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Jacob Bronowski, né le 18 janvier 1908 à Łódź , mort le 22 août 1974 à East Hampton , était un mathématicien britannico-américain d'origine polonaise, de tradition hébraïque, philosophe des sciences et poète, auteur de "Science and Human Values" en 1956, compagnon de travail du mathématicien John von Neumann, fondateur de la théorie des ensembles et auteur de la théorie des jeux. Wikipedia  

✵ 18. janvier 1908 – 22. août 1974
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Jacob Bronowski: 79   citations 0   J'aime

Jacob Bronowski: Citations en anglais

“In a parched African landscape like this at Omo, man first put his foot to the ground. That seems a pedestrian way to begin the ascent of man.”

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Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

Episode 1: "Lower than the Angels"
The Ascent of Man (1973)

“These are the moments when the powerful mind or the forceful character feels the ferment of the times, when his thoughts quicken, and when he can inject into the uncertainties of others the creative ideas which will strengthen them with purpose. At such a moment the man who can direct others, in thought or in action, can remake the world.”

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Jacob Bronowski

The Common Sense of Science (1951), on the influence of Isaac Newton.

“The richness of human life is that we have many lives, we live the events that do not happen (and some that cannot) as vividly as those that do, and if thereby we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay…”

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Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable. There is no absolute knowledge and those who claim it, whether they are scientist or dogmatist, open the door to tragedy. All knowledge, all information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility.”

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Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

Episode 11: "Knowledge or Certainty"
The Ascent of Man (1973)

“The belief that science destroys culture is sometimes supported by historical statements that the arts have flourished only when the sciences have been neglected. This thesis is… directly contrary to history… [I]n the great age of Greece, art and science penetrate one another more closely than in any modern age. …The example of these men in science as much as in art set the modern world afire in the Renaissance. And the type and symbol of Renaissance man… remains Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, mathematician, and engineer. No man has shown more strikingly the universality and the unity of the intellect.”

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Jacob Bronowski

"Sense and Sensibility"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

“We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experience, because he himself re-creates them.”

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Jacob Bronowski

Part 1: "The Creative Mind", §9 ( p. 20 http://books.google.com/books?id=TeHXAAAAMAAJ&q=%22We+re-make+nature+by+the+act+of+discovery+in+the+poem+or+in+the+theorem+And+the+great+poem+and+the+deep+theorem+are+new+to+every+reader+and+yet+are+his+own+experience+because+he+himself+re-creates+them%22&pg=PA20#v=onepage)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)

“I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.”

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Jacob Bronowski

As quoted in World Authors 1950–1970 (1975) by J. Wakeman, pp. 221–223

“[T]he most important images for human beings are simply words, which are abstract symbols. …[E]volution has greatly enlarged the front lobes of the human brain, which govern the sense of the past and the future; and… they are probably the seat of our other images.”

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Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“Man is not the most majestic of the creatures; long before the mammals even, the dinosaurs were far more splendid. But he has what no other animal possesses: a jigsaw of faculties, which alone, over three thousand million years of life, made him creative. Every animal leaves traces of what he was. Man alone leaves traces of what he created.”

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Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

The Ascent of Man (1973)

“Let me close by reminding you of what Newton actually did on the day that he conceived G = k \frac{mm'}{r^2}. …Newton did not have any subsidies, grants, funds, Secret Service money. But he had the moon. He said, "… I cannot throw a ball round the world, but let me picture the moon as if it were a ball which has been flung around the world… How long will it take to go round the world?" …He knew the value of gravity at the earth's surface …but he did not know the value of the earth's gravity for the moon. He said, "Let us suppose that it is given by an inverse square law. Now, how long will it take the moon to go around?"”

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Jacob Bronowski

It comes out at twenty-eight days. As Newton said, "They agreed pretty nearly."
The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)

“Fifty years from now, if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books, we shall not exist.”

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Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

Episode 13: "The Long Childhood"
The Ascent of Man (1973)

“When a child begins to play games… he enters the gateway to reason and imagination together.”

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Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“Dissent is the mark of freedom.”

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Jacob Bronowski

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Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)

“I am using the word image in a wide meaning, which does not restrict it to the mind's eye as a visual organ. An image in my usage is what Charles Pierce called a sign…”

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Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“Let me end with… man's ageless fantasy, to fly to the moon…. Plutarch and Lucian, Ariosto and Ben Jonson wrote about it, before the days of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and science fiction. The seventeenth century was heady with… fables about voyages to the moon. Kepler wrote one full of deep scientific ideas… wrote… The Discovery of a New World. They did not draw a line between science and fancy… they all tried to guess where… earth's gravity would stop. Only Kepler understood that gravity has no boundary, and put a law to it—… the wrong law.
All this was a few years before Isaac Newton was born, and it was all in his head that day in 1666, when he… came to conceive… that the moon is like a ball… thrown so hard that it falls exactly as fast as the horizon… he went on to calculate how long… the distant moon would take to round the earth… [T]he imagination that day chimed with nature, and made a harmony.”

