I first got up the nerve to introduce myself to Arthur C. Clarke because he was talking to Milt Rothman. I looked across the room at a Nebula banquet, and realized that the guy who had convinced me faster than light travel is inevitable was standing next to the guy who had convinced me faster than light travel is impossible.

As my wife discovered many years ago, people tend to be surprised when they discover science fiction writers are skeptics. They seem to find it odd that we do not automatically believe that Earth is being visited by super-intelligent aliens and that graduates of Duke University can foretell the future. There are many reasons why SF types are less gullible than the public thinks, but one of them is the fact that our genre has provided a home for writers such as Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, and Milt Rothman.

You may continue to write stories about FTL after you read Milt’s discussion of the topic in his book A Physicist’s Guide to Skepticism. You may even continue to believe that there may be some little loophole hidden in the laws of nature. But you will also know that there are very good reasons why you shouldn’t take the idea too seriously.

Milt is one of the founding members of science fiction fandom—one of the people who got it all going over sixty years ago. His literary accomplishments include science fiction stories, articles in Scientific American, and books on science such as the Physicist’s Guide and The Laws of Physics (which, according to rumor, he wrote because one famous editor didn’t seem to understand them).

He was, for a number of years, a member of the hardy band of physicists and engineers who struggle to make fusion power a reality—or prove once and for all that it will remain forever out of reach. Through all the years he has been associated with science fiction, he has been a persistent counterbalance to the loonier tendencies that sometimes infect our field. When some illustrious editor or writer has gone off the deep end, Milt has been one of the people who spoke up for scientific rigor, careful examination of the evidence, and the other rational values we all tend to forget from time to time.

In print and in person, Milt has influenced many of the writers who gave the science fiction genre its basic character. And we are all the better for it.

Milt and I live only about eight blocks from each other. So naturally, like all sensible modern people, we communicate by e-mail. Recently I got a message from him that raised my self-esteem at least fifty percent. We had both gone to the Academy of Music to hear James Levine conduct Mahler’s Third Symphony and Milt had discovered he had never heard that particular bit of sonic poetry. I, on the other hand, had been hearing Mahler’s Third for at least the second time.

I’ve been reviewing classical music for a Philadelphia weekly for eight years now. I’ve written over 200 review columns. I go to three to five concerts a week in the season. Many people think I’m kidding when I tell them I’m impersonating a music critic. Milt is the kind of person I’m thinking of when I say that.

He plays the piano and the organ at a semi-professional level. He adds CD’s to his collection the way dictators’ wives add shoes to their closets. He takes it for granted that cultivated, music-loving urbanites will have heard all the famous soloists who have lived since the piano was invented.

When Milt tells me he "went to heaven" when he heard Mahler’s Third, I assume he’s telling me something that is almost factually true—and I know, beyond any doubt, that he probably got a few rows closer than I did.

I also know what he means when he tells me a certain piece of Baroque music is "trivial". I still go on tapping my foot to the Baroque piece. But I know he’s hearing music in a way I never will. I’m basically a reader who likes music. Milt is part of the great tradition of physicists who can comprehend the world created by music in the same they can comprehend the world created by their equations.

Then there’s Milt the Phellow Philadelphian. I could tell you about his wife Miriam, who is a person of great interest in her own right.

I could tell you about the neat pad—a former carriage house—that he and Miriam inhabit in one of the classier streets in our center city residential neighborhood. And the way they put a circular office for Milt in the garage. And the parties they hold. I could mention the time Milt explained sine waves to me on a Horn and Hardart napkin, forty years ago, in the fabled days when Peggy Rae Pavlat was a captivating girl-child and I was one of the callower members of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. I could try to describe the quick explanation of certain aspects of quantum mechanics that he bestowed on me while we were standing in front of the new-releases rack at our local video store a few months ago.