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Integration Quotes
October 6, 2005
"The question of
all questions for humanity, the problem which lies behind all others
and is more interesting than any of them is that of the determination
of man's place in Nature and his relation to the Cosmos. Whence
our race came, what sorts of limits are set to our power over Nature
and to Nature's power over us, to what goal we are striving, are
the problems which present themselves afresh, with undiminished
interest, to every human being born on earth." - T.H. Huxley,
1863
June 7, 2005
"I know nothing
with any certainty, but the sight of stars makes me dream."
- Vincent van Gogh
April 1, 2005
"We go about our
daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little
thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes
life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would
otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which
we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend. Except
for children (who don't know enough not to ask the important questions),
few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is;
where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here; if time
will one day flow backward and effects precede causes; or whether
there are ultimate limits to what humans can know."--Carl Sagan
From an introduction to "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen
Hawking
March 1, 2005
"A
scientific worldview is by no means a trivial academic matter. Newtonianism
is woven subtly into the fabric of Western civilization. The mechanical
worldview has dominated Western culture for centuries, has been
assimilated so deeply that it is accepted without even noticing
it and without realizing that it is a particular worldview." --
Art Hobson (Physics: Concepts and Connections)
December 12,
2002
"We have inordinate amounts of knowledge, which could considerably
improve our condition, if only it could be made known to people,
integrated, and embodied in our daily practices."
-- A. Montuori (Evolutionary
Competence: Creating the Future, p. 347)
December 12,
2002
"Goethe opposed the use of the microscope, since he believed
that what cannot be seen with the naked eye should not be seen,
and that what is hidden from us is hidden for a purpose. In this,
Goethe was a scandal amoung scientists, whose first, firm, and necessary
principle is that if something can be done, then it should be done."
-- John Bainville, "Beauty, Charm and Strangeness: Science
as Metaphor", Science 281, 1998.
(I read it in "Wonders of Numbers" by Clifford Pickover)
December 12,
2002
"If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that
thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats."
-- Lemony Snicket, "The Wide Window"
(OK, it's a kids book and not about science, but I liked the quote)
October 6, 2002
"Most people are on the world, not in it - having no conscious
sympathy or relationship to anything about them - undiffused, separate,
and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate."
--John Muir
April 7, 2002
"Our beliefs about ourselves in relation to the world around
us are the roots of our values, and our values determine not only
our immediate actions, but also, over the course of time, the form
of our society. Our beliefs are increasingly determined by science.
Hence it is at least conceivable that what science has been telling
us for three hundred years about man and his place in nature could
be playing by now an important role in our lives."
--Henry Stapp ("Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics,"
p. 209)
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March 20, 2002
"If we are to examine how intelligent life may be able to guide
the physical development of the universe for its own purposes, we
cannot altogether avoid considering what the values and purposes
of intelligent life may be. But as soon as we mention the words
value and purpose, we run into one of the most firmly entrenched
taboos of twentieth-century science.... The taboo against mixing
knowledge with values arose during the nineteenth century out of
the great battle between the evolutionary biologists led by Thomas
Huxley and the churchmen led by Bishop Wilberforce. Huxley won the
battle, but a hundred years later Monod and Weinberg were still
fighting Bishop Wilberforce's ghost. Physicists today have no reason
to be afraid of Wilberforce's ghost. If our analysis of the long-range
future leads us to raise questions related to the ultimate meaning
and purpose of life, then let us examine these questions boldly
and without embarassment. If our answers to these questions are
naive and preliminary, so much the better for the continued vitality
of our science."
--Freeman Dyson (Reviews of Modern Physics, vol 51 no 3, July 1979,
p 447)
February 8, 2002
"When the Shawnee chief Tecumseh learned that an expedition
of scientists from Harvard was traveling to Iowa during the summer
of 1806 to observe an eclipse, he was curious. He asked his friend,
Galloway, to explain what a scientist is. Galloway described a scientist
as someone who 'studies the things of earth and heaven...Scientists
watch plants and animals, they watch the stars, they watch clouds
and rain, and the earth...' 'Does not all white men do this?' Tecumseh
asked. 'All Shawnee do this.'"
