Timothy Ferris

TIMOTHY FERRIS

Date of Birth: August 29, 1944
Birthplace: Miami, FL
Current Residence: San Francisco
Education: B.A., Northwestern University, 1966, and subsequent graduate study, 1966-67.
Profession: Reporter whose notable assignments included covering the Republican and Democratic national conventions in 1972, and the Viking landing on Mars in 1976; Worked for Rolling Stone, 1971-80; Professor of Journalism at University of California at Berkeley.

A lot of what I do consists of pointing out that there is more to the world than this world, and more to this world than we know. This idea got hold of me years ago, and never let go. It is my author.
-Timothy Ferris, Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Vol. 30

And science is what we as human beings do best, at the end of the second millenium. Science is our equivalent of painting in Michaelangelo's day, of music in the time of Bach, of seafaring in the age of Prince Henry the Navigator. The Hubble Telescope is not just the most complex and expensive unmanned space probe ever launched; it is also a work of art. Like the battered Voyager spacecraft flung out among the stars, the Viking landers sitting sandblasted on the ruddy dunes of Mars, and the paltry, heeled-over flags and scattered laser reflectors left on the moon by the Apollo explorers, it says more about us, and better, than we can know.
-Timothy Ferris, "The Space Telescope, A Sign of Intelligent Life," The New York Times Book Review

But his point is not merely to entertain us. It is also to illustrate that the progess of science is very far from a highly theoretical history of abstract thought. He means to show us too that scientists are artists—obsessed, intuitive, eccentric, driven, inspired and filled with longing to complete not only their pictures of the universe but also themselves.
-Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times