“Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.”

C 23
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook C (1772-1773)

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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg137

German scientist, satirist 1742–1799

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“No doubt that there are laws in science, the discovery of which depended on the abilities and diligence of its discoverers, without whom, perhaps, they would still remain a mystery.”

Zafar Mirzo (1972)

“Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud, also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level — man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Existence (1958), p. 36; also published in The Discovery of Being : Writings in Existential Psychology (1983), Part II : The Cultural Background, Ch. 5 : Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud, p. 87

“From its earliest days, science has been embedded in society, there has been a continuous learning process in society as a whole, based on day to day experiences and this can become the body of the knowledge from which applications and understanding have grown. … Everything on earth has to function in harmony as a system, and it is only in such a system that humanity can flourish.”

Mambillikalathil Govind Kumar Menon (1928–2016) Indian physicist

in Impact of Advances in science and new technologies on society http://www.here-now4u.de/eng/impact_of_advances_in_science_.htm, 1998.

“Of all the sciences, astronomy was the one the superstitious liked least.”

Ken MacLeod book Learning the World

Source: Learning the World (2005), Chapter 4 “A Moving Point of Light” (p. 51)

“Pure mathematics proves itself a royal science both through its content and form, which contains within itself the cause of its being and its methods of proof. For in complete independence mathematics creates for itself the object of which it treats, its magnitudes and laws, its formulas and symbols.”

Christian Heinrich von Dillmann (1829–1899) German educationist

Source: Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 94.

“[H]ow much of the fundamentals of Astronomy may be obtained with the coarsest observation with the unaided eye. …the science which is thus obtained by personal observations is vastly superior (as far as it goes) to that which is obtained by any other method. …The knowledge …inferred from actual personal observation carries with it a degree of reality and certainty, as the veritable science of external objects, which nothing else can give.”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Introduction
Popular Astronomy: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Ipswich (1868)

“How are we to survive? Solemnity is not the answer, any more than witless and irresponsible frivolity is. I think our best chance lies in humor, which in this case means a wry acceptance of our predicament. We don't have to like it but we can at least recognize its ridiculous aspects, one of which is ourselves.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

Commencement address at his daughter Linell's boarding school, as quoted http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/05/AR2005050501359_pf.html in The Washington Post (8 May 2005) <br class="br">Context: Among other things I think humor is a shield, a weapon, a survival kit... So here we are several billion of us, crowded into our global concentration camp for the duration. How are we to survive? Solemnity is not the answer, any more than witless and irresponsible frivolity is. I think our best chance lies in humor, which in this case means a wry acceptance of our predicament. We don't have to like it but we can at least recognize its ridiculous aspects, one of which is ourselves.

“Today, as we are coming to understand better the circular processes through which culture is developed and transmitted, we recognize that man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him. Learning, which is based on human dependency, is relatively simple. But human capacities for creating elaborate teachable systems, for understanding and utilizing the resources of the natural world, and for governing society and creating and creating imaginary worlds all these are very complex. In the past, men relied on the least elaborate part of the circular system, the dependent learning by children, for continuity of transmission and for the embodiment of the new. Now, with our greater understanding of the process, we must cultivate the most flexible and complex part of the system; the behavior of adults. We must, in fact, teach ourselves how to alter adult behavior so that we can give up postfigurative upbringing, with its tolerated configurative components, and discover prefigurative ways of teaching and learning. We must create new models for adults who can teach their children not what to learn but how to learn and not what they should be committed to, but the value of commitment.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

1970s, Culture and commitment, 1970

“Definite portions of a manifoldness, distinguished by a mark or by a boundary, are called Quanta. Their comparison with regard to quantity is accomplished in the case of discrete magnitudes by counting, in the case of continuous magnitudes by measuring. Measure consists in the superposition of the magnitudes to be compared; it therefore requires a means of using one magnitude as the standard for another. In the absence of this, two magnitudes can only be compared when one is a part of the other; in which case also we can only determine the more or less and not the how much. The researches which can in this case be instituted about them form a general division of the science of magnitude in which magnitudes are regarded not as existing independently of position and not as expressible in terms of a unit, but as regions in a manifoldness.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry (1873)

“For me, I think the greatest achievements of science is to allow humanity to realize that our world is comprehensible. Through science, rational thinking, we can understand how the universe works.”

Jim Al-Khalili (1962) British theoretical physicist, author and broadcaster

“Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.”

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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg137

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