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"We live in a changing universe, and few things are changing faster than our conception of it." -- Timothy Ferris"...it was Isidore I. Rabi who neatly summarized the reaction of the scientific world to the discovery of the muon by asking: 'Who ordered that?'" -- Gerard 't Hooft
"This whole hotchpotch of subatomic particles first appeared in the 1950s and '60s. 'Had I foreseen this I would have gone into botany,' was how Enrico Fermi reacted." -- Gerard 't Hooft
"The older I get, the better I was." -- Janice Chambers
From Big Bang, the origin of the universe by Simon Singh (2004)
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. - Paul DiracThe less one knows about the universe, the easier it is to explain. -- Leon Brunschvicg
They argued that the universe was eternal and unchanging, and that the Big Bang model was nonsense. This was still the establishment view.
All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial. -- Ernest Rutherford
In fact, Hoyle was almost obsessive in his questioning of orthodoxy. Sometimes he turned out to be right, but on many occasions he showed himself as a scientist out of his depth. Most notoriously, Hoyle denounced an archaeopteryx fossil as a forgery...
Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened -- the Big Bang, the event that began our universe. Why it happened is the greatest mystery we know. That it happened is reasonably clear. - Carl Sagan
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun. - Anon.
Physics is not a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money. - Leon Lederman
From Jeff Kanipe, author of Chasing Hubble's Shadows, The Search for galaxies at the Edge of Time
First of all, the distant galaxies look very strange.... some look like exclamation points and semicolons. They are bi-lobed, tri-lobed, and so train-wrecked that you can't tell if they're products of external collisions or internal strife. By contrast, most of the galaxies in our local cosmos look normal, with symmetrical shapes like spirals, ovals, and spheres. Galaxies in the distant universe are also typically smaller than those in the regional univers,e probably because they haven't had the time to build themselves up into the more massive galaxies we see today.Jonathan Katz, professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis, author of The Biggest Bangs, The mystery of gamma-ray bursts, the most violent explosions in the universe (2002)Alan Heavens... at the University of Edinburgh... observed 90,000 distant galaxies... [and] concluded that 5 billion years ago the overall star-formation rate began steadily decreasing to the rate we see today.
John Tonry, a cosmologist at the University of Hawaii, put the study of dark energy into succinct perspective: "We're not so interested in whether universe is accelerating or not -- we know it is accelerating. The question is, why?"
Madore: "Who goes in and classifies what turbulent eeddies look like? No physicist in their right mind would classify that sort of thing. And maybe that's all we're doing [in the classification of galaxies]. We have this frozen picture in time of things that don't look like what they used to look like, probably won't look the same in the future, and don't even look like what they do look like when you look at them in another wavelength! It may well be that every galaxy's structure is so contingent on the last event or environment that it found itself in, that what you see now in this fine little slice in time and this other tiny slice in wavelength have nothing to do with its global history... to reduce a whole galaxy down to two letter and a number seems to trivialize the whole thing."
For Simon Driver, a galaxy specialist at Australia's Mount Stromlo Observatory, the Hubble tuning fork is just butterfly counting. "The name of the game is to find something to replace it with."
"Scientific problems have a natural life cycle. They are born with an unexpected discovery, such as the observation of gamma-ray bursts by the Vela satellites. This immediately calls for explanation. The information available is preliminary and incomplete, so new measurements must be made. Theoretical models are floated and tested against our understanding of the laws of nature and against the data. Sometimes a satisfactory explanation is quickly developed. Sometimes closer examination shows that there is really nothing to explain, for the original data were spurious or misinterpreted.Lee Smolin, physicist. From The Life of the Cosmos, 1997.It is more interesting if the discovery is genuine, and remains enigmatic, as was the case for gamma-ray bursts. Then the next stage consists of the development of new instruments to answer the experimental questions, and of new theoretical ideas to explain their results... For gamma-ray bursts, the second stage lasted 25 years from their discovery.
The third stage in the life of a scientific problem involves the devlopment of a more quantitative and predictive understanding...
The life of a scientific problem, like all lives, ends finally in death. The problem is understood as well as anyone is interested in understanding it, or it may be beyond human understanding. Known experimental methods and theoretical ideas have yielded all they can. It ends in triumph, or in frustration, or in despair, or simply in boredom. The last is probably the most common. The excitement of discovery is not replaced by routine science, as some philosophers and historians of science would have us believe [Thomas Kuhn, take note], but by the silence of the grave, as scientists move on to something else, new and more interesting."
"The idea of the genius scientist is as wrong, or as obsolete, as the idea of scientific revolution. Modern science is so competitive that ideas are brought forward half-formed and immediately seized on and further developed by someone else. They achieve their final perfected form, if they ever do, only after a long and complex evolution, drawing on many contributions and owing debts to many contributors. There are no modern Galileos, Newtons, or Einsteins (if even they were the lone genius creators of legend) because there are too many would-be Galileos, Newtons, and Einsteins."
"Sometimes the philosophers speak plain nonsense: no scientist believes the truths of nature are figments of our assumptions. We cynically note that most philosophers of science are either failed scientists or ignorant of science. The most charitable conclusion may be that philosophy of science has nothing to do with science. Most scientists ignore it. Mathematics, at least, is useful."
"During the heyday of theoretical astrophysics it was hoped that study of new astronomical phenomena would lead to the discovery of new physical laws. This hope was not fulfilled, and there is no evidence that fundamentally new physical phenomena lie behind the discoveries of astronomers. Instead, familiar phenomena come together in novel ways."
"In recent decades some physicists have turned the search for new fundamental laws of nature into an exercise in mathematics and speculation, sterile because the domain of applicability of these laws lies far beyond any foreseeable experiment.
"So we come finally to quantum mechanics. Absolutely the first thing that must be said about it is that the discussions and arguments begun in the 1920s about the meaning of the quantum theory remain unresolved. Many, apparently equally viable, interpretations of the theory have been proposed, and there is now as much contention among the experts as there has ever been."Ann Druyan"The laws of nature themselves, like the biological species, may not be eternal categories, but rather the creations of natural processes occurring in time. There will be reasons why the laws of physics are what they are, but these reasons may be partly historical and contingent, as in the case of biology."
