John Wood Campbell

“ Nature's not nationalistic; she'll answer any properly phrased question asked by any intelligent being anywhere in the universe. The trouble doesn't lie there.
The trouble is pushbutton warfare, and I do not mean the pushbuttons made of plastic and metal by which rockets are launched, or sub-critical masses combined to annihilation. I mean those far more deadly pushbuttons that already exist, all over the world—pushbuttons that have controlled the most deadly of all weapons for many, many years. They're man-made pushbuttons, too—but they're the pushbuttons that set off men's minds. ”

“ It would seem to me, if it were a question of handing this future job over to the Navy or Air Force, the latter would be the most logical choice. The Navy traditionally steers its course on a two-dimensional plane, while the Air Force by its very nature must constantly operate in a three-dimensional plane. Of course, it is not necessary that any future space travel, if any, be assigned to any existing service. It would be more logical and a lot simpler to create a special, independent rocket force. ”

“ We have only a few imported types of pushbuttons and a few made by small-scale local producers turning out an inferior product. The only well-organized pushbutton producers in this country are frittering away their time with such unimportant things as teaching people to laugh en masse. Some, even, are going to the outrageous extreme of teaching people how to disconnect pushbuttons that have been so carefully taught into them. But most of the really effective pushbuttons in the country are imported. Our local producers have the sad habit of going into strictly competitive production ”

“ This is the way those man-made pushbuttons are made. The United States has the world's greatest industrial machine; we mass-produce automobiles for people to ride in, beds to sleep in, even houses to live in, and television sets to enjoy. ”

“ Once, when the winning of wars depended on swordsmen, archers, and cavalry, there were mercenary companies, that sold their training to the highest bidder. Today, more and more, wars are won or lost by science—and a scientific team. ”

“ For engineering purposes, nature obviously had to accept some limitations—but Ol' Momma Nature is fiendishly adept at sidetracking limitations! Now, why couldn't it just happen to be that she had stuck in another entirely different system of communications when she made human brains, to compensate the necessarily few physical line-connectors? ”

“ We have a tremendous lead in production of atomic weapons, and in the technology of machine production.
But our production of mind pushbuttons is a small and feeble, and un-co-ordinated, effort indeed.
The world does not need a defense against atomic bombs. We need a science that will turn off and rip out those pushbuttons. ”

“ Certain men in both the Navy and the Air Force are looking forward, rightly enough, to space travel. These men also seem to take it for granted that their own branch of service, viz. the Navy or the Air Force, will be the one to take over the military duties of patrolling the spaceways, or whatever might be required. ”

“ These carefully taught pushbuttons are the only kind that are really dangerous to Man; the metal and plastic kind aren't any good at all, the great intercontinental bombardment rockets, the subcritical masses of uranium and plutonium are all useless—unless a man who has been carefully taught is there to push them. And the man won't be, unless a whole population has been carefully taught, with plenty of pushbuttons installed in that deadliest of all weapons—the human mind. ”

“ Because there was considerable disagreement as to just which yarn merited first place, the scattering of point-votes made the scores come out high on the first few places, too. And it's well worthy of mention that a short story—"Production Test"—succeeded in making second place despite the fact that experience shows novelettes have a big advantage in the voting. ”

“ A hit of supporting evidence, here, is that most cases of "mysticism" generally originate in the backwoods of this planet. There's something like a psychic accord between man and nature that considerably helps the subject attain mental accord, it seems. ”

“ Immediately, I laid Locke’s article down for an instant and took off on my own speculations as to why we reputedly use only nine-tenths of the brain and why, as he says, the brain is apparently too large for efficiency already. I was considering a normally healthy brain, of course; psychotic brains are no more attractive to me than polio or cancer. ”

“ It seems to me, from the stories I have read recently, that either you or your writers are prejudiced in favor of the Navy. Even the rocket forces of alien peoples many light-years away have signed away their rocket forces to the local navies. ”

“ It is a little-known fact that any gas upon expanding may either heat up or cool down, or even do both in the same operation, depending upon the nature of the gas, the temperature at which the operation started, and the extent of the expansion. Below a certain temperature called the Joule-Thomson inversion temperature—different for each gas: -83° C for hydrogen; much higher for most gases—gases do indeed cool down upon expanding, as you state, but above this temperature, astonishingly enough, they heat up. ”

“ A rocket takes off with an initial horizontal velocity of 500 miles per hour and an initial rate of climb of 1,000 feet per minute. With each 1,000 feet of altitude its velocity increases 10 mph, and each 100 mph faster it goes the rate of climb increases 100 feet per minute. ”

“ The official announcement of the obviously inevitable having been made—some months back now; we are not a news magazine, of course—we are, in reality, operating in the world political situation that was clearly predictable. A divided world with atomic weapons. ”

“ Obviously, we'll have to go a long way farther toward something resembling a good definition of the word "civilization" before: (A) the human race is physically in such good shape that we aren't bothered with such things as colds, rheumatism, fevers, chills, and whatnot, which are distracting ”

“ Your stories seem to be much more logical and scientifically substantiated than the usual run of science fiction, which usual run usually runs into nausea. I am science editor for our local paper here at the University of Texas, have had a more than average amount of training in science and I think I may speak with some authority. ”

“ That suggested something else: anything that far "out of this world" would prove difficult for the brain itself to utilize! The communications received from such a system might conceivably be a tricky code that the brain would have trouble deciphering unless its physical structure was hitting peak efficiency! Good physical health and mental awareness. ”

“ It is even too much worry, as yet, remaining compatible with the little woman so as to raise a fine, strong family of red-blooded young Americans. We'll have to get all these items off our neural patterns before we're mentally healthy enough to tackle ESP and PK code-messages with a vengeance! ”