Quotes about scientist
page 7

“The scientist states that pressure is exerted outwards in all directions equally, whereas natural pressure (e. g. air pressure) is exerted inwards from all directions equally.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Implosion Magazine, No. 114, p. 29 (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine

Nature

“Modern science is characterized by its ever-increasing specialization, necessitated by the enormous amount of data, the complexity of techniques and of theoretical structures within every field. Thus science is split into innumerable disciplines continually generating new subdisciplines. In consequence, the physicist, the biologist, the psychologist and the social scientist are, so to speak, encapsulated in their private universes, and it is difficult to get word from one cocoon to the other.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 2. The Meaning of General Systems Theory, p. 29

Universe, Science

“Under Sharia law, apostasy is a crime punishable by death. So, reactions to non-belief include ostracization, severance of family support, abandonment, and other forms of maltreatment. In a society where the family is virtually everything in terms of social support and sustenance, family sanction is indeed the worse form of punishment for non-belief. The science is there. The scientists are there. But the popularizing scientific will is not. This is because scientists are afraid of backlash from religious establishments. Scientists do not want to disseminate scientific ideas in a way that they could be accused of blasphemy. Religious authorities are still very influential in Nigeria and will go to any length to suppress and neutralize any one promoting science in a way that puts religious claims into question. Science is still within the cocoon and control of religious authorities. Religion in Nigeria has yet to attain that liberalized state.”

Leo Igwe (1970) Nigerian human rights activist

An Interview with Dr. Leo Igwe — Founder, Nigerian Humanist Movement (2017)

Death, Family, Religion, Law

“Sometimes when I am alone in my beautiful apartments, brooding over these things and nursing my loneliness, I say to myself: "There are cases when success is a tragedy." There are moments when I regret my whole career, when my very success seems to be a mistake. I think that I was born for a life of intellectual interest. I was certainly brought up for one. The day when that accident turned my mind from college to business seems to be the most unfortunate day in my life. I think that I should be much happier as a scientist or writer, perhaps. I should then be in my natural element, and if I were doomed to loneliness I should have comforts to which I am now a stranger. That's the way I feel every time I pass the abandoned old building of the City College. The business world contains plenty of successful men who have no brains. Why, then, should I ascribe my triumph to special ability?”

Abraham Cahan book The Rise of David Levinsky

The Rise of David Levinsky (1917)

Life, Men, World, Beauty

“Programming languages on the whole are very much more complicated than they used to be: object orientation, inheritance, and other features are still not really being thought through from the point of view of a coherent and scientifically well-based discipline or a theory of correctness. My original postulate, which I have been pursuing as a scientist all my life, is that one uses the criteria of correctness as a means of converging on a decent programming language design—one which doesn’t set traps for its users, and ones in which the different components of the program correspond clearly to different components of its specification, so you can reason compositionally about it. […] The tools, including the compiler, have to be based on some theory of what it means to write a correct program.”

C. A. R. Hoare (1934) British computer scientist

Oral history interview http://hdl.handle.net/11299/107362 by Philip L. Frana, 17 July 2002, Cambridge, England; Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.

Life

“The way I really think is more like this "I am a scientist. I think the way to the truth is by investigation. I suspect that telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis and life after death do not exist because I have been looking in vain for them for 25 years. I have been wrong lots of times before and am not afraid of it."”

Susan Blackmore (1951) British writer and academic

Dr. Susan Blackmore http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Chapters/Kurtz.htm

Life, Death, Truth, Way

“Halley shattered their monopoly, beating them at their own game. A game that no scientist had ever played before: Prophecy. -S01E03”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014)
Variant: 'Halley shattered their monopoly, beating them at their own game. A game that no scientist had every played before: Prophecy.

Game

“Science fiction these days is only half a step ahead of science. Astrophysicists and scientists are working in the same way as science fiction writers. They’re working things out in their imagination based on the slim scientific facts that they know. Hawking imagines a black hole and then discovers the mathematics that support his theory, and new possibilities come to light. That’s the imaginative flair that scientists have to have. For me as a sci-fi writer, spinning those ideas in your mind brings you to the point where you dream in science fiction. Suddenly you think of something in the middle of the night, and it’s so vivid you don’t need to write it down because you know you’ll remember it in the morning. That’s what these books, Zero G, reflect: a vivid imagination.”

William Shatner (1931) Canadian actor, musician, recording artist, author, and film director

"William Shtner on Sci-Fi, Aging and the Environment" http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/08/22/in-the-magazine/shatner.html as interviewed by Jeanne Wolf, Saturday Evening Post, September/October 2017

Books, Dreams, Way, Imagination

“Bex shrugged. “You think anybody’s going to listen to a bunch of scientists? No offense. But nobody has so far.””