I think the roots of this antagonism to science run very deep. They're ancient. We see them in Genesis, this first story, this founding myth of ours, in which the first humans are doomed and cursed eternally for asking a question, for partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It's puzzling that Eden is synonymous with paradise when, if you think about it at all, it's more like a maximum-security prison with twenty-four hour surveillance. It's a horrible place. Adam and Eve have no childhood. They awaken full-grown. What is a human being without a childhood? Our long childhood is a critical feature of our species. It differentiates us, to a degree, from most other species. We take a longer time to mature. We depend upon these formative years and the social fabric to learn many of the things we need to know.A few from Alan Guth, originator of the theory of inflation in cosmology..."...science is not merely a collection of facts, but is instead an ongoing detective story, in which scientists passionately search for clues in the hope of unraveling the mysteries of the universe." [Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe, the quest for a new theory of cosmic origins]"...cosmologists are claiming that they can extrapolate backward in time to learn the conditions in the universe just one second after the beginning! If cosmologists are so smart, you might ask, why can't they predict the weather? The answer, I would argue, is not that cosmologists are so smart, but that the early universe is much simpler than the weather!"
"...the entire universe is expected to be at least 1023 times larger than the observed universe! ...if the inflationary theory is correct, then the observed universe is only a minute speck in a universe that is many orders of magnitude larger."
Some from Stuart Kauffman...
"Without [natural selection], we reason, there would be nothing but incoherent disorder. I shall argue... that this idea is wrong. For, as we shall see, the emerging sciences of complexity begin to suggest that the order is not all accidental, that vast veins of spontaneous order lie at hand. Laws of complexity spontaneously generate much of the order of the natural world. It is only then that selection comes into play, further molding and refining. Such veins... have not been entirely unknown, yet they are just beginning to emerge as powerful new clues to the origins and evolution of life." [Stuart Kauffman, At Home In The Universe]
"Such single-celled life-forms persisted alone in the biosphere for perhaps 3 billion years." [Stuart Kauffman, At Home In The Universe]
"In the Permian extinction, 245 million years ago, 96 percent of all species disappeared." [Stuart Kauffman, At Home In The Universe]
"On many fronts, life eveolves toward a regime that is poised between order and chaos." [Stuart Kauffman, At Home In The Universe]
"...if this is true, life is vastly more probable that we have supposed. Not only are we at home in the universe, but we are far more likely to share it with as yet unknown companions." [Stuart Kauffman, At Home In The Universe]
A few from Robin Fox, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University, New Jersey....
"Since science has no value agenda of its own, it is always subject to hijacking by fanaticism or idealism.""I seem to hear repeatedly today that science is somehow disreputable because it is the province of European white bourgeois males (or something such). Mendel was such, he was even an Augustinian monk, but he got it right about the wrinkled peas; and it would not have mattered if he had been a black handicapped Spanish-speaking lesbian atheist."
"The point then that science can be 'wrong' is beside the point. It is the business of science to be wrong. That is one way we know it is science."
"If you wish to be believed, you must accept the burden of falsifiability."
"The point that science can be used for evil purposes is [also] beside the point. Art and music can be used for evil purposes, but no one proposes abandoning either. Anything can be used for evil purposes. I am not going to stop listening to Wagner just because Hitler liked him."
"What was a shift in emphasis in the social sciences has become a revolutionary, relativistic, anti-scientific political ideology, with a frightening tendency, in the United States, at least, to harness the worst forces of puritanical fanaticism, forces that seem to eager to burst out and have their day, in a a new wave of campus totalitarianism that threatens with academic gulags and thought reform those who do not accept the moral absolute of the cultural relativists. (Logic has been the most obvious loser in the whole sorry history.)"
"...if all truths are indeed epistemologically relative and have no universal application, then the proposition that all truths are epistemologically relative is itself relative and has no universal application, and we have no reason to accept it."
"The way out of bad science is to find good science, not to ditch science altogether and embrace various forms of opinion mongering that masquerade as knowledge while denying its possibility."
"The real poet, like any artist, tries all the time to see the general in the particular. In this he is no different from the scientist. They are siblings under the skin."
Some from Dr. Eugenie Scott from the National Center for Science Education....
"The antievolution movement has had a long history in the United States... Creation 'science' is only a recent manifestation of this antievolutionism.""...creation science illustrates extremely well... the evasion or denial of empirically based knowledge when it conflicts with ideology."
"...antievolutionism has evolved into new forms which are characterized by the avoidance of any variant of the 'c word.' Phrases like 'intelligent design theory' and 'abrupt appearance theory' are used instead of 'creation science', 'creationism', and related terms. I call this newest state of antievolutionism 'neocreationism.'"
"In content, there is nothing in IDT [intelligent design theory] that has not already been expressed in earlier creation science literature."
"'Evidence against evolution' has always been synonomous with creation science, which specializes in finding anomalous tidbits in the scientific literature that appear to 'prove' that evolution did not occur."
"There is no scientific evidence against evolution."
Actually, modern science has omitted the supernatural for methodological, not philosophical reasons. It is not that scientists have an axe to grind with respect to theism. Rather, we simply get better explanations by ignoring the possibility of supernatural intervention or causation."
"One may come to a philosophical conclusion that there is no God, and even base this philosophical conclusion on one's understanding of science, but it is ultimately a philosophical conclusion, not a scientific one."
Some from Paul Kurtz....
"...there is a difference between an open mind and an open sink. The open mind allows for the critical examination of ideas, and it is receptive to new ones; the open sink is willing to accept anything and everything as worthy of examination without any responsible filtering process.""...what is at issue is the reticence to criticize religion in the public square or to subject its basic premises to scrutiny."
"...the desire to seek a kind of accommodation by mutual tolerance is understandable, even commendable. Nonetheless speaking as a secularist and skeptic, I believe this should not preclude others within the community from questioning the claims of Biblical, Koranic, or other absolute faiths, particularly since massive efforts are constantly undertaken by missionaries to recruit members to the fold... This posture is especially questionable given the constant effort by militant religionists to apply their doctrines in the political process, thus seeking to impose their views on others."
One from Richard Morris....
"If a theory is crazy, or unorthodox, or seemingly bizarre, that does not make it pseudoscientific. Crackpot and pseudoscientific theories are bizarre in a particular way. They tend to ignore long-established scientific ideas. They operate in a world of their own, not in the world of scientific discourse."One from David Berlinski, author of A Tour of the Calculus....
