“Understanding is, after all, what science is all about — and science is a great deal more than mindless computation.”

As quoted in The Golden Ratio : The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number (2002) by Mario Livio, p. 201.

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Roger Penrose15

English mathematical physicist, recreational mathematician … 1931

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Context: But what I really believe is that both he and Mr Wong are innocently guilty of the twentieth century fallacy that technology can be applied to the conduct of human affairs. They cannot believe that anything can work efficiently unless it has been programmed by a computer and have lost faith in the forces of the market and the human actions and reactions that make it up. But no computer has yet been devised which will produce accurate results from a diet of opinion and emotion. We suffer a great deal today from the bogus certainties and precisions of the pseudo-sciences which include all the social sciences including economics. An article I recently read referred to the academic’s “infernal economic arithmetic which ignores human responses”. Technology is admirable on the factory floor but largely irrelevant to human affairs.

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Source: Introductory lecture to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQLUPjefuWA

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Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

"Physics and Reality" in the Journal of the Franklin Institute Vol. 221, Issue 3 (March 1936)
Variant translation: "The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking." As it appears in the "Physics and Reality" section of the book "Out of My Later Years" by Albert Einstein (1950)
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“Understanding is, after all, what science is all about — and science is a great deal more than mindless computation.”

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Roger Penrose15

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