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Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“[S]ymbols have a reach and a roundness that goes beyond their literal and practical meaning. They are the rich concepts under which the mind gathers many particulars into one name, and many instances into one general induction.”

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Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“[A]ll our symbols have the same purpose; words are merely the symbols we use most commonly. The function of words in human thought is to stand for things which are not present to the senses, and allow the mind to manipulate them—things, concepts, ideas, everything that does not have a physical reality in front of us now.”

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Jacob Bronowski

"The Imaginative Mind in Art" (1978)

“With the… symbolic memory we spell out the future—not one but many futures, which we weigh one against another.”

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Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“There is today almost no scientific theory which was held when, say, the Industrial Revolution began about 1760. Most often today's theories flatly contradict those of 1760; many contradict those of 1900. In cosmology, in quantum mechanics, in genetics, in the social sciences, who now holds the beliefs that seemed firm sixty years ago? Yet the society of scientists has survived these changes without a revolution, and honors the men whose beliefs it no longer shares. No one has recanted abjectly at a trial before his colleagues. The whole structure of science has been changed and no one has been either disgraced or deposed. Through all the changes of science, the society of scientists is flexible and single-minded together, and evolves and rights itself. In the language of science, it is a stable society.”

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Jacob Bronowski

as quoted in American Journal of Physics, 44(2), p176, 1976-02
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Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)

“Newton was born during Cromell's revolution in the troubled 1640s; he was eighteen at the Restoration in 1660; and he published the Principia during the intrigues which ended by bringing William of Orange to England in the revolution of 1688. These are the moments when the powerful or the forceful character feels the ferment of the times, when his thoughts quicken…”

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Jacob Bronowski

"The Scientific Revolution and the Machine"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

“The air in a man's lungs 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has ever lived — Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses.”

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Jacob Bronowski

The Reader's Digest (1964) Vol. 84; also quoted in Structure and Plan (1974) by Glen A. Love, p. 154

“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.”

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Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

Unidentified episode
The Ascent of Man (1973)

“I believe that the world is totally connected: that is to say, that there are no events anywhere in the universe which are not tied to every other event in the universe. …It is… an essential part of the methodology of science to divide the world for any experiment into… relevant and… irrelevant. We make a cut. We put the experiment… into a box. …the moment we do that, we do violence to the connections …I get a set of answers which I try to decode in this context. …I am certainly not going to get the world right, because the basic assumption that I have made about the world is a lie. …it is bound to give me only an approximation to what goes inside the fence. Therefore, when we practice science (and this is true of all our experience) we are always decoding a part of nature which is not complete. We simply cannot get out of our own finiteness.”

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Jacob Bronowski

The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)

“What we really mean by free will… is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them. …the central problem of human consciousness depends on this ability to imagine.”

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Jacob Bronowski

The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)

“The language of ideas creates a different universe: a universe which has multiplied the monkey's vocabulary of forty words to the million words in the English dictionary.”

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Jacob Bronowski

"The Imaginative Mind in Art" (1978)

“In every age there is a turning point, a new way of seeing and asserting the coherence of the world. It is frozen in the statues of Easter Island that put a stop to time—and in the medieval clocks of Europe that once also seemed to say the last word about the heavens for ever. Each culture tries to fix its visionary moment, when it was transformed by a new conception either of nature or of man. But in retrospect, what commands our attention as much are the continuities—the thoughts that run or recur from one civilization to another.”

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Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

Source: The Ascent of Man (1973), Ch. 1 Lower than the Angels.

“[I]magination… is the faculty… the common root from which science and literature… spring and grow and flourish together. …the great ages of science are the great ages of all the arts… [P]owerful minds have taken fire from one another… without asking… to tie their imagination to falling balls or a haunted island. …When Galileo was looking through his telescope at the moon, Shakespeare was writing The Tempest and all Europe was in ferment, from Johannes Kepler to Peter Paul Rubens, and from the first table of logarithms by John Napier to the Authorized version of the Bible.”

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Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“The strength of the imagination, its enriching power and excitement, lies in its interplay with reality—physical and emotional.”

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Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.”

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Jacob Bronowski

Part 1: "The Creative Mind", §9 (p. 20)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)

“Imagination is the manipulation of images in one's head… the rational manipulation… as well as the literary and artistic manipulation.”

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Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)