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A COLLECTION of SCIENCE RELEVANT QUOTATIONS
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
"The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way."
"But who is to guard the guards themselves?"
"You know everybody is ignorant,__ only on different subjects."
"Let no one ignorant of mathematics enter here."
"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't."
A Definition of a Mathematician:
"In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."
"A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read."
"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise."
"A mathematician's ultimate concern is that his or her inventions be logical, not realistic."
"There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science." "Proverbs are short sentences drawn from long experience." "Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters." "Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins.
"All human invented religions are variously enduring proto-sciences devised in flatland ecologies and naive to the resolutions of the telescope and the microscope. The modern scientist shares the appreciation of the cosmic mystery equally with even the fanatically pious;__ the science minded individual only has a language that tries to measure and explain the perceived miracles. It is a language free of pronoun cathectations and abuses. It is a 'non proselytizing language,'__ and a language of universal peace and understanding. The science-minded soul has little concern in 'converting' anyone to the Age of Reason. If or not this requires a day or a millennium is of little concern; the scientist knows the conversion is inevitable. There is therefore no real conflict between religion and science. It is a culturo-linguistic problem only. Anyone can learn to 'speak' the language of science. It is pan-cultural and common to all people."
"If you can tell the difference between good advice and bad advice,... you don't need advice."
"There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes."
"Cosmology is only Meteorology,...taken to extremes."
"I look for what needs to be done,.... After all, that's how the universe designs itself." "Consider how much more you often suffer from your anger and grief, than from those very things for which you are angry and grieved." __ Marcus Aurelius.
"History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon."
"Where facts are few, experts are many."
"Where science speaks of improvement, Christianity speaks of renovation; where science speaks of development, Christianity speaks of sanctification; where science speaks of progress, Christianity speaks of perfection."
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
The best of all governments is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.
"Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want."
"Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own."
"Despair ruins some, presumption many."
"The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously."
"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one."
"There is no place in a fanatic's head where reason can enter."
"Science is nothing but perception."
"We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems."
"We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong."
"It is remarkable that a science which began with the consideration of games of chance should have become the most important object of human knowledge."
"All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws."
"Thinking: The talking of the soul with itself."
"Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something."
"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience."
"Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors."
"Society neither hears nor sees the great changes going on. Either man is obsolete or war is. War is the ultimate tool of politics. Political leaders look out only for their own side. Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers."
"Certainly the nationalism of which hatred and vanity are the governing traits has become in the twentieth century a planetary nuisance."
"We must stop preaching hatred, stop bringing up new generations to preserve and carry out the lethal fantasies of the old generation, stop believing that the gun or the bomb can solve anything, or that a revolution is any use if it closes doors and limits choices instead of opening both as wide as possible."
"A true man hates no one."
In the future, we will have difficulty finding an enemy among our brothers and sisters. The true enemies will still exist and these will be as they have always been,...the pathogenic
invasive and infectious agents (bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites and prions). Other conquerable enemies are the many debilitating inherited genetic syndromes (cerebral palsy, arthritis, diabetes, etc.) and these too we can eliminate from the human family. There will still be the occasional human enemy in the form of the psycho-sociopathic criminal. Some of these individuals will eventually be shown to be more than just products of their maturation and environment and will be shown to have a genetic basis for their pathological problem-causing natures. These problem citizens we can also ultimately cure and prevent or 'save' with knowledge and compassion. Other criminal types will be, for the most part, products of any mal-lingering localized set of environments typified by oppression, poverty and misery that can make a dangerous mind for an otherwise innately healthy body. With every child being conceived in love, wanted and well-nurtured,...these residual types of psycho-sociopaths can also be greatly prevented in society. We can be terror-free without a 'police-state'. The key remains a more equitable distribution of wealth and knowledge and a concerned zero population growth." "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, "Peace cannot be kept by force.
Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.
"Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized."
"The most dangerous moment comes with victory."
"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."
"They seem to be desperate for meaning in their lives." Trilian said.
