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James Burke citations
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James Burke est historien de la science britannique, né en 1936.

✵ 22. décembre 1936
James Burke photo
James Burke: 39 citations0 J'aime

James Burke: Citations en anglais

“… Any one of a million things could fail and cause our complex civilization to collapse for an hour, for a day, or however long. That's when you find out the extent to which you are reliant on technology and don't even know it. That's when you see that it's so interdependent, that if you take one thing away, the whole thing falls down and leaves you with nothing.”

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James Burke (science historian)

Connections (1979), 1 - The Trigger Effect

“… That's all it takes to get you back to the late 18th century. Three grandfather's lifetimes. That's how close we are to it. And, yet, that world has disappeared so totally, it's like fairyland. Thatched cottages, meadows, happy peasants. A golden age. Garbage, all that. Nasty, brutish, and short - that's what life was all about. And dirty. And boring. And it had been like that for thousands of years! And then, suddenly, the whole complex polluted overpopulated phrenetic nonstop stressful high tech rat race that is the modern world… Life was suddenly no longer as simple as it had been. And the extraordinary thing is, none of that was planned.”

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James Burke (science historian)

Connections 2 (1994), 1 - Revolutions

“Television tells us everyday that we live in a world we don't understand. And yet in the main it does little to explain that world. It tells us of new products that make the products we have either old-fashioned or obsolete. Above all, if today we are aware of how fast the world around us is changing, it's because television acts as a relentless reminder of that fact.”

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James Burke (science historian)

Connections (1979), 9 - Countdown

“Closing monologue”

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James Burke (science historian)

The Day the Universe Changed (1985), 10 - Worlds Without End

“Aware that there is no single privileged way of doing things.”

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James Burke (science historian)

The Day the Universe Changed (1985), 10 - Worlds Without End

“You might end the regimentation of people, living and working in vast unmanageable cities. Uniting them instead in an electronic community, where the Himalayas and Manhattan were only a split second apart.”

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James Burke (science historian)

The Day the Universe Changed (1985), 10 - Worlds Without End

“You might be able to give everybody unhindered, untested access to knowledge. Because the computer would do the day-to-day work — for which we once qualified the select few — in an educational system originally designed for a world where only the few could be taught.”

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James Burke (science historian)

The Day the Universe Changed (1985), 10 - Worlds Without End

“But, ironically, the latest product of that way of doing things is a new instrument — a new system — that while it could make conformity more rigid, more totalitarian, than ever before in history, could also blow everything wide open. Because with it, we could operate on the basis that values and standards — and ethics and facts and truth — all depend on what your view of the world is — and that there may be as many views of that, as there are people.”

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James Burke (science historian)

The Day the Universe Changed (1985), 10 - Worlds Without End

“Karnak was the first great statement of what technology could do with unlimited manpower and the approval of the gods. Ironically, the modern equivalent lies, again, in the desert. This time, the nomads also settled by a river… a river of oil. But what had took the pharaohs 4,000 years to build took the Kuwaitis 4,000 days.”

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James Burke (science historian)

What's happened in Kuwait, the change from a nomadic existence to being able to buy and use everything modern technology has to offer has come in much less than one generation. Kuwait represents the immense power of technology used in a way most of us have never experienced, because we've lived with the kind of change it can bring for more than a hundred years. Here it's been focused. Change has been instant and total. Kuwait has suddenly become like New York, or any other of the great urban islands on technology, totally dependent on that technology. Like them, without it, Kuwait would return to the desert.
Connections (1979), 1 - The Trigger Effect

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