“Science... the ways it does its calculating that approximately nobody going in at a basic level can gain any sense of the whole.”

— Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Buckminster Fuller Talks Politics (1982)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

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Buckminster Fuller 171

American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inv… 1895–1983

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“Since fresh examples and proofs could always be found of the alleged relation between guilt and punishment: if you behave in such and such a way, it will go badly with you. Now, as it generally does go badly, the allegation was constantly confirmed; and thus popular morality, a pseudo- science on a level with popular medicine, continually gained ground.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 26 (cf. Daybreak, § 11)

“If you sense a deep human need, then you go back to all the basic science. If there is some missing, then you try to do more basic science and applied science until you get it.”

Edwin H. Land (1909–1991) American scientist and inventor

As quoted in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 146, no. 1, (March 2002), p. 115
Context: If you sense a deep human need, then you go back to all the basic science. If there is some missing, then you try to do more basic science and applied science until you get it. So you make the system to fulfill that need, rather than starting the other way around, where you have something and wonder what to do with it.

“We have to realize that the way of thinking that got us to this place no longer holds. We have to rethink elements as basic as space and time, to go all science fictiony [sic] on you in this sense.”

Justin Trudeau (1971) 23rd Prime Minister of Canada; eldest son of Pierre Trudeau

Source: Speaking to university students in September 2014. http://www.torontosun.com/2014/09/21/justin-is-beyond-infinity

“Any problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection.”

David Wheeler (computer scientist) (1927–2004) British computer scientist

Attributed to David Wheeler by Butler Lampson in his Turing Lecture https://web.archive.org/web/20070221210039/http://research.microsoft.com/Lampson/Slides/TuringLecture.doc (17 February 1993)
Lampson uses the phrase without attribution in Authentication in distributed systems: theory and practice https://doi.org/10.1145/138873.138874 (November 1992)

“If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference. But absent near-omniscience there’s no way to know when that is. You can only make your best approximate calculation. You can only make your throw and try to puzzle out the results afterward.”

Ann Leckie book Ancillary Justice

Source: Ancillary Justice (2013), Chapter 10 (p. 153)

“I have taken the stand that nobody can be always wrong, but it does seem to me that I have approximated so highly that I am nothing short of a negative genius.”

Charles Fort (1874–1932) American writer

Source: Wild Talents (1932), Ch. 27

“The traditional sciences … constitute … a preparation for a higher knowledge and a way of approach to it, and by virtue of their hierarchical arrangement according to the levels of existence to which they refer, they form, as it were, so many rungs by which it is possible to climb to the level of pure intellectuality. It is only too clear that modern sciences cannot in any way serve either of these purposes; this is why they can be no more than “profane science,” whereas the traditional sciences … are effectively incorporated in “sacred science.””

René Guénon (1886–1951) French metaphysician

Source: The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), pp. 65-66

“Sometimes one can improve the theories in the sense of discovering a quicker, more efficient way of doing a given calculation.”

John Pople (1925–2004) Nobel prize winning British chemist

describing his discoveries in Density functional theory, December 29, 1995, in an interview with [István Hargittai, Magdolna Hargittai, Candid science: conversations with famous chemists, Volume 1 of Candid science, Imperial College Press, 2000, 1860942288, 180]

“If philosophy does not resolve any scientific problem, science, in its turn, does not resolve any philosophical problem.”

Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913–1994) Colombian writer and philosopher

Sucesivos Escolios a un Texto Implícito (1992)

“There is a strong current in contemporary culture advocating ‘holistic’ views as some sort of cure-all… Reductionism implies attention to a lower level while holistic implies attention to higher level. These are intertwined in any satisfactory description: and each entails some loss relative to our cognitive preferences, as well as some gain… there is no whole system without an interconnection of its parts and there is no whole system without an environment.”

Francisco Varela (1946–2001) Chilean biologist

Varela (1977) "On being autonomous: The lessons of natural history for systems theory. In: George Klir (ed.) Applied Systems Research. New York: Plenum Press. p. 77-85 as cited in: D. Rudrauf (2003) " From autopoiesis to neurophenomenology: Francisco Varela's exploration of the biophysics of being http://www.scielo.cl/pdf/bres/v36n1/art05.pdf". In: Biol Res 36: 27-65

“Science... the ways it does its calculating that approximately nobody going in at a basic level can gain any sense of the whole.”

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Buckminster Fuller 171

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