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Prologue (p. 6)
Evolution (2002)

Thinking

“Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. It differs, however, from most other branches of human activity in that not only are the pathways of scientific thought determined by the presuppositions of the scientists but their goals are the testing and revision of old presuppositions and the creation of new.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Mind and Nature, a necessary unity, 1988, p. 25

Religion, Art, Sleep, Science

“For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan or the Salmon in the Miramichi, this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence. We poison the caddis flies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die. We poison the gnats in a lake and the poison travels from link to link of the food chain and soon the birds of the lake margins become its victims. We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm leaf-earthworm-robin cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life — or death — that scientists know as ecology.”

Rachel Carson book Silent Spring

Source: Silent Spring (1962), p. 189

Life, Death, World, Food

“One of the characteristic features of Viennese life at this time was the continual, easy interaction of artists, writers, and thinkers with scientists.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

The Age of Insight (2012)

Life, Time

“Scientists and engineers changed the world.”

Regina E. Dugan (1963) American businesswoman, inventor, and technology developer

TED Talk, "From Mach-20 glider to Hummingbird Drone" (March 2012); also in Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2013) by Newton Lee

World, Change

“It is now fifty years since Woodrow Wilson wrote his brilliant essay on public administration.' It is a good essay to reread every so often; there is so much in it that sounds modern, so much that will hold permanently true… Political scientists owe Woodrow Wilson a debt of gratitude for opening their eyes to the broader importance and implications of administration. His keen mind also discerned the task which would occupy the attention of administrative theorists long after he was gone.”

Marshall E. Dimock (1903–1991) American writer

Source: "The Study of Administration." 1937, p. 28

Gratitude

“When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. […] The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. […] The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

You and Your Research (1986)

Way, Error, Problem, Tree

“Hans had courage to burn. If he had been willing to knuckle under to the Nazis he would have stayed at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. But Hans was a scientist. He wouldn’t trim his notion of truth to fit political gangsters.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Rocket Ship Galileo

Source: Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), Chapter 4, “The Blood of Pioneers”, p. 34

Truth, Courage

“Scientists refuse to study astrology, not because of prejudice or because there is a conspiracy afoot, but simply because there is not a shred of evidence that would justify the expenditure of valuable time from a career.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 5, “Pseudoscience: What Some People Do Isn’t Science” (p. 93)

Study, Time

“Our single greatest defense against scientific ignorance is education, and early in the life of every scientist, the child's first interest was sparked by a teacher.”

Peter Agre (1949) American chemist, recipient of Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Peter Agre's speech at the Nobel Banquet http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2003/agre-speech-e.html, December 10, 2003

Life, Education, Teachers

“For hundreds of years the Bible was the standard, and whenever anything was asserted in any science contrary to-the Bible, the church immediately denounced the scientist. I admit the standard has been changed, and ministers are very busy, not trying to show that science does not agree with the Bible, but that the Bible agrees with science.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

A Christmas Sermon (1890)

Business, Science, Change

“I believe that only scientists can understand the universe. It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright (1978), p. 235
General sources

Confidence, Understanding, Universe

“"A natural scientist, examining a single atom, might well be able to asseverate the structure and history of the entire universe!"
Bah!" muttered Hurtiancz. "By the same token, a sensible man need listen to but a single word in order to recognize the whole for egregious nonsense."”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

Dying Earth (1950-1984), Rhialto the Marvellous (1984), "Morreion", Ch. 8

History, Nature, Universe

“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?”

C. P. Snow book The Two Cultures

Source: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), Pp. 15-16

People, Education, Law, Time

“Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist -- all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.”

Neil Postman book Amusing Ourselves to Death

Ch1: Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 12
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