"If the calculus comes to vibrant life in celestial mechanics, as it surely does, then this is evidence that the stars in the sheltering sky have a secret mathematical identity, an aspect of themselves that like some tremulous night flower they reveal only when the mathematician whispers."From Conflict in the Cosmos, Fred Hoyle's Life in Science - Simon Mitton (2005)
A few from Max Planck...From 1939 to 1942, the Hoyle-Lyttleton collaboration had been characterized by a great richness in the range of problems they wanted to tackle using the accretion mechanism... But this collaboration also shows the development of Hoyle's highly combative approach to critics... feeling that he must defend not just his predictions but also his speculations against attack from any party... Above all, Hoyle sought to "save the appearances" as the philosophers of ancient Greece had so often done, so that his models could be modified in response to new data. This trait would ultimately lead to his exclusion from the academy. [p.76]
[Regarding Hoyle's BBC programs] Lord Simon turned to Sydney Goldstein, then professor of applied mathematics at Manchester, for an expert opinion. Goldstein, who had been a fellow of St. John's College, responded by saying it all depended what programming the corporation wanted. "If they want entertainment, the lectures are fine. If they want science they are not fine. The best astronomers would not agree with many of his conclusions. Hoyle has not the humility of a good scientist. [p.143]
One more point on which Eddington and Hoyle could agree concerned the chemical composition of the Sun. In common with most astrophysicists of the time, both believed that the interior of the Sun was made of about two parts iron to one part hydrogen. The spectrum of sunlight is crossed by copious narrow dark gaps, or absorption lines, the majority of which are the signature of iron. For half a century, this made it natural for astronomers to believe in an iron Sun, and the idea that iron constituted the bulk of its interior persisted even though it had been demonstrated in the late 1920s that the Sun's outermost layers -- its atmosphere -- consist primarily of hydrogen. Six years later [around 1946] Hoyle would show that this assumption about the chemical composition of the Sun's interior was entirely wrong. [p.154]
The collaboration with Fowler on nucleosynthesis even led Hoyle to dabble with the big bang universe for a while. Despite the great success of B2FH [Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler, and Hoyle's paper on stellar nucleosynthesis], there remained a nagging doubt about the origin of the lightest elements, particularly lithium: It cannot be made in stars, so it must come from another source.... [Investigating] the nuclear reactions that might occur fleetingly in the primordial fireball... [t]hey discovered ways to make deuterium, helium-3, and lithium-7... Hoyle had found out how these would be made during an event he did not believe in. [p.238]
Together with Geoffrey Burbidge, Hoyle worked on a detailed paper that examined whether or not the evidence pointed to quasars being at great distances or comparatively nearby... In the case of local quasars, they proposed that these objects had been expelled at extremely high speeds from the cores of disturbed galaxies. This opened the interesting possibility that some of the ejected quasars could be directed toward the Milky Way, in which case they would show a blueshift... No blueshifted quasars were found... [p.292]
The work of Hazard and Arp slowly increased the number of strange pairings and alignments, which Hoyle felt strongly must mean that quasars are expelled from galaxies at very high velocities. But he never convinced his Cambridge colleagues or the wider astronomical community... Hoyle received the [Russell] prize and delivered the lecture in Seattle at the [American Astronomical] society's April 1972 meeting. Arp took the opportunity to read a short observational paper arguing an extreme proposition: The excess redshifts were related to the age of the objects, and the atomic constants were changing with time!... [Hoyle] concluded, "This concept appears necessary if we are to understand the result reported by Arp... Martin Schwarzchild scolded the pair of them: "You are both crazy!" [p.296]
...Hoyle, Geoffrey Burbidge, and Jayant Narlikar... worked on... the nature of quasar redshifts, matter creation, and alternative cosmologies. Geoffrey Burbidge stoutly maintainted the view that quasar redshifts are not indicative of immense cosmological distances because quasars are local objects ejected at very high velocities from the nuclei of galaxies... The three convinced themselves that violent events in the nuclei of galaxies are manifestations of matter creation... However, their arguments failed to win any support outside their own small group. [p.339]
"...'to believe' means 'to recognize as a truth,' and the knowledge of nature, continually advancing on incontestably safe tracks, has made it utterly impossible for a person possessing some training in natural science to recognize as founded on truth the many reports of extraordinary occurrences contradicting the laws of nature, of miracles which are still commonly regarded as essential supports and confirmations of religious doctrines, and which formerly used to be accepted as facts pure and simple, without doubt or criticism." [Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers]"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."
"...it turns out that a general principle of classical theory, the least-action principle, is also invariant with respect to the Theory of Relativity..."
"What, then, is the meaning of this work of science? Briefly put, it consists in the task of introducing order and regularity into the wealth of heterogeneous experiences conveyed by the various fields of the sense world... Scientific reasoning does not differ from ordinary everyday thinking in kind, but merely in degree of refinement and accuracy... [E]ven scientific logic cannot deduce anything else from given presuppositions than can the ordinary logic of untrained common sense."
"...the pioneer in science... must have a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination. Nevertheless, the worth of a new idea is invariably determined, not by the degree of its intuitiveness -- which, incidentally, is to a major extent a matter of experience and habit -- but by the scope and accuracy of the individual laws to the discovery of which it eventually leads." [Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers]
Carl Sagan...
"Ethical rules... were not originally invented by some enlightened human lawgiver. They go deep into our evolutionary past. They were with our ancestral line from a time before we were human."
Several from Donald Goldsmith, author of The Runaway Universe...
"Twenty years later, astronomers recognized that Cepheids come in two distinct types, which have different intrinsic brightnesses for the same period of cyclical light variation. Once astronomers learned how to use the colors of these stars to distinguish one type of Cepheid from the other, they reexamined Hubble's distance estimates and found them all to be too low by factors of four to eight.""A nonzero cosmological constant, which produces energy in every cubic centimeter of empty space, also contributes to the total curvature of space in the cosmos, because, as Einstein first noted, any amount of energy E creates a corresponding amount of mass equal to E/c2, where c is the speed of light."
