
“An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.”
Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 11 (p. 104)
Page 2.38
The Dark Side of the Universe, 2007
“An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.”
Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 11 (p. 104)
"Loop Quantum Gravity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)
“Admitting you are a nature poet, nowadays, may make you seem something of a fool!”
Baler Twine
George Gamow, in his autobiography My World Line: An Informal Autobiography (1970), p. 44. Here the "cosmological term" refers to the cosmological constant in the equations of general relativity, whose value Einstein initially picked to ensure that his model of the universe would neither expand nor contract; if he hadn't done this he might have theoretically predicted the universal expansion that was first observed by Edwin Hubble.
Attributed in posthumous publications
Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. xiv
Context: The role of religion is to integrate the Cosmology and the Morality, to render the cosmological narrative so rich and compelling that it elicits our allegiance and our commitment to its emergent moral understandings. As each culture evolves, a unique Cosmos and Ethos appear in its co-evolving religion. For billions of us, back to the first humans, the stories, ceremonies, and art associated with our religions-of-origin are central to our matrix.
I stand in awe of these religions. I am deeply enmeshed in one of them myself. I have no need to take on the contradictions or immiscibilities between them, any more that I would quarrel with the fact that Scottish bagpipes coexist with Japanese tea ceremonies.
“Cosmology is peculiar among the sciences for it is both the oldest and the youngest.”
"Theories of the Universe" (10 Apr 1958)
Context: Cosmology is peculiar among the sciences for it is both the oldest and the youngest. From the dawn of civilization man has speculated about the nature of the starry heavens and the origin of the world, but only in the present century has physical cosmology split away from general philosophy to become an independent discipline.
Remarks at the Monogahela House (14 February 1861); as published in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953) by Roy P. Basler, vol. 4, p. 209
1860s