Birth

“Ascending modern rationalism, in its speculative as well as empirical form, shows a striking contrast between extreme critical radicalism in scientific and philosophic method on the one hand, and an uncritical quietism in the attitude toward established and functioning social institutions. Thus Descartes' ego cogitans was to leave the “great public bodies” untouched, and Hobbes held that “the present ought always to be preferred, maintained, and accounted best.” Kant agreed with Locke in justifying revolution if and when it has succeeded in organizing the whole and in preventing subversion. However, these accommodating concepts of Reason were always contradicted by the evident misery and injustice of the “great public bodies” and the effective, more or less conscious rebellion against them. Societal conditions existed which provoked and permitted real dissociation. from the established state of affairs; a private as well as political dimension was present in which dissociation could develop into effective opposition, testing its strength and the validity of its objectives. With the gradual closing of this dimension by the society, the self-limitation of thought assumes a larger significance. The interrelation between scientific-philosophical and societal processes, between theoretical and practical Reason, asserts itself "behind the back” of the scientists and philosophers. The society bars a whole type of oppositional operations and behavior; consequently, the concepts pertaining to them are rendered illusory or meaningless. Historical transcendence appears as metaphysical transcendence, not acceptable to science and scientific thought. The operational and behavioral point of view, practiced as a “habit of thought” at large, becomes the view of the established universe of discourse and action, needs and aspirations. The “cunning of Reason” works, as it so often did, in the interest of the powers that be. The insistence on operational and behavioral concepts turns against the efforts to free thought and behavior from the given reality and for the suppressed alternatives.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 15-16

Behavior, Reality, Effort, Universe

“Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.</i”

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

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 11

Art, Nature

“From the creationist’s perspective, the method or mechanism of creation which these mystical beings use is nothing more than a golem spell where clay statues are animated with an enchantment. Or its an incantation in which complex modern plants and animals are "spoken" into being. That’s right, magic words which cause fully-developed adult animals to be conjured out of thin air. Or a god simply wishes them to exist; so they do. That’s it! There really is nothing more to it than that; pure freakin’ magic –by definition. Remember that the next time you hear anything from a creation “scientist.””

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnJX68ELbAY, Youtube (November 11, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

God, Time, Animals

“Scientists possess healthy skepticism. They realize that you've got to know the answer before you measure it.”

Robert E. Machol (1917–1998) American systems engineer

Source: Mathematicians are useful (1971), p. 1:

“We tend to think of [Hitler] as an idiot because the central tenet of his ideology was idiotic – and idiotic, of course, it transparently is. Anti-Semitism is a world view through a pinhole: as scientists say about a bad theory, it is not even wrong. Nietzsche tried to tell Wagner that it was beneath contempt. Sartre was right for once when he said that through anti-Semitism any halfwit could become a member of an elite. But, as the case of Wagner proves, a man can have this poisonous bee in his bonnet and still be a creative genius. Hitler was a destructive genius, whose evil gifts not only beggar description but invite denial, because we find it more comfortable to believe that their consequences were produced by historical forces than to believe that he was a historical force. Or perhaps we just lack the vocabulary. Not many of us, in a secular age, are willing to concede that, in the form of Hitler, Satan visited the Earth, recruited an army of sinners, and fought and won a battle against God. We would rather talk the language of pseudoscience, which at least seems to bring such events to order. But all such language can do is shift the focus of attention down to the broad mass of the German people, which is what Goldhagen has done, in a way that, at least in part, lets Hitler off the hook – and unintentionally reinforces his central belief that it was the destiny of the Jewish race to be expelled from the Volk as an inimical presence.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

God, People, Age, World

“... if scientists could get rid of the mental block which prevents them investigating a vast subject right under their noses, they could soon learn a great deal more than my wife and I are capable of doing.”

Thomas Charles Lethbridge (1901–1971) British explorer and archaeologist

The Legend of the Sons of God (1972) as quoted by William Shepherd, "The World of T.C.Lethbridge" (July, 2009)

Learning

“For the scientist a model is also a way in which the human though processes can be amplified. This method often takes the form of models that can be programmed into computers. At no point, however, the scientist intend to loose control of the situation because off the computer does some of his thinking for him. The scientist controls the basic assumptions and the computer only derives some of the more complicated implications.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach (1968), p. 61

Way, Thinking

“The imaginative artist willy-nilly influences his time. If he understands his responsibility and acts on it—taking the art seriously always, himself never quite—he can make a contribution equal to, if different from, that of the scientist, the politician, and the jurist. The anarchic artist so much in vogue now—asserting with vehemence and violence that he writes only for himself, grubbing in the worst seams of life—can do damage. But he can also be so useful in breaking up obsolete molds, exposing shams, and crying out the truth, that the broadest freedom of art seems to me necessary to a country worth living in.”

Herman Wouk (1915–2019) Pulitzer Prize-winning American author whose novels include The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War and War and …

“An Exclusive Interview with Herman Wouk,” Kirk Polking, Writer’s Digest (September 1966).

