QUOTATIONS #1

Horowitz, Arshansky, & Elitzur --: It seems that Einstein's view of the life of an individual was as follows. If the difference between past, present, and the future is an illusion, i.e., the four-dimensional spacetime is a 'block Universe' without motion or change, then each individual is a collection of a myriad of selves, distributed along his history, each occurrence persisting on the world line, experiencing indefinitely the particular event of that moment. Each of these momentary persons, according to our experience, would possess memory of the previous ones, and would therefore believe himself identical with them; yet they would all exist separately, as single pictures in a film. Placing the past, present, and future on the same footing this way, destroys the notion of the unity of the self, rendering it a mere illusion as well.

Albert Einstein --: And now he has preceded me briefly in bidding farewell to this strange world. This signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.

Parmenides --: [Reality] is uncreated and indestructible; for it is complete, immovable, and without end. Nor was it ever, now will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one

Thomas Aquinas --: We may fancy that God knows the flight of time in His eternity, in the way that a person standing on top of the a watchtower embraces in a single glance a whole caravan of passing travelers.

Albert Einstein --: Till now it was believed that time and space existed by themselves, even if there was nothing - no Sun, no Earth, no stars - while now we know that time and space are not the vessel for the Universe, but could not exist at all if there were no contents, namely no Sun, no Earth, no celestial bodies.

Albert Einstein --: A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it.

Carl Sagan --: We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Paul C.W. Davies --: The temptation to believe that the Universe is the product of some sort of design, a manifestation of subtle aesthetic and mathematical judgement, is overwhelming. The belief that there is "something behind it all" is one that I personally share with, I suspect, a majority of physicists.

Richard Feynman --: If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.

Ralph Waldo Emerson --: Knowledge is the antidote to fear.

Albert Einstein --: Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.

New Scientist --: Gott and Li found that a time loop could have existed before the big bang without violating any laws of physics. Space would have been in a loop of time, perpetually recreating itself. If so, the Universe could be viewed as having given birth to itself. Gott says that asking what the first event in the Universe was becomes meaningless. "Every event in the Universe could have an event preceding it," he says.

Aubrey Eben --: Science is not a sacred cow. Science is a horse. Don't worship it. Feed it.

Joseph Conrad --: The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

John Whitfield --: The left hemisphere [of the brain] seems to suppress sensory information that conflicts with its idea of what the world should be like; the right sees the world how it really is.

Ludwig Boltzman --: The most ordinary things are to philosophy a source of insoluble puzzles. With infinite ingenuity it constructs a concept of space or time and then finds it absolutely impossible that there be objects in this space or that processes occur during this time... the source of this kind of logic lies in excessive confidence in the so-called laws of thought.

George Bernard Shaw --: Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

Isaac Asimov --: At two-tenths the speed of light, dust and atoms might not do significant damage even in a voyage of 40 years, but the faster you go, the worse it is--space begins to become abrasive. When you begin to approach the speed of light, hydrogen atoms become cosmic-ray particles, and they will fry the crew. ...So 60,000 kilometers per second may be the practical speed limit for space travel.

Arthur C. Clarke --: The First Clarke Law states, 'If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.'

Henry Ford --: Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.

Albert Einstein --: The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

John Milton --: The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.

Ralph Waldo Emerson --: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Werner von Braun --: Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

Neils Bohr --: No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical.

Marie Curie --: Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

Neil Rieck --: Until we have proof that we're not alone, we should proceed with the assumption that it is the destiny of the biomass of Earth to spread life to the rest of the galaxy with Homo Sapien engineering as an enabler. It is possible that humanity's only purpose in the world is to build and dispatch the monoliths (space craft) which will seed life and intelligence throughout our galaxy. Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey) was way ahead of his time.

Eden Phillpotts --: The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

John Batzel --: Of course the Universe hates you. You're working to reduce chaos by expending a lot of energy to do your job. Thus, you're contributing to the eventual heat death of the universe, and it's just protecting itself from you.

Carl Sagan --: One of the great commandments of science is: 'Mistrust arguments from authority.'

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow --: Thought takes man out of servitude, into freedom.

Abraham Lincoln --: If you understand what you're doing, then you're not learning anything.

John Barrow --: If a `religion´ is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Godel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.

Stephen Wright --: It's a good thing we have gravity, or else when birds died they'd just stay right up there.

Albert Einstein --: The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself amoung profoundly religious men.

