Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Context: The purpose of science in understanding who we are as humans is not to rob us of our sense of mystery, not to cure us of our sense of mystery. The purpose of science is to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate that mystery. To always use it in a context where we are helping people in trying to resist the forces of ideology that we are all familiar with.
The Trouble With Testosterone (1997) ISBN 068483409X
Friends, Lovers, Chocolate, chapter 15.
The Sunday Philosophy Club series
“In each of us there dwells a mystery, and that mystery is the human personality.”
The Rights of Man and Natural Law (1943), p. 2.
As quoted in Humphry Davy : Science & Power (1998) by David Knight, p. 87
Quote, c. 1910; as cited by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 112
1910 - 1915
"Rectify the Party's Style of Work" (1942)
Progress In Religion (2000)
Context: I am saying to modern scientists and theologians: don't imagine that our latest ideas about the Big Bang or the human genome have solved the mysteries of the universe or the mysteries of life. Here are Bacon's words again: "The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding". In the last four hundred years, science has fulfilled many of Bacon's dreams, but it still does not come close to capturing the full subtlety of nature.
Variants:
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature, for in the final analysis we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve.
Source: Where is Science Going? (1932)