"We had to know everything__ from how the iron molten lava in the center of the Earth was churning-- to how plate tectonic movements were affecting the wobble of the Earth to how the plasma in the atmosphere delayed the radio signals to and from the Deep Space Network stations,"
"Memory is the Mother of all Wisdom."
"He who can read Sir Charles Lyell's grand work on the principles of geology, which the future historian will recognize as having produced a revolution in natural science, and yet does not admit how vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume."
"Not everything that counts can be counted,
"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."
"The only physico-chemical reality is the electron cloud." "God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."
"Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense." "If you are out to describe the Truth, leave elegance to the tailor."
"The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking." "The advertisement is one of the most interesting and difficult of modern literary forms." "Amusement to an observing mind is study. " "It was through the feeling of wonder (i.e. reverence) "Other people can't make you see with their eyes. At best, they can only encourage you to use your own." "Children generally hate to be idle. All the care then should be, that their busy humor should be constantly employed in something that is of use to them." "The best way to make children good is to make them happy." "Children share with geniuses an open, inquiring, uninhibited quality of mind."
"Where love rules, there is no will to power,
"They have become childish, not child-like." "If one clings to the small child within, one loses the mature adult. If one clings to the mature adult,...one loses the child within."
"Mathematics is a language."
"The thorough sceptic is a dogmatist.
"What Cicero says of war may be applied to disputing,...
"After endless hours of chiseling the words into stone walls, we all agreed...
"Because we can talk about physical reality in terms of some model,__
"The most valuable planetary resource we have is not the air, water and trees;
it is the SCIENTIFIC METHOD itself...only through this are we able to define
a synthesis of all that is physical versus biophysical, essentially ourselves
and the rest of the Cosmos. As with other resources it can be corrupted and
misused or abused."
"The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing"
"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body."
"A multitude of words is no proof of a prudent mind."
"It is my opinion that people should study literature for what it is,...generally little more than a source of other people's ideas, accountings-recollections, histories, reports, facts and data, and also entertainment-talents. Sometimes all of this is, no doubt,... motivational and inspiring, and it can be inspiring enough to make the reader want to pick up the pen and paper and continue the tradition. __ Great or mediocre literature should not be allowed to become a sort of 'Supernatural Amulet' for the masses."
"The Universe is a grand book which cannot be read until one first learns to comprehend the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics."
"It is a shameful thing to be weary of inquiry when what we search for is excellence." "Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk or discourse, but to weigh and consider."
"The only thing worse than 'Blue-collar ignorance' is 'White-collar ignorance.'"
"The future is the most expensive luxury in the world."
"Numbers constitute the only universal language." " Mathematics is not only real, but it is the only reality. That is that entire universe is made of matter, obviously. And matter is made of particles. It's made of electrons and neutrons and protons. So the entire universe is made out of particles. Now what are the particles made out of? They're not made out of anything. The only thing you can say about the reality of an electron is to cite its mathematical properties. So there's a sense in which matter has completely dissolved and what is left is just a mathematical structure." "Algebra is the Metaphysics of Arithmetic." .... X,...the Unknown.
"If Victor's X-Rays Look Clear,...Don't Medicate."
"Memory is the Mother of all Wisdom."
"The very fact that we see a star means that its thermodynamics is like our own."
"Trivia fact:__99.999999999999% of an atom's volume is just empty space! " "It's a problem that physicists have learned to deal with: they've learned to realize that whether they like a theory or they don't like a theory in not the essential question. Rather, it is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with experiment."
"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."
"Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome."
"Evolution usually proceeds by 'speciation'__ the splitting of one lineage from a parental stock___ not by the slow and steady transformation of these large parental stocks. Repeated episodes of speciation produce a bush. Evolutionary 'sequences' are not rungs on a ladder, but our retrospective reconstruction of a circuitous path running like a labyrinth, branch to branch, from the base of the bush to a lineage now surviving at its top."
