
“Symbols have the unfortunate power to acquire the importance of what they symbolise.”
Source: Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002), Chapter 4, “Symbols” (p. 19)
Source: Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002), Chapter 4, “Symbols” (p. 19)
“Symbols have the unfortunate power to acquire the importance of what they symbolise.”
Source: Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002), Chapter 4, “Symbols” (p. 19)
“It's very nice to be right sometimes … it has certainly been a long wait.”
In a press conference asked whether he felt a sense of vindication.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jul/06/prof-higgs-nice-right-boson
Source: https://www.news.com.au/national/nice-to-be-right-says-peter-higgs-about-bosun-discovery/news-story/f87c237d7b51c8e067ed94e97ed0eb65
Science and the Unseen World (1929)
Context: If to-day you ask a physicist what he has finally made out the æther or the electron to be, the answer will not be a description in terms of billiard balls or fly-wheels or anything concrete; he will point instead to a number of symbols and a set of mathematical equations which they satisfy. What do the symbols stand for? The mysterious reply is given that physics is indifferent to that; it has no means of probing beneath the symbolism. To understand the phenomena of the physical world it is necessary to know the equations which the symbols obey but not the nature of that which is being symbolised.... this newer outlook has modified the challenge from the material to the spiritual world.<!--III, p.30
p 110
The Undiscovered Self (1958)
Context: We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i. e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.