-- James M. Patchett and Gerould S. Wilhelm, "Designing Sustainable
Systems: Fact or Fancy."
December 4, 2001
"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.
The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to
put together the right information at the right time, think critically
about it, and make important choices wisely."
-- E.O. Wilson, "Consilience," p.269
November 26,
2001
"Every college student should be able to answer the following
question: What is the relation between science and the humanities,
and how is it important for human welfare?"
-- E.O. Wilson, "Consilience,"
p.13
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October 3, 2001
"[We are] made of the same stuff of which events are made....
The mind that is parallel with the laws of Nature will be in the
current of events, and strong with their strength."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson (quoted by Eric Chaisson in "Cosmic Evolution:
The Rise of Complexity in Nature")
July 1, 2001
"Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here
is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep
us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise."
--Lewis Thomas
June 4, 2001
"And Silent Spring will continue to remind us that...change
can be brought about, not through incitement to war or violent revolution,
but rather by altering the direction of our thinking about the world
we live in."
--Paul Brooks, Introduction to Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring
May 31, 2001
"What is science? The word is usually used to mean one of three
things, or a mixture of them. I do not think we need to be precise
- it is not always a good idea to be too precise. Science means,
sometimes, a special method of finding things out. Sometimes it
means the body of knowledge arising from the things found out. It
may also mean the new things you can do when you have found something
out, or the actual doing of new things."
--Richard Feynman (The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen
Scientist, p. 4)
May 23, 2001
"We are composites of many different legacies, put together
from leftovers in an evolutionary process that has been going on
for billions of years. Even the endorphins that made my labor pains
tolerable came from molecules that humans still share with earthworms."
--Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Preface. Mother Nature.
May 16, 2001
One of the deepest puzzles in physics is why the fundamental constants
of nature (e.g. the speed of light, charge of the electron, strength
of gravity, etc.) have the specific values they do. For example,
if you arrange some of these constants so that all the dimensions
(mass, time, and distance) cancel out, you are left with a pure
number which is just slightly over 1/137. Why that number? Why not
exactly 1/137, or some other number? What determines the values
of the constants, and the relationships among them?
-- Adapted from George Johnson ("10 Physics Questions to Ponder
for a Millennium or two." The New York Times on the Web. August
15, 2000
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May 10, 2001
"Many seemingly end-directed processes in inorganic nature
are the simple consequence of natural laws...Processes in living
organisms owe their apparent goal-directedness to the operation
of an inborn genetic or acquired program. "
--Ernst Mays in Scientific American July, 2000. 80.
May 3, 2001
"Nature, like liberty, is but restrained / By the same laws
which first herself ordained."
--Alexander Pope
"An Essay on Criticism." 89-90.
April 26, 2001
"The physics of human consciousness is also the physics of
the quantum vacuum itself, the ground state of all that is."
--Danah Zohar
April 19, 2001
"In schools science is often presented in a dry and uninteresting
manner. Children learn it by rote to pass examinations, and they
don't see its relevance to the world around them."
--Stephen Hawking
April 12, 2001
"Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they
are blind."
--Marston Bates
April 6, 2001
"I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound
by the second law of thermodynamics. The great ideas in science,
like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are
part of our cultural heritage."
--Alan Lightman
March 31, 2001
"Nature has no goal in view, and final causes are only human
imaginings."
--Baruch Spinoza
March 20, 2001
"It is neither possible nor necessary for the general public
to have detailed scientific knowledge across a range of disciplines.
Instead, what is important is scientific awareness - an understanding
of what the scientific enterprise is about, what a scientist means
by the word 'theory,' and what it means to establish a 'scientific
fact.' For instance, many people say 'evolution is just a theory,'
assuming this means its basic principles are still debatable. They
do not realize that gravity is also 'just a theory,' and that, to
a scientist, a theory is an explanation of what has been observed.
--Keith Devlin (American Journal of Physics, July 1998, p. 559)
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March 12, 2001
"Our 'mental models' determine not only how we make sense of
the world, but how we take action."