"To be sure, beauty or the lack of beauty does not determine the truth, whatever John Keats may have thought."
Astronomers' observations of supernovae have revised fundamental ideas about the cosmological constant by demonstrating that [Omega-M, the ratio of the universe's actual mass to that mass needed to just close the universe] minus [Omega-lambda, the mass ratio due to the cosmological constant component] has a value close to -0.4. Most observationally oriented astronomers had expected this difference to lie close to 0.3, because [Omega-M] had been deduced to be close to this value, and no good reason existed for a nonzero value of [Omega-lambda]... astronomers thus found themselves astounded, if not totally floored, by what supernovae revealed about the value of [Omega-M] minus [Omega-lambda]. They have, however, leaped from the carpet, dusted themselves off, and proceeded to investigate the universe."
"The cosmological constant's claim to a nonzero value fundamentally rests on the finding that distant Type Ia supernovae reach maximum brightnesses approximately 25 percent fainter than the peak brightnesses they would attain in a universe with a cosmological constant equal to zero."
"...the differential absorption of different colors of light allows astronomers to recognize the effects of dust grains by spreading the light from a distant supernova into its detailed spectrum."
"When astronomers succeed in observing supernovae with redshifts and distances much larger than those of the supernovae with redshifts between 0.4 and 0.7, the Hubble diagram for the universe actually reverts toward the original line describing a cosmos with no acceleration produced by a cosmological contant. This reversion occurs because as we look farther out in space, we look further back in time, to eras when the cosmological constant had produced a cumulative effect much smaller than at the present time or at times 'only' 4 to 7 billion years ago. We can effectively recapture the Hubble diagram for a universe without a cosmological constant by looking so far back in time that we observe epochs when the cosmological constant had produced negligible results."
"The fixed frame of reference that the background radiation provides can furnish only a local delineation of space, useful within a limited volume but in no way providing a framework of the entire cosmos."
"In January 1990, at the American Astronomical Society's meeting near Washington, D.C., Mather announced to an auditorium, packed with astronomers stunned by the quality of the data and gratified by its implications, that COBE's measurements had confirmed in every detail the predictions of the big-bang model of the universe."
"...astronomers characterize the intensity of the cosmic background radiation with a temperature... Thanks to COBE's initial measurements, we know that this temperature equals 2.7278 kelvins..."
"If you press an observationally oriented cosmologist to the wall and force him to divulge his best guess at the truth, the numbers [Omega-M] = 0.3 and [Omega-lambda] = 0.7 will probably emerge from his troubled soul. Considering that just a few years ago, similar pressure to spill his cosmological guts would have yielded [Omega-M] = 0.25 and [Omega-lambda] = 0, we have seen a sea change in cosmology, an acceptance of the cosmological constant undreamed of for many long decades."
A few by Robert Geroch, professor of physics and mathematics at the University of Chicago
and author of General Relativity From A to B (1978)..."There isn't any 'really' in relativity or physics...""...'four dimensions' is just a convenient way of describing the world and thinking about the world, nothing more. Is the 'fourth dimension' real? ...physics will not answer such a question... the attitude of physicists will be that such a question is not germane. There is the physical world, and then there is our description of it... We can change our description every Friday morning if we wish. Nature doesn't care about our descriptions."
"...nothing is ever 'proven'. Everything is essentially a working hypothesis in one form or another... there are always caveats, the sands are constantly shifting..."
Some from Nick Herbert, author of Quantum Reality, Beyond the New Physics (1985)...
"We are now certain that the world is not a deterministic mechanism."
The essential point in science is not a complicated mathematical formalism or a ritualized experimentation. Rather the heart of science is a kind of shrewd honesty that springs from really wanting to know what the hell is going on!"
"The pragmatist treats his theory like a cookbook full of recipes which are useful for ordering and manipulating the facts. The realist sees theory as a guidebook which lays out for the traveler the highlights of the invisible landscape that lies just beneath the facts."
"Classical physics had its defects, experiments it could not explain, that eventually led to its downfall. As far as we can tell, there is no experiment the Quantum Theory does not explain, at least in principle."
"A visitor to Niels Bohr's country cottage asked him about a horseshoe nailed above the front door. 'Surely, Professor Bohr, you do not really believe that a horseshoe over the entrance to a home brings good luck?' 'No,' answered Bohr, 'I certainly do not believe in this supersition. But you know,' he added, 'they say it brings luck even if you don't believe in it.'"
"Quantum theory is like Bohr's horseshoe: it works no matter what a person believes."
Electrons cannot really be said to have dynamic attributes [position, momentum, etc.] of their own. What attributes they seem to have depends on how we choose to analyze them... the kind of parts a wave seems to have depends on how we cut it up."
"Despite its central role in Victorian science, the luminiferous ether plays no part whatsoever in modern physics. The ether is a reality that failed."
"What's at stake in the quantum reality question is not the actual existence of electrons but the manner in which electrons possess their major attributes."
"...quantum theory boldly exposes itself to potential falsification on a thousand different fronts. Its record is impressive: quantum theory passes every test we can devise. After sixty years of play, this theory is still batting a thousand."
"Most physicists treat the wave function as a mere calculational device, not as a real wave located somewhere in space."
"In the orthodox view the world is represented by a fictitious proxy wave with no pretentions to being real. On the other hand, in the hidden variable models, the wave that tells the electron how to move is considered just as real as the water in the Pacific Ocean... In order to match the quantum facts, this real wave must possess some quite remarkable properties: primarily it must connect with every particle in the universe, be entirely invisible, and travel faster than light."
"Bell proves (among other things) that it is impossible to construct a hidden-variable model which explains the facts without including something that goes faster than light."
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle follows solely from the waveform-attribute connection and has nothing to do with the 'unavoidable disturbance of the system by measurement.'"
"Science's biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all."
A few from Stephen Jay Gould...
"Our world overflows with peculiar, otherwise senseless shapes and behaviors that function only to promote victory in the great game of mating and reproduction. No other world but Darwin's would fill nature with such curiosities that weaken species and hinder good design but bring success where it really matters in Darwin's universe alone -- passing more genes to future generations.""Sexual selection is our most elegant confirmation of [Darwin's] central tenet that the struggle of individuals for reproductive success drives evolution... The proof that our world is Darwinian lies in the large set of adaptations arising only because they enhance reproductive success but otherwise both hinder organisms and harm species."