Life, Truth, Art, Imagination

“Real success in business is to be found in achievements comparable rather with those of the artist or the scientist, of the inventor or statesman. And the joys sought in the profession of business must be like their joys and not the mere vulgar satisfaction which is experienced in the acquisition of money, in the exercise of power or in the frivolous pleasure of mere winning.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

"Business — The New Profession", La Follette's Weekly Magazine, Volume 4, No. 47 (November 23, 1912), p. 7.
Extra-judicial writings

Money, Pleasure, Exercises, Business

“Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that ‘language’ themselves (just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs). Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Becker (1978) cited in: Peter Hamilton (2006) Visual Research Methods'. Volume 1. p. 214.

Music, Way, Understanding, Learning

“I believe – as many scientists – that excessive hygienisation of life is responsible for the development of allergies. We avoid contact with microorganisms, our children live in almost sterile conditions, we wash our hands every now and then. Our immune system hardly comes into contact with bacteria, but it is still in contact with other antigens. So, if the organism gets bored, then these other antigens, completely harmless – a protein of milk, fish, or even strawberries – start to be treated as enemies.”

Włodzimierz Ptak (1928–2019) immunologist

Mazurek, Maria (7 July 2017): Cudowna armia, która broni naszego ciała http://plus.gazetakrakowska.pl/magazyn/a/cudowna-armia-ktora-broni-naszego-ciala,12271571. Gazeta Krakowska (in Polish), pp. 18–19.

Life, Children, Fish

“The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

Source: Letters to a Young Scientist (2013), chapter 5, "The Creative Process", page 74.

Thinking

“You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a peculiar religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the religion of the naive man. For the latter God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one stands to some extent in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe. But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.”

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

1940s, The World As I See It (1949)

Life, God, Age, Fear

“A scientist who writes for a grant has to write subpar papers - so that the grant giver will understand what the paper is about.”

Janusz Korwin-Mikke (1942) polish politician

Source: blog, 8 February 2007

Understanding

“"When I published my book "The Origins of the Bulgarians" in 1907, from which it came out that the Bulgarians were something better than what was being thought of for them, I was declared a patriot and, therefore, which is outside the law. Everyone who criticized me has criticized me not in content, not because the data I have stated is untrue, but because I was a patriot who reported facts that the Bulgarians were both valiant and cultural when, in the opinion of my opponents, it was obvious that the Bulgarians were created by nature as a fertilizer on foreign fields … My chauvinism, proving that Thrace and Macedonia were old Bulgarian lands, threatened on the one hand Russia, which aspired to South Thrace as a hinterland of the Dardanelles and on the other hand - Pannonian Slavs who aspired to Thessaloniki. The opinion of Paninese Slavs was also supported by Bulgarian scientists.”

Gancho Tsenov (1870–1949) Bulgarian historian

Books, Law, Support, Nature

“The study of race differences in intelligence is an acid test case for psychology. Can behavioral scientists research this subject with the same freedom, objectivity, thoroughness, and scientific integrity with which they go about investigating other psychological phenomena? In short, can psychology be scientific when it confronts an issue that is steeped in social ideologies? In my attempts at self- analysis this question seems to me to be one of the most basic motivating elements in my involvement with research on the nature of the observed psychological differences among racial groups. In a recent article (Jensen, 1985b) I stated:I make no apology for my choice of research topics. I think that my own nominal fields of expertise (educational and differential psychology) would be remiss if they shunned efforts to describe and understand more accurately one of the most perplexing and critical of current problems. Of all the myriad subjects being investigated in the behavioral and social sciences, it seems to me that one of the most easily justified is the black- white statistical disparity in cognitive abilities, with its far reaching educational, economic, and social consequences. Should we not apply the tools of our science to such socially important issues as best we can? The success of such efforts will demonstrate that psychology can actually behave as a science in dealing with socially sensitive issues, rather than merely rationalize popular prejudice and social ideology.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

p. 258
Source: Differential Psychology: Towards Consensus (1987), pp. 438-9

Education, Behavior, Intelligence, Motivation

“As non-scientists, most gardeners deprived of atomic-ray spectrometers, a battery of reagents, and a few million research dollars must look to signs of health such as the birds, reptiles, worms, and plants of their garden-farm. For myself, in a truly natural garden I have come to expect to see, hear, and find evidence of abundant vertebrate life. This, and this alone, assures me that invertebrates still thrive there. I know of many farms where neither birds nor worms exist, and I suspect that their products are dangerous to all life forms.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 8.12

Life, Health, Nature, Bird

“Science has long been in the value business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best efforts to value principles of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument. This is how norms of rational thought are made effective… The answer to the question "What should I believe, and why should I believe it?"”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

is generally a scientific one.
Source: 2010s, The Moral Landscape (2010), p. 143–144

