“The history of science—especially physics—has in part been the tension between the natural tendency to project our everyday experience on the universe and the universe's noncompliance…”
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
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Carl Sagan 365
American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science ed… 1934–1996Related quotes
“Experience, the universal Mother of Sciences.”
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book III, Ch. 7.
volume I; lecture 3, "The Relation of Physics to Other Sciences"; section 3-7, "How did it get that way?"; p. 3-10
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)
Context: A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the Earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange arrays of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!
[describing the view of Husserl] p. 164
One-Dimensional Man (1964)
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
The Believer interview (2013)
Context: Yeah, our view of reality, the one we conventionally take, is one among many. It’s pretty much a fact that our entire universe is a mental construct. We don’t actually deal with reality directly. We simply compose a picture of reality from what’s going on in our retinas, in the timpani of our ears, and in our nerve endings. We perceive our own perception, and that perception is to us the entirety of the universe. I believe magic is, on one level, the willful attempt to alter those perceptions. Using your metaphor of an aperture, you would be widening that window or changing the angle consciously, and seeing what new vistas it affords you.
[Former ASP Executive Director Andrew Fraknoi Named 2007 California Professor of the Year, https://www.astrosociety.org/news/fraknoi.html, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 18 January 2018]
Science and the Unseen World (1929), VIII, p.83