"....both patently ill-founded and quaint in its failure to avoid that age-old pitfall of Western intellectual life -- the representation of raw hope gussied up as rationalized reality."
Some from Leon Lederman...
"It's not perfect, but it's good enough. Like aiming a rifle at a mosquito sitting on the moon but hitting it in the wrong eye." [Leon Lederman, The God Particle, p 219]
"The accelerator laboratory became a service center with a variety of products. By the late 1980s, Fermilab's sales force advertised to potential customers that the following hot and cold running beams were available: protons, neutrons, pions, kaons, muons, neutrinos, antiprotons, hyperons, polarized protons (all spinning in the same direction), tagged photons (we know their energy), and if you don't see it, ask!" [Leon Lederman, The God Particle, p 251]
"By 8 P.M. we were disassembling the apparatus of one very confused and upset graduate student. Marcel saw his Ph.D. thesis experiment being taken apart!" [Leon Lederman, The God Particle, p 268]
"We will chronicle the construction of the standard model, which contains all the elementary particles needed to make all the matter in the universe, past or present , plus the forces that act upon these particles." [Leon Lederman, The God Particle, p 275]
"Still, these were just theorists talking. Other published accounts of the November Revolution have implied that the experimenters involved were somehow working their tails off to verify the ideas of the theorists. Dream on. They were fishing... At the time that Glashow, Gaillard, and others were talking charm, experimental physics was having its own problems... The "lepton people" and the "hadron people" had a spirited debate going. Electrons hadn't done much. But you should have heard the propaganda!" [Leon Lederman, The God Particle, p 311]
"Meanwhile, Lederman's group at Fermilab finally learned how to carry out the dimuon experiment correctly, and a new, vastly more effective organization of apparatus exploded open the mass domain from the J/psi peak at 3.1 all the way to pretty nearly 25 GeV, the limit allowed by Fermilab's 400 GeV energy... And there, at 9.4, 10.0, and 10.4 GeV sat three new bumps, as clear as the Tetons viewed on a brilliant day from Grand Targhee ski resort... and the new thing that was conserved was the beauty quark -- or as some less artistic physicists call it, the bottom quark." [Leon Lederman, The God Particle, p 320]
"One has to go to the quantum phase of the universe's history, in which spooky quantum mechanical fluctuations during inflation can lead to the irregularities. Inflation enlarges these microscopic fluctuations to a scale commensurate with galaxies." [Leon Lederman, The God Particle, p 400]
"The laws of nature must have existed before even time began in order for the beginning to happen. We say this, we believe it, but can we prove it? No." [Leon Lederman, The God Particle]
"But first a comment on the word "theory," which lends itself to popular misconceptions. "That's your theory" is a popular sneer. Or "That's only a theory." Our fault for sloppy use. The quantum theory and the Newtonian theory are well-established, well-verified components of our world view. They are not in doubt. It's a matter of derivation. Once upon a time it was Newton's (as yet unverified) "theory." Then it was verified, but the name stuck. "Newton's theory" it will always be. On the other hand, superstrings and GUTs are speculative efforts to extend current understanding, building on what we know. The better theories are verifiable. Once upon a time that was the sine qua non of any theory. Nowadays, addressing events at the Big Bang, we face, perhaps for the first time, a situation in which a theory may never be experimentally tested." [Leon Lederman, The God Particle, p 389]
"Supersymmetry, or Susy, is the favorite of the betting theorists." [Leon Lederman, The God Particle, p 392]
Albert Einstein...
"As scientists, we must never cease to warn against the danger created by these [atomic] weapons; we dare not slacken in our efforts to make the peoples of the world, and especially their governments, aware of the unspeakable disaster they are certain to provoke unless they change their attitude toward one another and recognize their responsibility in shaping a safe future.""For what is a nation but a group of individuals who are forever influencing one another by means of the written and spoken word. [1922]
"A vast collection of facts is essential for the establishment of any theory that is to have a chance of success. But this material does not of itself consititute a starting point for a deductive theory. However, with the help of this material, one may succeed in finding a general principle that can be the starting point for a logical (deductive) theory. But there is no logical path leading from the empirical material to the general principle on which the logical deduction will then rest." [March 20, 1952 letter to Besso]
"Darwin's theory... has been cited by many people as authorization of the encouragement of the spirit of competition... the necessity of the destructive economic struggle of competition between individuals. But this is wrong, because man owes his strength in the struggle for existence to the fact that he is a socially living animal." ['On Education', Out of My Later Years, 1950]
Some from physicist Gerard 't Hooft...
"I began to view Nature as an intelligence test to which humanity as a whole has been subjected...""If history has taught us one thing it is that, with hindsight, newly discovered laws always turn out to be quite logical extensions of what we have already known for a long time."
"A theory should not consist only of words, but also of accurate mathematical rules for calculations."
"...translating mathematical formulae into plain language is sometimes impossible without a little cheating."
"A reader not at home with the subject of theoretical physics may have to accept many of my statements on faith."
"Mass and energy also depend on velocity... that is, if mass M is defined by Newton's law F = m a. Modern physics teachers prefer to redefine mass such that it is velocity independent."
A few from science historian Thomas Kuhn (with whom I don't always agree...)
"Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time.""And when... the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice -- then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science... scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science."
"Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers. They constitute what I am here calling normal science."
"Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others."
"By focusing attention upon a small range of relatively esoteric problems, the paradigm forces scientists to investigate some part of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable."
"A man may be attracted to science for all sorts of reasons. Among them are the desire to be useful, the excitement of exploring new territory, the hope of finding order, and the drive to test established knowledge... The scientific enterprise as a whole does from time to time prove useful, open up new territory, display order, and test long-accepted belief. Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is almost never doing any one of these things. Once engaged, his motivation is of a rather different sort. What then challenges him is the conviction that, if only he is skilful enough, he will succeed in solving a puzzle that no one before has solved or solved so well. Many of the greatest scientific minds have devoted all of their professional attention to demanding puzzles of this sort."
"To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself."
"As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice -- there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community."
"...no theory ever solves all the puzzles with which it is confronted at a given time; nor are the solutions already achieved often perfect."
