QUOTATIONS #2

Steven Crane --: A man said to the Universe, "Sir, I exist!".
"However," replied the Universe, "The fact has not aroused in me a sense of obligation".

Joseph Campbell --: The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them.

Katha Pollitt --: As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Time, in no other Western country is the teaching of Evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout the world, one way or another, most Christian denominations have managed to reconcile belief in God with belief in the mechanisms of natural selection. A French or German or Scandinavian politician who called for students to entertain as a reasonable deduction from existing evidence the proposition that Earth is at most 10,000 years old would be bundled off to a mental hospital.

Arthur Koestler --: The Revolutionary's Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age.... All utopias are fed from the source of mythology; the social engineers' blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text.

Carl Sagan --: We wish to find the truth, no matter where it lies. But to find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact.

Louis de Broglie --: In space-time everything which for each of us constitutes the past, present, and the future is given in block...Each observer , as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them.

John Wheeler --: In a self-reference cosmology, past, present and future are wired together and the universe does not come into being unless and until the blind accidents of evolution are generated to produce the consciousness, consciousness of consciousness and communicating community, that will give meaning to that universe from start to finish. The universe is brought into being by the act of participation.

Neils Bohr --: No photon exists until a detector fires, only a developing potentiality. Particle-like and wave-like behavior are properties we ascribe to light. Without us, light has no properties, no existence. There is no independent reality for phenomena nor agencies of observation.

Daniel Dennett --: Here then is Darwin's dangerous idea: the algorithmic level is the level which best accounts for the speed of the antelope, the wing of the eagle ... and all the other occasions for wonder in the world of nature. It is had to believe that something as mindless and mechanical as an algorithm could produce such wonderful things. No matter how impressive the products of an algorithm, the underlying process always consists of nothing but a set of individually mindless steps succeeding each other without the help of any intelligent supervision...

Roger Penrose --: The viewpoint of strong AI, for example, maintains that a 'mind' finds its existence through the embodiment of a sufficiently complex algorithm, as this algorithm is acted out by some objects of the physical world. It is not supposed to matter what actual objects these are. Nerve signals, electric currents along wires, cogs, pulleys, or water pipes would do equally well. The algorithm itself is considered to be all-important.

Steven Weinberg --: At any one moment one is presented with a wide variety of innovative ideas that might be followed up: not only astrology and such, but many ideas much closer to the main stream of science, and others that are squarely within the scope of modern scientific research. It does no good to say that all these ideas must be thoroughly tested; there is simply no time... Even if I dropped everything else in my life, I could not begin to give all of these ideas a fair hearing.

Carl Sagan --: There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.

Carl Sagan --: In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion.

L. Frank Baum --: Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams--daydreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing--are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to invent, and therefore to foster, civilization.

Steve Jones --: This is the essence of science. Even though I do not understand quantum mechanics or the nerve cell membrane, I trust those who do. Most scientists are quite ignorant about most sciences but all use a shared grammar that allows them to recognize their craft when they see it. The motto of the Royal Society of London is ´Nullius in verba´ : trust not in words. Observation and experiment are what count, not opinion and introspection. Few working scientists have much respect for those who try to interpret nature in metaphysical terms. For most wearers of white coats, philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex: it is cheaper, easier, and some people seem, bafflingly, to prefer it. Outside of psychology it plays almost no part in the functions of the research machine.

Carl Sagan --: We live in a civilization profoundly dependent on science and technology. Yet we have arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

George Benard Shaw --: 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. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

Aldous Huxley --: There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old . . . In an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

Stuart Kauffman --: proposed Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: "The diversity of ways of making a living that organisms can achieve, tends to increase over time." This also may apply, he believes, to the formation of geological bodies, the evolution of galaxies -- the universe.

George Santayana --: Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.

Carl Sagan --: How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed.' Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.'

Jack Sarfatti --: The answer is obvious and Sir James Jeans understood it clearly in the 1920's when he called the quantum wave function "mind stuff" and said The Universe is more a "great thought than a great machine". Jeans was under Bohr's sway at the time. The Truth from Einstein-De-Broglie-Bohm-Vigier is that The Universe is BOTH a Great Thought AND a Great Machine.

Stuart Hameroff --: The pan-experiential view holds that conscious experience (or its raw, undifferentiated proto-conscious precursors) is a fundamental feature of the universe somehow accessed by brain activities (e.g. Democritus , Leibniz, Whitehead, Wheeler, Chalmers. . .). Modern pan-experientialism views 'qualia' as basic features of reality, emanating from the quantum world.

