Stewart Brand writes that "Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly." We now live in a world in which the rate of change is the biggest change. Science has thus become a big story.
- "The Third Culture" by John Brockman, 1991.
Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.
We manipulate nature as if we were stuffing an Alsatian goose. We create new forms of energy; we make new elements; we kill crops; we wash brains. I can hear them in the dark sharpening their lasers.
Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.
- New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative by Paul Goodman, 1970.
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance-the idea that anything is possible.
- Ray Bradbury, science fiction author.
LA Times, August 9, 1976
The mind can store an estimated 100 trillion bits of information-compared with which a computer’s mere billions are virtually amnesiac.
- "Memory: Science Achieves Important New Insights into the Mother of the Muses," Newsweek.
September 29, 1986
To understand the place of humans in the universe is to solve a complex problem. Therefore I find it impossible to believe that an understanding based entirely on science or one based entirely on religion can be correct.
- Wilton Robert Abbott, aerospace engineer.
Who's Who in America, 43rd Edition 1984-85
Mapping the human genome has been compared with putting a man on the moon, but I believe it is more than that. This is the outstanding achievement not only of our lifetime, but in terms of human history. A few months ago I compared the project to the invention of the wheel. On reflection, it is more than that. I can well imagine technology making the wheel obsolete. But this code is the essence of mankind, and as long as humans exists, this code is going to be important and will be used.
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
All life is an experiment.
In view of the kind of matter we work with, it will never be possible to avoid little laboratory explosions.
In science, self-satisfaction is death. Personal self-satisfaction is the death of the scientist. Collective self-satisfaction is the death of the research. It is restlessness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, agony of mind that nourish science.
Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.
When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves. Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.
Science is wonderful: for years uranium cost only a few dollars a ton until scientists discovered you could kill people with it.
- 20,000 quips & quotes by Evan Esar.
