In Fact, All Of Us Have A

We Physicists Don't Like To Admit It, But Some Of Us Are Closet Science Fiction Fans. We Hate To Admit It Because It Sounds Undignified. But When We Were Children, That's When We Got Interested In Science, For A Lot Of Us.

Scientists Who Have Dedicated Their Lives To Building Machines That Think, Feel That It's Only A Matter Of Time Before Some Form Of Consciousness Is Captured In The Laboratory.

What Differentiates Human From Lower-animal Consciousness Is Time. You Can't Explain The Concept Of "tomorrow" To Your Dog. Our Consciousness Is Dominated By Time - We're Constantly Running Simulations Of The Future. Our Brain Is A Prediction Machine. The Hallmark Of Intelligence, Indeed Of Genius, Is The Number And Complexity Of The Feedback Loops We Use In Predicting The Future.

A Hundred Years Ago, Auguste Compte, ... A Great Philosopher, Said That Humans Will Never Be Able To Visit The Stars, That We Will Never Know What Stars Are Made Out Of, That That's The One Thing That Science Will Never Ever Understand, Because They're So Far Away. And Then, Just A Few Years Later, Scientists Took Starlight, Ran It Through A Prism, Looked At The Rainbow Coming From The Starlight, And Said: "hydrogen!" Just A Few Years After This Very Rational, Very Reasonable, Very Scientific Prediction Was Made, That We'll Never Know What Stars Are Made Of.

[t]he Yeoman's Work In Any Science, And Especially Physics, Is Done By The Experimentalist, Who Must Keep The Theoreticians Honest.