Hypothetical Scenarios Quotes

Eighty percent of my job is to ask the question, 'If this were real, what would it look like?'

I don't engage in hypotheticals.

Historians have to deal with facts and they are committed to the facts. The trouble is that facts are imperfect. The novelist comes up with an imaginary structure. This is not what happened. It is what could have happened. And sometimes this brings more understanding …

We all know the moon isn't made out of green cheese...but if it was made out of barbeque spare ribs would you eat it?

There's no use in asking what if. No one could ever give you the answers. I try, I really do, but it's hard for me to accept this way of thinking. I'm always wondering about the what-ifs, about the road not taken.

It is too easy to say 'what if' and paint a picture of a perfect world.

Never answer a hypothetical question. It gets you beyond where you want to be.

The protocols of science fiction and the protocols of science are not separate-they'r e woven together.

What science fiction does is take what might be possible someday and examine what might happen if it were - the drawbacks and the positive things.

Toad, with no one to check his statements or to criticize in an unfriendly spirit, rather let himself go. Indeed, much that he related belonged more properly to the category of what-might-have-happened-had-I-only-thought-of-it-in-time-instead-of-ten-minutes-afterwards. Those are always the best and raciest adventures; and why should they not be truly ours, as much as the somewhat inadequate things that really come off?

Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

I think the really cool and compelling thing about math and physics is that it opens up entry to all these hypotheticals - or at least, it gives you the language to talk about them. But at the same time, if a scenario is completely disconnected from reality, it's not all that interesting.

Creativity requires novelty. Imagination is all about counterfactuals and untested possibilities that don't yet exist.

Bill Gates'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.

Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.

No more fiction, for now we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first.

In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities.

Though he’d never know for sure what had happened to them, his mind was super talented at imagining the absolute worst.

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

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

In inventing a model we may assume what we wish, but should avoid impossibilities.

To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe.

So I ask that these papers be taken for what they merely are: exercises, trials, tryouts, a means of displaying possibilities, not establishing fact.

I mean, obviously when you've a lot of time on your hands, you get together and you're always always debating that team vs. that team, that player vs. that player, all these hypothetical matchups.