"All historically significant theories have agreed with the facts, but only more or less."
"Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not all all."
"But paradigm debates are not really about relative problem-solving ability, though for good reasons they are usually couched in those terms. Instead, the issue is which paradigm should in the future guide research on problems many of which neither competitor can yet claim to resolve completely."
A few from Tony Rothman, General Relativity professor at Harvard...
"More and more scientists are now engaging in the popularization of their own fields. I wholeheartedly support this trend for the simple reason that scientists know their turf better than journalists. At the same time I am disturbed to see a growing gap between the standards upheld by scientists when they face other scientists and the standards they uphold when they face the public... [saying] things they would never try to get away with among colleagues.""Recently at a New York cocktail party, a young physicist was asked how he made his living and he replied that he was by specialty a cosmologist. While it might be debated whether cosmology constitutes a "living," his host remained undeterred and immediately inquired if it would be possible to make an appointment for a manicure and a haircut."
"That the universe should be exactly the critical density is the one testable hypothesis claimed for [cosmic] inflation and this prediction appears to be incorrect."
"If these neutrinos had a mass of about 10 eV... the total mass density in neutrinos would be sufficient to close the gap between the observed density and the critical density."
"You can say the gravitational attraction of the two spaceships pulled them together, or you can say that their gravitational fields curved space and that the ships no longer followed straight world lines but curved geodesics."
"A.P. French and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg... argue it doesn't make much sense to talk about time as a fourth dimension; neither does it make sense to speak of imaginary distances or curvature or geodesics and that the geometrical interpretation of relativity has "dwindled to a mere analogy"... But if geometry is a "mere analogy," it is a very useful "mere analogy."
"The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us." [Paul Valery] "Take heed." [Rothman]
"Einstein's equations do not specify the universe; rather they may be considered a general framework within which you can construct many different model universes."
"There are, in fact, any number of Big Bangs (models), so we will stick with the acronym FLRW [Friedman-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker] when speaking of the standard Big Bang.
"When the temperature dropped far below one billion degrees [three minutes after the big bang] this 'primordial nucleosynthesis' stopped and, according to the standard model, we should be left with roughly 25% helium by mass and 2 x 10-5 parts deuterium. It may seem like a miracle that astronomers in fact do measure about 25% helium in the real universe, but it is a miracle squared that they also measure something like 2 x 10-5 parts deuterium."
"Actually, it is so difficult for a model to predict both the light isotope abundances and the cosmic microwave background that most alternative models have been of the big bang type."
"We mentioned that the FLRW cosmology begins with a singularity. This is a much more serious breakdown than a flat tire or a cracked engine block. It is, in fact, a physical impossibility -- a region where the laws of physics break down altogether and even spacetime comes to an end."
"To keep helium below the 25% limit imposed by astronomers [observations] requires that the universe was highly isotropic at the time of element formation."
"TR has investigated this problem for at least one choice of variable-G theory and found that at three minutes after the Big Bang, G must have been essentially what it is now.
"The Brans-Dicke [variable-G] theory has been constrained so much by observations of the binary pulsar's orbital period that it is virtually the same as special relativity. Probably the last believers in the Brans-Dicke theory died at the Port Authority Bus terminal five years ago [in 1984]."
"The cosmological constant can be regarded as an extra energy term in the Einstein equations (resulting in the negative pressure.) Specifically, it is a constant energy per unit volume. So, as the universe expands, its volume increases and therefore its total energy does too."
"Unfortunately, the Steady-State theory finds it virtually impossible to explain either the light elements or the CMB, both of which require the universe to have been much different in the past than it is today, namely very hot. For this reason, all but the most rabid fanatics gave up the Steady-State theory around 1965 with the discovery of the CMB."
Keith Devlin, author of Goodbye, Descartes, professor of mathematics, Dean of the School of Science at St. Mary's College, and senior researcher at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Communication
"One way to think of the background to a conversation is by comparing a conversation to two people building a wall. The building skills and experience the two individuals bring to the task are part of the background. So too is the supply company that delivers the bricks, sand, and cement. All of these contribute to the building of the wall, and some of them are essential to the task. But none are part of the actual building work. The one part of the background that can be regarded as part of the actual building process is the preparation of the foundations for the wall, since the foundations are, in a sense, part of the wall. The construction of the wall then proceeds in a step-by-step fashion, as the two persons add one brick after another in a coordinated and cooperative fashion... each new brick builds upon those that have been laid previously. The attention of the two people building the wall is focused entirely on the wall and its foundations, not on anything in the background.""How meaning is created and conveyed by language is one of the key aspects of language that Chomsky's analysis did not address. It is one of the most elusive of the features that researchers have turned attention to, and... though progress has been made, many questions remain unanswered."
"In many respects, situation theory is an extension of classical logic [in the analysis of communication via language] that takes account of context."
"Speaking and understanding a language... requires not only an implicit knowledge of the grammar of that language... but also an implicit knowledge of the relevant culture."
"The real root of the [Liar] paradox was neither self reference nor truth, but an unacknowledged context... So when proper attention is paid to context, the Liar Paradox ceases to be a paradox. In saying "This assertion is false," the individual a is making a claim that refers (implicitly) to a particular context, c, and that leads to a contradiction. So the claim must be false. But the context for making the observation that the claim is false cannot be c, since if it were, then that too leads to a contradiction."
"The evidence continues to mount that the answers to the age-old questions concerning the nature of thought, communication, and action will not be found until we go beyond the boundaries imposed by the legacy of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and all the other great thinkers in that two-thousand-year intellectual tradition."
Some from Roger Penrose...
"...according to classical relativistic theories of gravity, there is inevitably a... physical singularity at the origin of Big Bang cosmological models. These results indicate that, in some sense, there is a serious incompleteness in these theories, since physical singularities should be avoided in all physically meaningful theories." -- from Malcolm Longair's Foreward to Penrose's book, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind"Indeterminacy in quantum mechanics only arises when you perform what is called 'making a measurement' and that involves magnifying an event from the quantum level to the classical level."
"These signals [from tightly orbiting neutron stars] can be timed so accurately that, over 20 years, the accuracy with which the theory is known to be correct amounts to about one part in 1014. This makes General Relativity the most accurately tested theory known to science."