Question, Business, Reality, Effort

“Not long ago the head of what should be a strictly scientific department in one of the major universities commented on the odd (and ominous) phenomenon that persons who can claim to be scientists on the basis of the technical training that won them the degree of Ph. D. are now found certifying the authenticity of the painted rag that is called the "Turin Shroud" or adducing "scientific" arguments to support hoaxes about the "paranormal" or an antiquated religiosity. "You can hire a scientist [sic]," he said, "to prove anything." He did not adduce himself as proof of his generalization, but he did boast of his cleverness in confining his own research to areas in which the results would not perturb the Establishment or any vociferous gang of shyster-led fanatics. If such is indeed the status of science and scholarship in our darkling age, Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"The Price of the Head", Instauration magazine (March 1980)
1970s, 1980s

Age, Support, Universe, Science

“Since all of the possibilities of a terrestrial origin have been either ruled out or seem improbable, and since the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin has not been able to be ruled out, I must conclude that an ETI (ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) might have sent the signal that we received as the Wow! source. Of course, being a scientist, I await the reception of additional signals like the Wow! source that are able to be received and analyzed by many observatories. Thus, I must state that the origin of the Wow! signal is still an open question for me. There is simply too little data to draw many conclusions. In other words, as I stated above, I choose not to "draw vast conclusions from 'half-vast' data."”

Jerry R. Ehman American astronomer and astrophysicist

The Big Ear Wow! Signal : What We Know and Don't Know About It After 20 Years (1 September 1997); section: ETI

Intelligence, Question, Drawing

“The social scientist is in a difficult, if not impossible position. On the one hand there is the temptation to see all of society as one's autobiography writ large, surely not the path to general truth. On the other, there is the attempt to be general and objective by pretending that one knows nothing about the experience of being human, forcing the investigator to pretend that people usually know and tell the truth about important issues, when we all know from our lives how impossible that is. How, then, can there be a "social science"? The answer, surely, is to be less ambitious and stop trying to make sociology into a natural science although it is, indeed, the study of natural objects. There are some things in the world that we will never know and many that we will never know exactly. Each domain of phenomena has its characteristic grain of knowability. Biology is not physics, because organisms are such complex physical objects, and sociology is not biology because human societies are made by self-conscious organisms. By pretending to a kind of knowledge that it cannot achieve, social science can only engender the scorn of natural scientists and the cynicism of the humanists.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

Sex, Lies, and Social Science (1995)

People, Truth, World, Nature

“How will you construct the gun that will stand this strain? … you will enter the shell and detonate the explosive and start off at 7 miles a second. That is, you get a blow 50 times as hard as if struck by a Big Bertha shell. Clearly, you are flattened like a pancake. The bump is equal to a fall from a height of many thousands of miles …. This foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments …. all these errors could be easily avoided by correlative meetings of groups of different scientists investigating all kinds of cosmic problems. This is the work the Correlative Science Society, established by the Royal Botanic Society, has been attempting to do with most encouraging results.”

A.W. Bickerton (1842–1929) British scientist

From Scholar-Errant: A biography of Professor A.W. Bickerton, by R.M. Burdon, Pegasus Press, Christchurch, 1956, quoting an article by Bickerton in the Daily Mail, who was then apparently commenting on a plan by some Russian scientists to be launched to the moon from a large gun, a la Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon:

Error, Idea, Problem, Science

“The Machine Age’s commitment to cause and effect was the source of many dilemmas, including the one involving free will. At the turn of the century the American philosopher E. A. Singer, Jr., showed that science had, in effect, been cheating. It was using two different relationships but calling both cause and effect. He pointed out, for example, that acorns do not cause oaks because they are not sufficient, even though they are necessary, for oaks. An acorn thrown into the ocean, or planted in the desert or an Arctic ice cap does not yield an oak. To call the relationship between an acorn and an oak ‘probabilistic’ or ‘non deterministic causality,’ as many scientists did, was cheating because it is not possible to have a probability other than 1.0 associated with a cause; a cause completely determines its effect. Therefore, Singer chose to call this relationship ‘producer-product’ and to differentiate it from cause-effect.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1980s, Creating the Corporate Future, 1981, p. 224-225 as cited in: David Ing (2010) "The producer-product relation, and coproducers in systems theory". in the Coevolving blog, September 02, 2010.

Age, Science, Cheating

“Today we have great laboratories and individual research projects employing thousands of scientists, but the interrelation between these giant laboratories, and between them and the myriad of individual investigators, is still one of voluntary, and almost unconscious, co-operation. It is not based on central planning or hierarchic organization. But as any economist knows, the fact that there is no one who can give commands does not mean that there is no social organization.”

