The world is colors and motion, feelings and thoughts and what does math have to do with it? Not much, if 'math' means being bored in high school, but in truth mathematics is the one universal science. Mathematics is the study of pure pattern and everything in the cosmos is a kind of pattern.

Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.

But how does it feel to plug into a system that's say, a million times as smart as a person.

One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.

If we suppose that many natural phenomena are in effect computations, the study of computer science can tell us about the kinds of natural phenomena that can occur.

If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!

Intellectually, perspective [drawing] is a breakthrough, because here, for the first time, the physical space we live in is being depicted as ifit were an abstract, mathematical space. A less obvious innovation due to perspective is that here, for the first time, people are actually drawing pictures of infinities.