".....hundreds or thousands of years (a geological microsecond). Major evolutionary change may occur in these small isolated populations. Favorable genetic variation can quickly spread through them." "Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after
"Creation 'scientists' must be aware that the informed workers in literary interpretation and in physical and biological sciences regard their stance as irresponsible, and that in the scholarly world as well as in the schools they are doing irreparable damage to the Christian cause."
"It isn't that they can't see the solution: It's that they can't see the problem."
"Science is an allegory that assert that the relations between the parts of reality are similar to the relations between terms of discourse."
"... Life knows only that it is living."
"For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics."
" Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics."
"It is a law of nature we overlook,... that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect
mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers."
"If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing."
"All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values."
"We are here to make another world."
"There is a penalty for ignorance. We are paying through the nose."
"It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best."
"Any mathematical calculus or theory of electro-magnetism which can nurture an aerospace-technology ("Rocket Science") competent enough to send a space-craft on a more than 320 million mile journey from its launch-site and land within a mere few hundred feet of it's target has generally proven its validity within the contexts of the inventor's-discoverer's (Newton-Leibnitz and Maxwell-Gauss) expertise."
"Mathematics possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty__ a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture."
"...all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation."
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history,__ with the possible exceptions of hand guns and tequila. "I knew a mathematician who said 'I do not know as much as God. But I know as much as God knew at my age.'"
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
"Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics."
"The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers."
"'Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms."
"The workers and professionals of the world will soon be divided into two distinct groups. Those who will control computers and those who will be controlled by computers. It would be best for you to be in the former group."
"Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra. In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra."
"Man is a slow, sloppy and brilliant thinker; the machine is fast, accurate and stupid."
"These particles are called virtual [particles] because, unlike "real" particles, they cannot be observed directly with a particle detector. Their indirect effects can nonetheless be measured, and their existence has been confirmed by a small shift (the "Lamb shift") they produce in the spectrum of light from excited hydrogen atoms"
"My body is of the same substance as that of Heaven and Earth; my nature is of the same organizing principle which controls Heaven and Earth." "There exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for Music."
"Let us confess it, no longer is our world ruled by a balance of power, ...it is shocked into policies by a balance of terror."
"Extended empire, like expanded gold, exchanges solid strength for feeble splendor."
"An Angel is Love,... The Devil is Hate
"Humans are a single problem-solving energy-event species which is able to greatly increase the frequency probability occurrences of certain elemental-atomic and molecular permutations which would most certainly never happen in Nature. This is the essence of the Science of Chemical Engineering and, more recently, Proteonomics. This ability alone is reason enough to consider the dichotomy of 'Man versus Nature' as some how unique and valid in all of Universe. It gives us reason and purpose as agents of entropy and extropy and endows us with remarkable purpose and promise as well as awesome responsibility. It imparts the reality of morality and ethics, beauty and Truth in all our social and economic actions."
"I respect faith but doubt is what gets you an education."
"There would seem to be almost no limit to what people can and will misunderstand when they are not doing their utmost to get at a writer's meaning."
"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."
"As far as the Laws of Mathematics refer to reality,...they are not certain; and as far as they are certain,...they do not refer to reality."
"The best mind-altering drug is truth."
"The aim of education is the wise use of leisure."
"Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition."
"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
"A child miseducated is a child lost."
"Heaven is an American salary, a Chinese cook, an English house and a Japanese wife. Hell is defined as having a Chinese salary, an English cook, a Japanese house and an American wife."
"To make extinct two avian enspeciation phenomena by the parabolic trajectorial deployment of a single small mass geological matrix formulation."
"Is'nt language great! ...There is always a better way to say almost everything."
"When one has something to say, no one seems to listen!"
"There is no better way to learn anything than to write about it!"
"Superstrings are totally lacking in empirical support, yet they offer an elegant theory with great explanatory power. I wish I could be around fifty years from now to know whether superstrings turn out to be a fruitful theory or whether they are just another blind alley in the search for a 'theory of everything.'"