"...mathematical structure is just there in Nature, the theory really is out there in space - it has not been imposed upon Nature by anyone."
"[In the two slit experiment] somehow, the two possible things which the photon might do cancel each other out. This type of behaviour does not take place in classical physics. Either one thing happens or another thing happens - you don't get two possibile things which might happen, somehow conspiring to cancel each other out."
A couple from Stanislaw Ulam, mathematician...
"Mathematics, and perhaps other sciences like physics, have the mission to prepare or improve the human brain, be it the brain of an individual or the collective brain of mankind, for developments yet to come. Just as animals play when they are young in preparation for situations arising later in their lives, it may be that mathematics to a large extent is a collection of games...""...I will mention a few mathematical ideas which will perhaps play an important role in the physics of the future, near future, or even more remote future. But, of course, that is always difficult. As Niels Bohr said, it is very hard to predict, especially the future."
A few from Lazar Mayants, author of Beyond the Quantum Paradox...
[Regarding the paradox of 'Schrodinger's cat'] "Since the reasoning of conventional quantum mechanics employs probability, it must concern an abstract cat, whereas any cat experiment, even an imaginary one, should be related to a concrete cat. But every concrete cat during the experiment has only one of the two possible values, 'alive' and 'dead', of the property 'state of being', whereas an abstract cat does not exist in reality at all. Therefore, the question concerning the 'state of being' of an abstract 'Schrodinger's cat', as stated above, is senseless.""In a probability related science, however, theoretical laws applying to abstract objects are of an essentially probabilistic character. They cannot in principle be verified on a separate concrete object -- their verification requires the gathering of proper statistical data by carrying out an appropriate statistical experiment on a large enough number of concrete objects. Therefore, in probability related sciences, definite values of properties possessed by a particular concrete object cannot be predicted in principle by theory. This is the case with any probability related domain of physics, in particular with quantum physics."
"Spin is the inherent property of every concrete particle, and has the dimension of the angular momentum. All attempts to link the spin of a particle with the rotation of the particle have failed, and I do not think they can ever be successful."
"Unlike mechanical macrosystems, whose probabilistic characteristic is determined by the laws of classical mechanics valid for every concrete system, the origin of the probabilistic behaviour of microsystems is unknown, at least so far. Will it ever become known? I do not think that anyone can answer this question at present."
[Regarding the paradox of the 'particle-wave duality']... "It turns out that there is no such (real) thing that both moves as a particle and propagates as a wave. The so-called 'wave properties' are connected with the probability distributions related to relevant abstract particles, which are revealed (approximately) through the experimental statistical distributions of the corresponding concrete particles, in a long enough series of experiments (random tests). If a few concrete particles only are used in a diffraction experiment, no distinguishing diffraction pattern appears. Hence, only (real) corpuscular properties are inherent in every individual (concrete) particle, whereas the (unreal) 'wave properties' are related to abstract particles. And this fact removes the challenge to common sense."
"The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle usually is considered as valid without exception, and to be one of the most important features of conventional quantum mechanics. Some physicists even believe that this principle should be taken as the primary premise of quantum mechanics. The principle and especially its meaning have been discussed many times (in papers and in conferences), since there has always been confusion as to what this principle is all about. Most physicists, especially experimentalists, believe that it imposes restrictions on the accuracy of the measurement of coupled quantities.... The example of a free particles is... a counter-example which shows that this principle is not always valid... the momentum of a free particle is constant. Hence its uncertainty is precisely zero. The coordinates... are uncertain, but no matter how big the uncertainty, the product of both uncertainties remains zero too."
[Mayants goes on to clarify and challenge any paradoxical interpretations derived from the EPR thought experiment, Bohm's paradox, Bell's Inequality, Aspect's experiment, the two-slit experiment, Wheeler's delated-choice experiment, and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.]
Some from Klaus Mainzer...
"Simplicity was understood, still for Copernicus, as a feature of truth.""In the framework of modern physics, the emergence of the structural variety in the universe from elementary particles to stars and living organisms is modeled by phase transitions and symmetry breaking of equilibrium states."
"...in China, where there was no phonetic alphabet but instead ideographic characters, the particle idea was unknown and a field-and-wave conception of the natural processes prevailed."
"If we only assume the classical principles of Einstein's General Relativity, then as Penrose and Hawking have mathematically proved, the standard models of cosmic evolution have an initial singularity which may be interpreted as the Big Bang, i.e., the emergence of the universe from a mathematical point. But if we assume a unification of General Relativity and quantum mechanics with imaginary (instead of real) time, then, as Hawking has mathematically proved, a 'smooth' cosmic model is possible without any beginning, which simply exists, according to the mathematical principles of a unified relativistic quantum physics."
"In the history of science anthropic or teleological arguments often showed that there were weaknesses or failures of explanation in science."
"The behavior of single elements in complex systems with huge numbers of degrees of freedom can neither be forecast nor traced back. The deterministic description of single elements must be replaced by the evolution of probabilistic distributions."
"It is not sufficient to have good intentions without considering the nonlinear effects of single decisions. Linear thinking and acting may provoke global chaos, although we locally act with the best intentions."
"Even in a fully deterministic world, the assumption of a Laplacean demon which can calculate the universe in the long run was exposed as an illusionary fiction [by Poincare]."
Some from Howard L. Kaye...
"Scientific knowledge does not have social, moral, or spiritual implications, in the sense of logically compelling inferences derived from objective facts; such meanings are, instead, attributed to science by individuals having particular viewpoints and living in particular societies.""In the midnineteenth century, science, theology, philosophy, and social theory had not yet been severed from one another to form autonomous disciplines."
"Who are we? Why are we here? and What is the purpose of life" now appeared to follow immediately and scientifically: we are six feet of a particular molecular sequence of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorous atoms... we are here because we have evolved from simple chemical compounds by a process of natural selection... the aim, purpose, and 'logic of life' is simply reproduction..." [after the 1953 J. Watson and Crick elucidation of the structure of the DNA molecule.]
"According to Max Delbruck, one of the founders of molecular biology, the greatest surprise for everyone was that 'the whole business [DNA structure] was like a child's toy that you could buy at the dime store all built in this wonderful way that you could explain in Life Magazine, so that really a five-year-old can understand what's going on... there was so simple a trick behind it."