Max Planck --: A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Richard Feynman --: I was born not knowing, and have only had a little time to change that here and there.

Thomas Huxley --: I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything.

Hector Berlioz --: Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Henry Austin Dobson --: Time goes, you say? Ah no! Alas, Time stays, we go.

Sir Fred Hoyle --: Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.

Erwin Schrödinger --: Had I known that we were not going to get rid of this damned quantum jumping, I never would have involved myself in this business!

Henri Poincaré --: Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

Peter de Vries --: The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination, but the combination is locked up in the safe.

Steven Weinberg --: 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.

Fred Hoyle --: If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you would have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just about where these levels are actually found to be ... A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

Albert Einstein --: When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity.

Arthur Eddington --: ... if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

Douglas Adams --: Space ... is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

Oscar Wilde --: We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Isaac Asimov --: The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it) but "That's funny..."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe --: Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

Stephen Jay Gould --: I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Bob Monkhouse --: Personally, I don't think there's intelligent life on other planets. Why should other planets be any different from this one?

J.B. S Haldane --: I have the doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose ... I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.

Sir Francis Bacon --: If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Douglas Adams --: There is a theory that states: "If anyone finds out what the universe is for it will disappear and be replaced by something more bazaarly inexplicable." There is another theory that states: "This has already happened...."

Unknown --: The goal of science is to build better mousetraps. The goal of nature is to build better mice.

Bertrand Russell --: Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.

Aristotle --: It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Charles Darwin --: I am not very skeptical... a good deal of skepticism in a scientific man is advisable to avoid much loss of time, but I have met not a few men, who... have often thus been deterred from experiments or observations which would have proven servicable.

Albert Einstein --: The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Vincent van Gogh --: Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

Vincent van Gogh --: Sometimes I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars.

Vincent van Gogh --: There remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.

Steven Weinberg --: The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

Joseph Roux --: Science is for those who learn; poetry for those who know.

Aldous Huxley --: Science has "explained" nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

G. K. Chesterton --: Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

Rémy de Gourmont --: Science is the only truth and it is the great lie. It knows nothing, and people think it knows everything. It is misrepresented. People think that science is electricity, automobilism, and dirigible balloons. It is something very different. It is life devouring itself. It is the sensibility transformed into intelligence. It is the need to know stifling the need to live. It is the genius of knowledge vivisecting the vital genius.

Francis Bacon --: It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives.

Wernher von Braun --: Don't tell me that man doesn't belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go-and he'll do plenty well when he gets there.

Gore Vidal --: It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy's edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create "one world." Instead of one world, we have "star wars," and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet's dead.

Freeman Dyson --: The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.

Oscar Wilde --: Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

Paul Valéry --: Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.

Cyril Connolly --: Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

Henry David Thoreau --: If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness.

Thomas Hardy --: Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws & nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be-& the non-necessity of it.

Amelia Barr --: Whatever the scientists may say, if we take the supernatural out of life, we leave only the unnatural.

Bertrand Russell --: Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?

Jacob Bronowski --: Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.

Jacob Bronowski --: No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.

Talcott Parsons --: Science is intimately integrated with the whole social structure and cultural tradition. They mutually support one other-only in certain types of society can science flourish, and conversely without a continuous and healthy development and application of science such a society cannot function properly.

Primo Levi --: The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.

Wyndham Lewis --: The puritanical potentialities of science have never been forecast. If it evolves a body of organized rites, and is established as a religion, hierarchically organized, things more than anything else will be done in the name of "decency." The coarse fumes of tobacco and liquors, the consequent tainting of the breath and staining of white fingers and teeth, which is so offensive to many women, will be the first things attended to.

Blaise Pascal --: Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.

Aldous Huxley --: We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.

Thornton Leigh Page --: In 1650 Bishop Ussher dated the creation from the genealogy given in the Bible at 4004 B.C.; for a long time (even for some people today) this was accepted as "gospel truth." However, if you accept a miracle such as this, what's wrong with creation 5 minutes ago? It would be scarcely more difficult for the Creator to create all of us sitting here, with our memories of events that never really happened, with our worn shoes that were never really new, with spots of soup that were never really spilled on our ties, and so on. Such a beginning is logically possible, but extremely hard to believe.

Denis Diderot --: Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.

Howard Aiken --: Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are that good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

Stephen Hawking --: My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it as it is and why it exists at all.

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