"Chance, too, which seems to rush along with slack reins,
"Each autonomous individual emerges holographically within egoless ontological
"Philosophy is the Science which considers Truth.
"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education."
"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
"Superstition is not, as has been defined, an excess of religious feeling, but a misdirection of it, an exhausting of it on vanities of man's devising."
"Superstition renders a man a fool, and scepticism makes him mad."
"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life." "We cannot drive scientists into our laboratories, but, if we tolerate reckless or unfair attacks, we can certainly drive them out."
"One might as well proclaim that they do not "believe" in the Theory of Electricity as to say they do not believe in the Theory of Evolution. Both are well substantiated by the Scientific Method and intimately connected at the atomic-molecular level of physical universe. (The former is now more well established as a 'field theory' in electromagnetism; and the later is now a sub-discipline of a transhistorical protein molecular dynamics.) And how many of the common citizens even remotely understand electricity? How many can even tell you who Benjamin Franklin or Gregor Mendel were or what they accomplished in the history of Science? This is the real terror we have in the western world today. A Democracy is only as functional as its educated masses."
"It is worse still to be ignorant of your ignorance."
"To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe."
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark;__ the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."
"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.”
"You do ill if you praise,__ but worse if you censure,__ what you do not understand.
"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
"Persecution is not wrong because it is cruel,...but cruel because it is wrong."
"We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on."
There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
"The English laws punish vice;...the Chinese laws do more,...they reward virtue."
"The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."
"A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."
"Happiness is good health and a bad memory."
"Employment is nature's physician, and is essential to human happiness."
"Contradiction in nature is the root of all motion and of all life."
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."
"Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know."
"If we define the spirit (or soul) as the pattern of information of which we are made–our genes, proteins, memories and personalities,___then spirituality is the quest to know the place of our essence within the deep time of evolution and the deep space of the cosmos."
"Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason. He was the last of the
magicians..."
"In uniting the human and cosmic scales of existence, he had reimagined both as stages on which the actors were objects (trees and houses, planets and stars) that interacted through attractions and repulsions. He was already convinced that the objects inhabiting the microworld were atoms, so it remained only to determine what kinds of forces they exerted on each other."
"I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever."
"We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place."
"It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge."
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
"Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them."
"Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without
action."
"Everyone hates extremist,... unless, of course, they happen to be pastry chefs."
"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them."
"All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince."
"Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?"
"No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding."
"How very nice it would be if the missionaries rendered humanitarian service without the ulterior aim of (religious) conversion."
"Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves".
"If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people."
"What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.
"The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun."
"Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking."
It is greater than the stars - that moving procession of human energy; greater than the palpitating earth and the things growing thereon.
"God is a verb, not a noun."
"Nature is an infinite SPHERE whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is no-where."
"Love is metaphysical gravity."
"Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true."
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."
"Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else."
"Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate."
"The future is not what it used to be."
"In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these."
"We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic."
"It may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come when men control the destinies of stars."
"We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet."
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
"No longer can we follow the dream of discovering the unique equations that predict everything we see, and writing them on a single page. Predicting the constants of nature becomes a messy environmental problem. it has the complications of biology."
"We do not have to agree on how the natural world was made to be willing to work together to preserve it."
"It is up to the scientific community to say what is good science,...and it is good religion that needs to put bad religion in its place."
"The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet."
"Doing well is the concern of intelligence."
"Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be."
"It may be socio-economic ENTROPY,...
"To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence."
"The soul of science is found in courageous thought and creative experiment, not in restrictive fear and prohibitions. For science to progress, it must given the opportunity to succeed or fail. ..."
"All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses."
"It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book."
“All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.”
"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. ___
"If we define the spirit (or soul) as the pattern of information of which we are made,__our genes, proteins, memories and personalities,__ then spirituality is the quest to know the place of our essence within the deep time of evolution and the deep space of the cosmos."
"There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics."
" No, this trick won't work... ~LINKS AND INDEX TO ALL ONTO-ESSAYS~ ~An Arts and Architecture Page~. ~The Virtualology Educational Project~ |
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