“Old answers never perfectly suit new questions, except in the most formal, logical circumstances.”

— Marvin Minsky

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

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Marvin Minsky 65

American cognitive scientist 1927–2016

John Fowles book The Magus

Source: The Magus

“After the new forms are introduced into the language, it is possible to formulate with their help internal questions and possible answers to them. A question of this kind may be either empirical or logical; accordingly a true answer is either factually true or analytic.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Source: Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology (1950), Ch. 3. What does acceptance of a kind of entities mean?

“It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.”

Cory Doctorow book For the Win

Source: For the Win

“Computational reducibility may well be the exception rather than the rule: Most physical questions may be answerable only through irreducible amounts of computation. Those that concern idealized limits of infinite time, volume, or numerical precision can require arbitrarily long computations, and so be formally undecidable.”

Stephen Wolfram (1959) British-American computer scientist, mathematician, physicist, writer and businessman

[Undecidability and intractability in theoretical physics, Physical Review Letters, 54, 8, 1985, 735–738, 10.1103/PhysRevLett.54.735, https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/undecidability-intractability-theoretical-physics.pdf]

“Superstring theory starts off by proposing a new answer to an old question: what are the smallest, indivisible constituents of matter?”

Brian Greene book The Fabric of the Cosmos

The Fabric of the Cosmos : Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (2004), p. 17
Context: Superstring theory starts off by proposing a new answer to an old question: what are the smallest, indivisible constituents of matter? For many decades, the conventional answer has been that matter is composed of particles... that can be modeled as dots that are indivisible and that have no size and no internal structure. Conventional theory claims, and experiments confirm, that these particles combine in various ways to produce protons, neutrons, and a wide variety of atoms and molecules... Superstring theory tells a different story.... it does claim that these particles are not dots. Instead... every particle is composed of a tiny filament of energy, some hundred billion billion times smaller than a single atomic nucleus, which is shaped like a string. And just as a violin string can vibrate in different patterns, each of which produces a different musical tone, the filaments of superstring theory can also vibrate in different patterns. But these vibrations... produce different particle properties.... All species of particles are unified in superstring theory since each arises from a different vibrational pattern executed by the same underlying entity.

“Remember, an easy question can have an easy answer. But a hard question must have a hard answer. And for the hardest questions of all, there may be no answer - except faith.”

Charles Sheffield book Brother to Dragons

Source: Brother to Dragons

“Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988)

“Hamm: Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!”

Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) Irish novelist, playwright, and poet

Endgame (1957)

“It is an odd circumstance that neither the old nor the new, by itself, is interesting; the absolutely old is insipid; the absolutely new makes no appeal at all. The old in the new is what claims the attention,—the old with a slightly new turn.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Chapter XI: Attention http://books.google.com/books?id=U6ETAAAAYAAJ&q=%22It+is+an+odd+circumstance+that+neither+the+old+nor+the+new+by+itself+is+interesting+the+absolutely+old+is+insipid+the+absolutely+new+makes+no+appeal+at+all+The+old+in+the+new+is+what+claims+the+attention+the+old+with+a+slightly+new+turn%22&pg=PA108#v=onepage
1910s, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (1911)

“Old questions are not answered—they only go out of fashion.”

Donald A. Schön (1930–1997) American academic

Schon (1971, 42) cited in: William G. Weissert, ‎Carol S. Weissert (2012) Governing Health: The Politics of Health Policy. p. 296

“Old answers never perfectly suit new questions, except in the most formal, logical circumstances.”

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