Rudy Rucker Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.

Rudy Rucker
This is just so typical of you, Alwin, to be in love with a giant ass.

Rudy Rucker
I love cosmology: there's something uplifting about viewing the entire universe as a single object with a certain shape. What entity, short of God, could be nobler or worthier of man's attention than the cosmos itself? Forget about interest rates, forget about war and murder, let's talk about space.

Rudy Rucker
The world is colors and motion, feelings and thought... and what does math have to do with it? No 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.

Rudy Rucker
A photon is a wavy yet solid little package that can zip through empty space without the benefit of any invisible jelly vibrating underfoot.

Rudy Rucker
The space of our universe is the hypersurface of a vast expanding hypersphere.

Rudy Rucker
Don't you think women would like a man's head that always listens to them and agrees?

Rudy Rucker
It was funny. I knew I didn't want the bomb to be a success. But yet I'd spent so many years working around physics labs that I couldn't stand not to do it right.

Rudy Rucker
I'm not a brave man. My self-image is of a very small and weak person. In point of fact, I'm almost six feet, and solidly built. But I was a late bloomer. I spent those formative early high-school years as a pudgy little science whimp. I'm still scared of big men with deep voices.

Rudy Rucker
Was I to be Earth's first casualty in the Attack of the Giant Ass From Hilbert Space?

Rudy Rucker
Not only am I scared of big, strong men, I'm scared of mean little women. It's just little skinny men and nice big women that I get along with.

Rudy Rucker
There are many possible realities, infinitely many. Yet most of them are not... alive. Most of them are like books that no one ever actually wrote. A group-mind, like humanity's, lights up one given world. What makes this world different from some ghostly alternative universe is that we actually live here.

Rudy Rucker
I am, as it were, an eye that the cosmos uses to look at itself. The Mind is not mine alone; the Mind is everywhere.

Rudy Rucker
For whatever reason, we find it easier to "read" Hilbert Space patterns in terms of time. Yet the patterns exist outside of time. Thinking timelessly is not some unusual skill; when you remember last night's supper you sense a whole and not a chew-by-chew replay. To know a novel's action is to grasp the four-dimensional spacetime whole described.

Rudy Rucker
I had formed a vague idea that the sex sphere was a hypersphere extending into the fourth dimension. Which meant that if the sphere's giant cunt swallowed me I could end up somewhere very... different

Rudy Rucker
For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon's surface, and that half the people's right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it's interesting again.

Rudy Rucker
At first the tumbling had me totally disoriented. With each degree that I turned, the images around me would deform and change. Three given blobs might split or merge to two or five, while some other shape's angular facets would sprout interlocking crystals. It was a little like trying to make out a human body by watching a Carousel slideshow of three hundred sixty microtomed cross sections.

Rudy Rucker
The matter of color is more confusing. Not every property of a system can be stated as a definite spatio-temporal state of affairs. A system's tendency, for instance, to move from State A to State B, but not from State B to State A... a tendency like this is not any specific event which you can point to in space and time. These nonspecific properties correspond to overall gestalts in the Hilbert Space coloring. Alternating bands of red and green light might, for example, represent a particle which is moving from left to right but which has no specific location. A good mood could be a golden haze not tied to any particular cause.

Rudy Rucker
But after a while, some higher brain-center cut in, and I began being mentally able to fit the wildly changing scenery into a coherent four-dimensional whole. The process was really no more devious than the process by which one integrates the two hundred lines of a TV screen into a single two-dimensional image... which in turn is interpreted as a three-dimensional scene. It's just a matter of processing information. Impossible? I saw.

Rudy Rucker
Women care about specifics, about details. Men care about generalities, about abstract principles.

Rudy Rucker
The study of infinity is much more than a dry academic game. The intellectual pursuit of the absolute infinity is, as Georg Cantor realized, a form of the soul's quest for God. Whether or not the goal is ever reached, an awareness of the process brings enlightenment.

Rudy Rucker
A person's lifeworm is a tangle of atomic worldlines. A braid. The dotty little atoms trace out smooth lines in spacetime: you are the pattern that these lines make up. there is no one single atom that is exclusively yours. I breathe an atom out, you breathe it in. Your garbage helps my tomatoes grow. And so the little spacetime threads weave us all together. The human race is a single vast tapestry, linked by our shared food and air. There are larger links as well: sperm, egg and umblilicus. Each family tree is an organic whole. Your spacetime body tapers back to the threads of mother's egg and father's sperm. And children, if you have them, are forever rooted in your flesh.

Rudy Rucker
The fifties were supposed to be a golden age when the pig had everything his way. That's what TV and the government wants us to believe: there was a time when no one made trouble. What about Kerouac, you assholes? What about Neal?

Rudy Rucker
Sybil had an unreal, larger-than-life feeling... as if she were a person in a book.

Rudy Rucker
My real speciality is the mathematical analysis of Hilbert Space operators. But this was no time to come on like an ivory-tower idealist.

Rudy Rucker
This brought back the sick, ashamed feeling I'd woken up with. I was no better than some geek with a foam-rubber woman's torso like they advertise in Hustler. What a pathetic, twisted version of womanhood: all the "inessential" parts lopped off, nothing left behind but tits and ass and holes. Lifelike washable plastic skin. Greek and French features. But yet, in a way, wasn't the sex sphere always what I'd wanted in a woman? An ugly truth there. "Shut up and spread!" How many times had I told Sybil that, if not in so many words?

Rudy Rucker
What is the shape of space? Is it flat, or is it bent? Is it nicely laid out, or is it warped and shrunken? Is it finite, or is it infinite? Which of the following does space resemble more: (a) a sheet of paper, (b) an endless desert, (c) a soap bubble, (d) a doughnut, (e) an Escher drawing, (f) an ice cream cone, (g) the branches of a tree, or (h) a human body?

Rudy Rucker
At the most elemental level, reality evanesces into something called Schröedinger's Wave Function: a mathematical abstraction which is best represented as a pattern in an infinite-dimensional space, Hilbert Space. Each point of the Hilbert Space represents a possible state of affairs. The wave function for some one physical or mental system takes the form of, let us say, a coloring in of Hilbert Space. The brightly colored parts represent likely states for the system, the dim parts represent less probable states of affairs.

Rudy Rucker