John Horgan (journalist): Thing

John Horgan (journalist) is American science journalist. Explore interesting quotes on thing.
John Horgan (journalist): 28   quotes 0   likes

“Newton's version of gravity violates common sense. How can one thing tug at another across vast spans of space? …Newton's formalism nonetheless provided an astonishingly accurate means of calculating the orbits of planets; it was too effective to deny.”

John Horgan (journalist)

Source: The End of Science (1996), p. 66

Sense

“Kuhn's recognition that science might cease—leaving us with what Charles Sanders Peirce had defined as the "truth" about nature—made it even more imperative for Kuhn than for Popper to challenge science's authority, to deny that science can ever arrive at absolute truth. "The one thing I think you shouldn't say is that now we've found out what the world is really like," Kuhn said. "Because that's not what I think the game is about."”

John Horgan (journalist)

Source: The End of Science (1996), Ch. 2 : The End of Philosophy

Truth , World , Game , Nature

“I had barely sat down when he began to tell me… that science writers were "ignoramuses" and a "terrible breed" who invariably got things wrong: only scientists were really qualified to present their work to the masses. As time went on, I felt less offended, since it became clear that Gell-Mann held most of his scientific colleagues in contempt as well.”

John Horgan (journalist)

Source: The End of Science (1996), p. 212

Science , Time

“In the early 1990s, I came to suspect that the quest for a unified theory is religious rather than scientific. Physicists want to show that all things came from one thing: a force, or essence, or membrane wriggling in eleven dimensions, or something that manifests perfect mathematical symmetry. In their search for this primordial symmetry, however, physicists have gone off the deep end, postulating particles and energies and dimensions whose existence can never be experimentally verified.”

John Horgan (journalist)

(2002 wager, 18 year duration) [Bet 12 (John Horgan vs. Michio Kaku), longbets.org, http://longbets.org/12/]

Search , Mathematics , Perfection

“One of the things that makes Gell-Mann so insufferable is that he is almost always right.”

John Horgan (journalist)

Source: The End of Science (1996), p. 215