--Peter Senge
March 8, 2001
"Nature...does not act by means of many things when it can
do so by means of a few."
-- Galileo Galilei
February 13,
2001
Perhaps this relates to our discussion of whether science is an
"unnatural" way of investigating and looking at the world?
"What is needed
here is a transformative process where one can learn to see and
feel the world in a way congruent with what is actually happening.
Such a transformation would enable one to transcend the split modern
condition of experiencing the world one way, while knowing the truth
of the world is otherwise." (So, for example, we know abstractly
that it's the spinning earth that causes sunrise and sunset, yet
we still *experience* a sunset as if the sun were really moving.)
--Brian Swimme, "The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos" p. 24
January 28, 2001
"...experience has shown that our everyday modes of inquiry
are inadequate to reveal the underlying causes of natural phenomena."
--Morris Shamos (The Myth of Scientific Literacy, p. 46)
January 22, 2001
Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.
--Niels Bohr
January 17, 2001
"Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find
it."
--Andre Gide
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January 7, 2001
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity
has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when
he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous
structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend
a little of this mystery every day."
--Albert Einstein
December 21,
2000
"No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now
trying...that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first
object should therefore be, to leave open to him all avenues to
truth."
--Thomas Jefferson
December 8, 2000
"...a healthy consciousness is like a spider's web, and you
are the spider in the centre. The centre of the web is the present
moment. But the *meaning* of your life depends on those fine threads
which stretch away to other times, other places, and the vibrations
that come to you along the web....Normally, your consciousness is
like a very small spider's web; its threads don't stretch very far.
Other times, other places, are not very real to you. You can remember
them, but they aren't realities. And our lives are turbulent, like
living in a strong wind, so the web gets broken pretty frequently.
But sometimes the wind drops, and you manage to create an enormous
web. And suddenly, distant times and distant places become realities,
as real as the present moment, sending their vibrations down into
your mind."
--Colin Wilson (The Philosopher's Stone)
December 4, 2000
"We are called to be the architects of the future, not its
victims."
--Buckminster Fuller
November 25,
2000
"Any serious consideration of a physical theory must take into
account the distinction between the objective reality, which is
independent of any theory, and the physical concepts with which
the theory operates. These concepts are intended to correspond with
the objective reality, and by means of these concepts we picture
this reality to ourselves."
--Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (Physical Review, 47, 777, 1935)
November 12,
2000
"We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible,
because only in that way can we find progress."
--Richard Feynman
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November 6, 2000
"It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out
how nature *is*. Physics concerns what we can *say* about nature."
-- Niels Bohr
October 30, 2000
"It is predictable, and yet very unfortunate, that attempts
by academics of any rank to connect directly with the public that
supports our science will be met with resistance (and, perhaps,
with envy?) by much of the remainder of the academic community.
The origin of the resistance, I think, is the fear that such academic
scientists' view of themselves as awesome, special, and powerful
priests will be compromised if science is conveyed without jargon.
Many academics are, indeed, legends in their own minds."
--Jeffrey Marque (In a letter to the Spring/Summer 2000 issue of
APS Forum on Education)
October 24, 2000
"Humankind is entering an age of synthesis such as occurs only
once in several generations, perhaps only once every few centuries.
The years ahead will surely be exciting, productive, perhaps even
deeply significant, largely because the scenario of cosmic evolution
provides an opportunity to inquire systematically and synergistically
into the nature of our existence - to mount a concerted effort to
create a modern universe history that people of all cultures can
readily understand and adopt. As we begin the new millennium, such
a coherent story of our very being - a powerful and true myth -
can act as an effective intellectual vehicle to invite all citizens
to become participants, not just spectators, in the building of
a whole new legacy."
-- Eric Chaisson, "Cosmic
Evolution: The rise of complexity in nature"
October 15, 2000
From the APS New England Section newsletter, Fall 2000, the editor
(David Markowitz, emeritus professor at U of Connecticut) writes:
"I think of science the way I think of democracy. It is filled
with flaws until you look at any competing system. We are flexible
and tolerant and in the ideal, which we never measure up to, we
are perfectly honest. That's because we go by the evidence as far
as we can gather, analyze and understand it."