Gordon Tullock (1922–2014) American economist

The Organization of Inquiry (1966) Ch 1. The Social Organization of Science

“The scientist tries to understand the origin of our solar system, the structure of the universe and the laws governing the atom. He has discovered X rays, the radioactive substances, and he has built cyclotrons. He has foreseen the existence of electromagnetic and electronic waves. Out of his thought has grown the technique of our century. But not until today has he begun to notice that the earth on which he moves is covered with sweat and with blood and that in the world in which he lives "the son of man has nowhere to lay his head."”

Leopold Infeld (1898–1968) Polish physicist

Quest: An Autobiography [1941] (second edition, 1980), Book III, "Search and Research", p. 338

World, Law, Understanding, Universe

“Paul was a great theologian as well as a great saint and a heroic missionary, but we are not bound to imprison our minds in his theories. Newton was a great scientist, but it is no disparagement of Newton to realize that even schoolboys today know more than he did about atoms. Thought moves on in every field of inquiry.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.117

“We have a whole valley full of people talking UNIX versus MS-DOS. What do you need any of that for? Just throw it all out; get rid of all that nonsense. Maybe you need it for computer scientists, but for people who want to get something done, no. Do you need an operating system? No.”

Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist

Programmers At Work (1986)

People

“If we compare the third-person attitude of someone who simply says how things stand (this is the attitude of the scientist, for example) with the performative attitude of someone who tries to understand what is said to him (this is the attitude of the interpreter, for example), the implications … become clear. … First, interpreters relinquish superiority that observers have by virtue of their privileged position, in that they themselves are drawn, at least potentially, into negotiations about the meaning and validity of utterances. By taking part in communicative action, they accept in principle the same status as those whose utterances they are trying to understand. … It is impossible to decide a priori who is to learn from whom.”

Jürgen Habermas (1929) German sociologist and philosopher

Source: Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983), p. 26

Communication, Understanding, Learning, Parting

“Imagine how different our world would be if those discoveries had been explained and used for the benefit of everyone, if the humane perspective of Eratosthenes had been widely adopted and applied. But this was not to be. Alexandria was the greatest city the Western world had ever seen. People from all nations came here to live to trade to learn, on a given day these harbours were thronged with merchants and scholars and tourists, it's probably here that the word Cosmopolitan realised its true meaning of a citizen not just of a nation but of the Cosmos, to be a citizen of the Cosmos. Here were clearly the seeds of our modern world, but why didn't they take root and flourish why instead did the Western world slumber through a 1000 years of darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work done here? I cannot give you a simple answer but I do know this, there is no record in the entire history of the library that any of the illustrious scholars and scientists who worked here ever seriously challenged a single political or economic or religious assumption of the society in which they lived. The permanence of the stars was questioned, the justice of slavery was not.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

28 min 30 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Who Speaks for Earth? [Episode 13]

People, World, Justice, Imagination

“We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), XIII. Progress Through Revolutions, p. 170

Truth, Learning, Change

“Cognitivism bridges the chasm between what the writer C. P. Snow has called the "two cultures" — the widening gap between the world view of the scientist and the humanist. The Caltech philosopher W. T. Jones has called this the crisis of contemporary culture.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

New Mindset on Consciousness (1987)

World

“In the penultimate decade of the twentieth century science is sufficiently advanced to resolve the puzzles that stymied scientists in the last century and demonstrate, without metaphysical speculation, the consistency of evolution in all realms of experience. It is now possible to advance a general evolution theory based on unitary and mutually consistent concepts derived from the empirical sciences.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Evolution: the general theory (1996), p. 21 as cited in: Kingsley L. Dennis (2003) An evolutionary paradigm of social systems : An Application of Ervin Laszlo's General. Evolutionary Systems Theory to the Internet http://quigley.mab.ms/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/An-Evolutionary-Paradigm-of-Social-Systems-MA-Thesis.pdf.

Science

“Nothing can better express the feelings of the scientist towards the great unity of the laws of nature than in Immanuel Kant's words: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing awe: the stars above me and the moral law within me."… Would he, who did not yet know of the evolution of the world of organisms, be shocked that we consider the moral law within us not as something given, a priori, but as something which has arisen by natural evolution, just like the laws of the heavens?”