Isaac Asimov --: I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties; that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the Universe.

Robert A. Heinlein --: Througout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

John Brockman --: Scientists debate continually, and reality is the check. They may have egos as large as those possessed by the iconic figures of the academic humanities, but they handle their hubris in a very different way. They can be moved by arguments, because they work in an empirical world of facts, a world based on reality. There are no fixed, unalterable positions.

Arthur C. Clarke --: It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him.

Susan Haack --: It is not in principle impossible that developments in physics should give rise to a need for a change of logic.

Richard Dawkins --: We are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

Edward O. Wilson --: It's time to look at the whole once again, and, yes, I think we can begin talking about insect colonies as superorganisms, but without the mysticism.

Stephen W. Hawking --: Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

Julian Barbour --: For me one of the great miracles is colors, and different sounds and sensations. This is the problem of the qualia. I would love to create a physics in which they exist and form a fundamental part of the physics just like mass and electric charge do. But that really is a distant dream.

David Zindell --: 'What is a human being, then?'
'A seed.'
'A... seed?'
'An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree'

John Brockman --: Key to this cultural pessimism is a belief in the myth of the noble savage; that before we had science and technology, people lived in ecological harmony and bliss. Quite the opposite is the case.

Plato --: If the study of all these sciences which we have enumerated, should ever bring us to their mutual association and relationship, and teach us the nature of the ties which bind them together, I believe that the diligent treatment of them will forward the objects which we have in view, and that the labor, which otherwise would be fruitless, will be well bestowed.

Jean Rostand --: It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.

Karl Marx --: Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.

Richard Feynman --: ...trying to find a computer simulation of physics, seems to me to be an excellent program to follow out...and I'm not happy with all the analyses that go with just the classical theory, because NATURE ISN'T CLASSICAL, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better MAKE IT QUANTUM MECHANICAL, and by golly it's a wonderful problem because it doesn't look so easy.

Vannevar Bush --: Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. Nearly all men of science, all men of learning for that matter, and men of simple ways too, have it in some form and in some degree. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries.

Friedrich Wilheim Nietsche --: Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and wizards who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?

Jacob Bronowski --: Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.

Thomas Hobbes --: Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.

Eric Gill --: Science is analytical, descriptive, informative. Man does not live by bread alone, but by science he attempts to do so. Hence the deadliness of all that is purely scientific.

Timothy Vaughn --: Don't LOOK at anything in a physics lab, Don't TASTE anything in a chemistry lab, Don't SMELL anything in a biology lab, Don't TOUCH anything in a medical lab, and, most importantly, Don't LISTEN to anything in a philosophy department.

François Jacob --: Myths and science fulfil a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and the forces that are supposed to govern it.

Paul Ehrlich --: The average scientist is basically toilet-trained to the point where if what he does is comprehensible to the general public, it means he's not a good scientist. That's what I thought. I was wrong.

Albert Einstein --: You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.

Richard Feynman --: First you guess. Don't laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong. That's all there is to it.

William Burroughs --: Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

Henry Miller --: No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe.

Eric Hoffer --: Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.

Edward O. Wilson --: For every person in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet Earths. The five billion people of the developing countries may never wish to attain this level of profligacy. But in trying to achieve at least a decent standard of living, they have joined the industrial world in erasing the last of the natural environments.

Jacob Bronowski --: By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science.

Raymond Chandler --: There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. … Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.

Basil Bunting --: I hate Science. It denies a man's responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God's fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast. It is far easier for a Hitler or a Stalin to find a mock-scientific excuse for persecution than it was for Dominic to find a mock-Christian one.

Margaret Mead --: The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer.

Isaac Asimov --: If a scientific heresy is ignored or denounced by the general public, there is a chance it may be right. If a scientific heresy is emotionally supported by the general public, it is almost certainly wrong. …It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong....It is those who support ideas for emotional reasons only who can't change.

Pope John XXIII --: Nevertheless, in order to imbue civilization with sound principles and enliven it with the spirit of the gospel, it is not enough to be illumined with the gift of faith and enkindled with the desire of forwarding a good cause. For this end it is necessary to take an active part in the various organizations and influence them from within. And since our present age is one of outstanding scientific and technical progress and excellence, one will not be able to enter these organizations and work effectively from within unless he is scientifically competent, technically capable and skilled in the practice of his own profession.

William James --: We know what consciousness is as long as no one asks us to define it.

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