“The whole idea of science is really to listen to nature, in her own language, as part of a continuing dialogue.”
Source: Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987), Ch.32 Hidden Harmonies
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Frank Wilczek 49
physicist 1951Related quotes
“Science is about continuity of ideas, a web of connections.”
“A Scientist’s Notebook: Life on Mars?” in Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1997, p. 119
“The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.”
Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Part I : Contemporary Issues in Science, Ch. 1 : "The Scientist as Rebel"
The Scientist As Rebel (2006)
Context: The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A reductionist philosophy, arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go only in one direction, makes no scientific sense. Indeed, dogmatic philosophical beliefs of any kind have no place in science.
Remarks after the Solvay Conference (1927)
Context: I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.
Philo to Cleanthes, Part XI
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)
Context: Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children!
Source: The Nature and Authority of Scripture (1995), p. 20
Context: The famous Rgveda text, "One is the Truth, the sages speak of it differently" (1.64.46), is often employed to explain away doctrinal differences as merely semantic ones. The point of this text, as its context makes quite clear, is not really to dismiss the significance of the different ways in which we speak of the One or to see these ways as equally valid. The text is really a comment on the limited nature of human language. Such language must by nature be diverse in its attempts to describe that which is One and finally indescribable. The text, however, is widely cited in ways that seem to make interreligious dialogue redundant.
Jay Lemke (2003), "Teaching all the languages of science: Words , symbols, images and actions," p. 3; as cited in: Scott, Phil, Hilary Asoko, and John Leach. "Student conceptions and conceptual learning in science." Handbook of research on science education (2007): 31-56.
Source: New Year, New Resolution https://www.cookislandsnews.com/opinion/editorials/new-year-new-resolution/ (7 January 2022)