(Thanks to Eric for this week's quote)
October 6, 2000
"Through certain vagaries of history, we have managed to conflate
two quite distinct questions: What makes a belief well-founded (or
heuristically fertile)? And what makes a belief scientific? The
first set of questions is philosophically interesting and possibly
even tractable; the second question is both uninteresting and, judging
by its checkered past, intractable. If we would stand up and be
counted on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms like 'pseudo-science'
and 'unscientific' from our vocabulary; they are just hollow phrases
that do emotive work for us."
--L. Laudan ("The demise of the demarcation problem" in
vol.76 of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, edited
by R.S. Cohen and L. Laudan)
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October 1, 2000
In the spirit of the conference, here's one of my favorite quotes.
"The search for meaning is not limited to science: it is constant
and continuous - all of us engage in it during all our waking hours;
the search continues even in our dreams. There are many ways of
finding meaning, and there are no absolute boundaries separating
them. One can find meaning in poetry as well as in science; in the
contemplations of a flower as well as in the grasp of an equation.
We can be filled with wonder as we stand under the majestic dome
of the night sky and see the myriad lights that twinkle and shine
in its seemingly infinite depths. We can also be filled with awe
as we behold the meaning of the formulae that define the propagation
of light in space, the formation of galaxies, the synthesis of chemical
elements, and the relation of energy, mass and velocity in the physical
universe. The mystical perception of oneness and the religious intuition
of a Divine intelligence are as much a construction of meaning as
the postulation of the universal law of gravitation."
--Ervin Laszlo
Submitted by Claudine Kavanagh
August 15, 2000
"Fail to discover, and you are little or nothing in the culture
of science, no matter how much you learn and write about science.
Scholars in the humanities also make discoveries, of course, but
their most original and valuable scholarship is usually the interpretation
and explanation of already existing knowledge. When a scientist
begins to sort out knowledge in order to sift for meaning, and especially
when he carries that knowledge outside the circle of discoverers,
he is classified as a scholar in the humanities. Without scientific
discoveries of his own, he may be a veritable archangel among intellectuals,
his broad wings spread above science, and still not be in the circle.
The true and final test of a scientific career is how well the following
declarative sentence can be completed: "He (or she) discovered
that..." A fundamental distinction thus exists in the natural
sciences between process and product. The difference explains why
so many accomplished scientists are narrow, foolish people, and
why so many wise scholars in the field are considered weak scientists."
- E. O. Wilson (Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, pp 56-7)
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August 7, 2000
"Your book is dictated by the soundest reason. You had better
get out of France as quickly as you can."
--Voltaire, 1758
July 31, 2000
"Do we ask what profit the little bird hopes for in singing?"
--Johannes Kepler
July 5, 2000
"For sanity's sake, societies must now evolve belief systems
to incorporate the scientific dimension. But precious little constructive
help seems to be forthcoming from the scientific community. Galileo
and Darwin agonized about the implications of their conclusions
on their societies' belief systems. Not so many in the scientific
community of today, the most vocal representatives of which appear
to take glee in the intellectual vandalism of scoring easy and unhelpful
points to deny forms of truth other than the scientific, and to
equate religion with the useless and superstitious ornamentation
of life."
--D.A. Rees ("Nature," 20 May 1993, p. 203)
June 25, 2000
"The fundamental contradiction of the scientific age might
be the one between our eager embrace of the technological fruits
of science, and our lazy rejection of the ways of thinking that
made it all possible."
--Art Hobson
June 19, 2000
"We believe that the experimental dialogue is an irreversible
acquisition of human culture. It actually provides a guarantee that
when nature is explored by man it is treated as an independent being.
It forms the basis of the communicable and reproducible nature of
scientific results. However partially nature is allowed to speak,
once it has expressed itself, there is no further dissent: nature
never lies."