"Even to speak of natural selection as a 'process' can be imprecise and misleading; natural selection is only a statistical atrifact, not a set of operations and actions organized and directed toward some end."
"We live in a society and a world ordered and shaped by science, yet we [?] still desperately cling to values based on religious beliefs and myths utterly destroyed by the findings of modern science. Molecular biology, by closing the last loopholes in Darwinian theory (the physical nature of heredity and the origin of variation), has delivered the death blow to all religious beliefs and their philosophical substitutes (eg., dialectical materialism and the 'scientistic progressism' of Spencer, Teilhard de Chardin, and the biological humanists), by destroying the 'anthropocentric illusion' upon which all 'animisms' are based... Wrongly blaming the messenger for the bad news, people have become increasingly alienated from and hostile toward science and the rationality for which it stands."
"[E.O.] Wilson's curious anthropomorphizing of genes -- his treatment of them as selfish and calculating agents devising techniques for survival and self-proliferation -- is not pure, objective, positivist science, as Wilson claims, but is instead a sanctioning myth for his moral and social prescriptions."
"In any case, sociobiology is epistemologically self defeating."
"What Dawkins and Barash are thus popularizing is not objective science but their own metaphysical assumptions, philosophical positions, and social visions."
"Dawkins's myth of the selfish gene and its hellish creation is, of course, scientifically false, as well as being morally abhorrent. Dawkins's genetics, as other scientists have observed, are impossible... the selfish gene is neither selfish nor a gene."
"Dawkins's theory of culture is a disaster, empirically and morally... Dawkins has transformed culture into a meaningless and oppressive tyrant, an indoctrinator of human 'survival machines' so that they will behave selfishly on behalf of virulent memes."
In no particular order...
"Neils Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of physicists into thinking that the job was done fifty years ago." -- Murray Gell-Mann
"Atoms are not things." -- Heisenberg
"By 1871, twelve years after the Origin of Species, Darwin no longer needed to convince people of good will and mental flexibility that evolution had occurred; that battle had been won." -- Stephen Jay Gould
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -- Galileo
"One can imagine a category of experiments that refute well-accepted theories, theories that have become part of the standard consensus of physics. Under this category I can find no examples whatever in the past one hundred years." -- Steven Weinberg
"All roads lead to cosmology, and the higher we climb, the farther we can see." -- Timothy Ferris
"Selfishness is not incompatible with co-operation. Individuals may survive better when they join forces with others. By their joint actions they can frequently do things that one individual cannot do. Consequently, those that team up are more likely to survive than those that do not." -- Patrick Bateson
"Pessimism as a belief not only becomes a passive set of predictions about the future but also plays a dynamic role in ensuring the deteriorating quality of tomorrow's world." -- H.J. Morowitz
"Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible" -- H.L. Mencken
"Nature and Nature's laws lay hid at night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light" -- Alexander Pope"The God of the argument from design is not the God of the Old or New Testament... [who interacted] directly in human affairs and therefore exists outside of Nature." -- H.J. Morowitz
"...miracles in the sense of events contrary to the laws of nature so far from demonstrating to us the existence of God, would on the contrary lead us to doubt it." -- Spinoza
"Little by little, time brings out each several thing into view, and reason raises it up into the shores of light." -- Lucretius
"Illingsworth: The Book of Life begins with a man and woman in a garden.
Allonby: It ends with Revelations." -- Oscar Wilde"Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people." -- Oscar Wilde
Mike "Fluff" Cowan, Tiger Woods' caddie, on his prime responsibilities on the PGA Tour: "Basically, it's show up, keep up, and shut up."
"Making a model of the universe is like trying to pitch a tent on a moonless night in a howling Arctic wind. The tent is theory. The wind is experiment. When one gets to the precipice, where the secure lands of the known have been left behind and the dark canyons of the unknown fill one's field of view, it becomes very difficult to guess just where to set the tent pegs and to predict which ones will hold once the wind comes up." -- Timothy Ferris
"...certainly the COBE result provided powerful reassurance that the theorists were on track in proposing that cosmic structure formation, which has created the largest objects in nature, resulted from random quantum flux, the smallest phenomenon in nature." -- Timothy Ferris
"Ernest Rutherford used to advise his students to distrust any concept (or their command of any concept) that they could not explain to a barmaid. Leon Lederman said, 'If the basic idea is too complicated to fit on a T-shirt, it's probably wrong." -- Timothy Ferris
"Wolfgang Pauli gave a speculative talk on elementary particle physics at Columbia University on January 31, 1958, after which Pauli turned to Bohr and said, 'You probably think these ideas are crazy.' Bohr replied, 'I do, but unfortunately they are not crazy enough.'" -- Abraham Pais
"While walking with Heisenberg, the physicist Felix Bloch, who had just read Weyl's Space, Time and Matter, felt moved to declare that space is simply the field of linear equations. Heisenberg replied, 'Nonsense. Space is blue and birds fly through it.'"
"More often than not, the way science goes from point A to point B is by a random lurch through points X, Y, and Z. Even when great leaps of progress do occur, they only rarely come "out of the blue." Advances are nearly always preceded by years, decades, or even centuries of patient accumulation of facts and data and ideas." [Rocky Kolb, Blind Watchers of the Sky]
"It is rather ironic that the job of a scientist is to understand nature, and if the scientist completely succeeds, the reward is unemployment. But of the many things that concern me in the day-to-day existence of a scientist, waking up one morning and discovering that there are no problems to solve is rather low on the list." [Rocky Kolb, Blind Watchers of the Sky]
"In the years 1664 through 1666, Newton invented calculus; developed his theory of light and color; became the first person to understand in the modern sense the concepts of force, inertia, velocity, acceleration (indeed, the complete science of dynamics); and had his first insights into the universality of gravity." [Rocky Kolb, Blind Watchers of the Sky]
"We find that the galaxy has a much larger mass than the sum of all the stars, dust, and other things we "see." The shortfall is not just a few percentage points, but most of the mass of our galaxy seems to have been left unaccounted." [Rocky Kolb, Blind Watchers of the Sky]
"The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter. You know, if it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that He's evil. I think that the worst you can say about Him is that, basically, He's an underachiever." [Woody Allen]
Updated March 1, 2007