Konrad Lorenz book On Aggression

Source: On Aggression (1963), Ch. XII : On the Virtue of Scientific Humility

World, Law, Feeling, Star

“As Justice Stevens explains, “ ‘objective evidence, though of great importance, [does] not wholly determine the controversy, for the Constitution contemplates that in the end our own judgment will be brought to bear on the question of the acceptability of the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment.’ ” (quoting Atkins v. Virginia). “I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty” Purer expression cannot be found of the principle of rule by judicial fiat. In the face of Justice Stevens’ experience, the experience of all others is, it appears, of little consequence. The experience of the state legislatures and the Congress—who retain the death penalty as a form of punishment—is dismissed as “the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process.” The experience of social scientists whose studies indicate that the death penalty deters crime is relegated to a footnote. The experience of fellow citizens who support the death penalty is described, with only the most thinly veiled condemnation, as stemming from a “thirst for vengeance.””

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

It is Justice Stevens’ experience that reigns over all.
Baze v. Rees (2008) (concurring).
2000s

Death, Justice, Penalty, Quotes

“Historians whose profession is to study the past, are as wary as scientists of the idea that events unfold in a manner that can be predicted. In fact, in a study of history the illusion of inevitability has serious consequences that it is one of the few things that both conservative and socialist historians can agree on.”

Leonard Mlodinow book The Drunkard's Walk

Source: The Drunkard's Walk, Chapter 10, The Drunkard's Walk, p. 201

History, Idea, Study, Past

“You can be a doctor and I’ll still help you. You can be an engineer and I can help you. You can be a scientist and I’ll help you, whoever you are because I am not helping anything else. I am helping you! Peace on this Earth doesn’t begin by great ideas. Peace on Earth begins with you.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Kissimmee, Florida, November 10, 1978
1970s

Peace, Idea, Help

“As we shall see in this book's chapters, traditional societies are far more diverse in many of their cultural practices than are modern industrial societies. […] Yet psychologists base most of their generalizations about human nature on studies of our own narrow and atypical slice of human diversity. […] That is, as social scientists Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan express it, most of our understanding of human psychology is based on subjects who may be described by the acronym WEIRD: from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. […] Hence if we wish to generalize about human nature, we need to broaden greatly our study sample from the usual WEIRD subjects […] to the whole range of traditional societies.”

Jared Diamond book The World Until Yesterday

Prologue, section "Why study traditional societies?"
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012)

Books, Education, Understanding, Nature

“Keep stupid, keep crazy. Knowledge begins with wonder. Success as a scientist is based on keen curiosity. If one wants to enjoy academic life, I would recommend him or her to be different.”

Ryōji Noyori (1938) Japanese chemist

Ryōji Noyori (2018) cited in " Diverse culture, free environment keys for Nobel prizes: Nobel winner http://focustaiwan.tw/news/ast/201805090001.aspx" on Focus Taiwan, 9 May 2018.

Life, Stupidity, Knowledge, Success

“What I have discovered in 20 years of studying the universe, from here to there to everywhere, is that the universe is complicated, and when things happen, it is almost never like ‘A happened and therefore B’. No, A happened and therefore B, C, D and E, but then there is this thing F, and that had a 10% effect, and that prompted G to go back and tip over A, and it is always like this – everything is interconnected. And so a lot of these far-right fundamentalist religion people, and a lot of these people who are anti-global warming, anti-evolution, anti-science, what they do is they take advantage of the fact that things are complicated, and their lives are based on things being simple – if we do this, then this will happen – if we invade Iraq, we will be treated as liberators, if we pray, then good things will happen, and this stuff is wrong. But we have a culture where people are brought up to believe in simplicity, and if A then B. And so when you point out that scientists say the earth is warming, but we had a really devastating winter this year, then these people will say “oh, obviously global warming is wrong.””

Philip Plait (1964) astronomer, skeptic

No, global warming can cause worse winters locally. It’s complicated. But people don’t want to hear “it’s complicated”, and boy, the conspiracy theorists and anti-scientists take full advantage of that. Skepticality http://www.skepticality.com/index.php ep. 52 http://www.skepticality.com/notes/sn_Ep52.php (15 May 2007) 23:11 - 24:46 Interviews

People, Religion, Boy, Study

“The progress of science is tremendously disorderly, and the motivations that lead to this progress are tremendously varied, and the reasons why scientists go into science, the personal motivations, are tremendously varied. I have said … that science is a haven for freaks, that people go into science because they are misfits, and that it is a sheltered place where they can spin their own yarn and have recognition, be tolerated and happy, and have approval for it.”

Max Delbrück (1906–1981) biophysicist

Interview with Max Delbruck (1978), p. 87. Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives, Pasadena, California.

