighthood was first announced in 1998, but then the British tabloid The Sunday Mirror published accusations of paedophilia against him ((http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/52598.stm)). The award was delayed while the allegations were investigated, although by 2000 the BBC reported that he had been cleared ((http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/765385.stm)). Clarke's health did not allow him to travel to London to receive the honour personally from the Queen, so the UK High Commissioner to Sri Lanka awarded him the title of Knight Bachelor at a ceremony in Colombo.
He is currently the Honorary Board Chair of the Institute for Cooperation in Space, founded by Dr. Carol Rosin.
He was the first Chancellor of the International Space University, serving from 1989 to 2004 and Chancellor of Moratuwa University, Sri Lanka, from 1979 to 2002.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Arthur C. Clarke".
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