--Prigogine and Stengers, "Order Out of Chaos," p. 44
June 12, 2000
"The quantum physicist Richard Feynman once gave a lecture
on color vision in Caltech's Beckman Auditorium. He explained the
molecular events that take place in the human eye and brain to show
us red, yellow, green, violet, indigo, and blue. This chain of reactions
was one of the early discoveries of molecular biology, and it fascinated
Feynman. "Yeah," someone in the audience said, "but
what is really happening in the mind when you see the color red?"
And Feynman replied, "We scientists have a way of dealing with
such problems. We ignore them, temporarily.""
--Jonathan Weiner
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May 28, 2000
"In the last analysis, can a satisfactory description of the
physical world fail to take explicit account of the fact that it
is itself formulated by and for human beings?"
--A.J. Leggett
May 21, 2000
"When Stalking Wolf gave us a test, it was not a test in the
sense that it could be graded. It was a way of knowing what to work
on next. The importance of the test was not the results but what
we did with them."
--Tom Brown, Jr. (in "The Tracker")
May 15, 2000
"Did I win? Is this enough? Even at seventysomething, I feel
as if I've spent my life playing a game in which I am not sure of
the rules or the goal. And I wonder whether I've played well enough
to win."
--George Sheehan
May 8, 2000
"The wonders of nature explain themselves by natural causes."
--Jean Meslier, 1730
April 30, 2000
"To deny time - that is, to reduce it to a mere deployment
of a reversible law - is to abandon the possibility of defining
a conception of nature coherent with the hypothesis that nature
produced living beings, particularly man. It dooms us to choosing
between an antiscientific philosophy and an alienating science."
--Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers
April 24, 2000
Something to ponder in relation to science...
A key to motivation is the belief that there is something fundamentally
worth doing, which is within your power to do.
April 17, 2000
"We study the story (of the history of the universe) primarily
in order to live the story."
--Brian Swimme
April 10, 2000
"Some things I have said of which I am not entirely confident.
But that we should be better and braver and less helpless if we
think we ought to inquire, than we should have been if we had indulged
in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use seeking to
know what we do not know – that is a theme on which I am ready
to fight, in word and in deed, to the utmost of my power."
--Plato
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April 3, 2000
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts."
-- Richard Feynman
Mar 20, 2000
Another controversial statement from Bryan Appleyard ? ....
"Science, quietly and inexplicitly, is talking us into abandoning
ourselves, our true selves."
Mar 14, 2000
What does it mean to teach? It is to create opportunities for students
to make their own discoveries.
-- George Polya
Mar 8, 2000
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does
not go away."
--Philip K. Dick
Mar 3, 2000
I wonder if we think there is any truth in this passage from Bryan
Appleyard ("Understanding the Present"):
"Scientists themselves are of surprisingly little help. They
find it difficult to talk of what they do because they tend to assume
detailed knowledge is required for generalities to be understood.
They find it hard to grasp the concept of the *meaning* of their
work, assuming this to be a debate that takes place at a lower level
than the specialized discussions with their colleagues. When they
do generalize, - or "popularize" as it is usually called
with a noticeable degree of contempt - they tend to reveal a startling
philosophical naivete."
Feb 20, 2000
"(Five) thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor
of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have
passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this
room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than
the present one, an audience of some 5 or 6 score people, if each
person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us
away to the black unknown of the human species, to days without
a document or monument to tell their tale."
-- William James
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Feb 14, 2000
Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a
collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is
a house.
-- Henri Poincare
Feb 6, 2000
"Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their
product is, in the end, impersonal."
--Alan Lightman
Jan 31, 2000
Faith is not trying to believe something regardless of the evidence.
Faith is daring to do something regardless of the consequence.
-- (unknown - from a collection by Derric Johnson)
Jan 24, 2000
"Now individual consciousness, as typified in human beings,
has great advantages and great disadvantages. Individuality means
a narrowing, and narrowness can be useful. It is good for close-up
work. We have invented the magnifying glass and the microscope to
narrow our vision, because narrowness makes for precision. But narrowness
also makes for a failure of purpose, for exhaustion of the will;
for purpose depends upon a broad vision, a clear sight of one's
objective."
-- Colin Wilson
Jan 16, 2000
In the spirit of last week's quotation...
"Furious activity is no substitute for understanding."
--H. Williams
Other quotes
"Nothing is more terrible
than activity without insight."-- Thomas Carlyle
"Although this nihilistic
interpretation of nature is widely accepted in the scientific world,
most nonscientists find it even less attractive philosophically
than the mechanistic view which it replaced. Unable to argue directly
with the scientists, they cannot deny their own intuitive perception
of a creative force pervading all nature. So they have turned their
backs on science, espousing mystical, supernatural, existentialist,
and transcendental ways of interpreting the experience of existence."--
Louise B. Young (in "The Unfinished Universe")
"The most beautiful thing
we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true
art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who
can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good
as dead: his eyes are closed."-- Albert Einstein
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"If we were to go back
in time 100 years and ask a farmer what he'd like if he could have
anything, he'd probably tell us he wanted a horse that was twice
as strong and ate half as many oats. He would not tell us he wanted
a tractor. Technology changes things so fast that many people aren't
sure what the best solutions to their problems might be."-- Philip
J. Quigley
"Michael Chen entered
Yale in 1986 planning to study science...But then, he took astrophysics.
'It scared the hell out of me,' says Mr. Chen."-- Dana Milbank,
Wall Street Journal
"If your experiment needs
statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment."-- Lord
Rutherford
"On the maps provided
by science, we find everything except ourselves."-- Bryan Appleyard
(in Understanding the Present)
"Life cannot wait until
the sciences may have explained the Universe scientifically. We
cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic
of life is its coerciveness: It is always urgent, "here and now"
without any possibility of postponement. Life is fired at us point
blank."-- Oretga y Glasset
"We feel that even when
all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems
of life remain completely untouched."-- Ludwig Wittgenstein
"The importance of a
strong self-image cannot be overestimated, because in human affairs
an idea is a greater moving force than any physical influence...So
the shape of our future will depend to a large extent on our understanding
of our role in the cosmic process."-- Louise B. Young (in The
Unfinished Universe)
"The greatest discovery
of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering
the attitudes of his mind."-- William James
"The worthiest professor
of physics would be one who could show the inadequacy of his text
and diagrams in comparison to nature and the higher demands of the
mind."-- Goethe
"...the attempt to prevent
total disenchantment by means of an essential dualism -- between
mind and matter, understanding and explanation, hermeneutics and
science -- is difficult to maintain intellectually. Whereas all
people live in terms of the conviction that they are more than behaviorism,
sociobiology, and psychobiology allow, and may feel that the totally
disenchanted approach to human beings is inappropriate, it has been
extremely difficult to state these convictions and feelings in an
intellectually defensible way."-- David Ray Griffin (in The Reenchantment
of Science)
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"If this life be not
a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe
by success, it is not better than a game of private theatricals
from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight--as
if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with
all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem."--William
James
"Men and women are not
content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or
to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life. They also
build telescopes and satellites and accelerators, and sit at their
desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they
gather. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very
few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce,
and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."-- Steven Weinberg
"Quantum phenomena challenge
our primitive understanding of reality; they force us to re-examine
what the concept of existence means. These things are important,
because our belief about what is must affect how we see our place
within it, and our belief about what we are. In turn, what we believe
ultimately affects what we actually are and, therefore, how we behave.
Nobody should ignore physics."-- Euan Squires (The Mystery of the
Quanturm World)
"It is not impossible
that our own Model (of reality) will die a violent death, ruthlessly
smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts...But I think it is
more likely to change when, and because, far-reaching changes in
the mental temper of our decendants demand that it should. The new
Model will not be set up without evidence, but the evidence will
turn up when the inner need for it becomes sufficiently great. It
will be true evidence. But nature gives most of her evidence in
answer to the questions we ask her. Here, as in the courts, the
character of the evidence depends on the shape of the examination,
and a good cross-examiner can do wonders."-- C.S. Lewis (The Discarded
Image)
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