Happiness, People, Motivation, Science

“I have to say that I find Ali’s argument truly revolting—not just because it’s intellectually weak and actually deceptive, but because it debases the entire realm of university scholarship of which I’m a member. When I see pieces like hers—lame apologetics that are meant from the outset to reinforce an opinion already held—I thank Ceiling Cat that I am a scientist: a member of the guild in which using your scholarship to reinforce emotional commitments is considered a sin.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" At last it happens: a professor blames ISIS’s sex slavery on the West https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/08/23/at-last-it-happens-a-professor-blames-isiss-sex-slavery-on-the-west/" August 23, 2015

Cats, Universe

“I had barely sat down when he began to tell me… that science writers were "ignoramuses" and a "terrible breed" who invariably got things wrong: only scientists were really qualified to present their work to the masses. As time went on, I felt less offended, since it became clear that Gell-Mann held most of his scientific colleagues in contempt as well.”

John Horgan (journalist) (1953) American science journalist

Source: The End of Science (1996), p. 212

Science, Time

“Creationists often cite the laws of Thermodynamics as if they could somehow apply to the diversification of life on earth. They don’t. Lord Kelvin, the scientist who discovered those laws was a creationist himself. He was definitely opposed to evolution. But even he said that thermodynamics demands that the earth would still have to be on the order of twenty to forty million years old at least, even if the bowels of the world didn’t continue to heat themselves radioactively, which of course they do, and that pushes the age back much further.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"6th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3k0dDFxkhM, Youtube (February 2, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Life, Age, World, Law

“Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe … I don’t think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.”

Derek Walcott (1930–2017) Saint Lucian–Trinidadian poet and playwright

Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas are Born (Penguin, 1990), pp. 176

Art, Soul, Thinking, Science

“Of the so-called global theories the one initially stated and defined by Bertalanffy in 1947 under the title of "general systems theory" has taken hold… Since then he has refined, modified and applied his concepts, established a society for general systems theory and published a General Systems Yearbook. Many social scientists but only a handful of psychiatrists studied, understood or applied systems theory. Suddenly, under the leadership of Dr. William Gray of Boston, a threshold was reached so that at the 122nd annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in 1966 two sessions were held at which this theory was discussed and regular meetings for psychiatrists were ensured for future participation in and development of this "Unified Theory of Human Behavior."”

Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) American psychiatrist and neurologist

If there be a third revolution (i.e. after the psychoanalytic and behavioristic), it is in the development of a general theory.
Grinker, Helen MacGill Hughes (ed.) (1967) Towards a Unified Theory of Human Behaviour. 2e ed. New York, Basic Books. p. ix; cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) General System Theory. p. 7

Behavior, Study, Future

“If we deal with our problem not knowing, or pretending not to know the general theory encompassing the concrete case before us, if we tackle the problem "with bare hands", we have a better chance to understand the scientist's attitude in general, and especially the task of the applied mathematician.”

George Pólya (1887–1985) Hungarian mathematician

Mathematical Methods in Science (1977)

Understanding, Problem, Chance

“I must tell you that mathematicians are not scientists, they are artists…. Apart from the most elementary mathematics, like arithmetic or high school algebra, the symbols, formulas and words of mathematics have no meaning at all. The entire structure of pure mathematics is a monstrous swindle, simply a game, a reckless prank. You may well ask: "Are there no renegades to reveal the truth?" Yes, of course. But the facts are so incredible that no one takes them seriously. So the secret is in no danger.”

Theodore Kaczynski (1942) American domestic terrorist, mathematician and anarchist

The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLqrVCi3l6E Interviews

Truth, Secret, School, Game

““HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?”
That’s the question you should always ask believers when they make unsupported assertions, ranging from “God is loving” to “Our souls live on after death.” The answer will always be one of two things: “The Bible says so,” or “I just know it to be true.” Neither of those are rational answers, but they satisfy the religious.
It is in fact the “how-do-you-know-that” query that really distinguishes New Atheism from Old. While atheists have always decried the lack of evidence for theism, it is the infusion of scientists and science-friendly people into atheism, starting with Carl Sagan and continuing on to Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Pinker, and Dennett, that has made us realize that religious dogmas are in fact hypotheses, and you need reasons and evidence for accepting them. If you have none, then you have no reason to believe in God.
Nevertheless, religious dogma does change, but not because theology has found better reasons. It’s because a.) science has shown the dogma to be false (Genesis, Adam and Eve, creation, the Exodus, etc.) or b.) secular morality has shown that the tenets of religious belief are no longer supportable”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

hell as a place of fire, limbo, discrimination against gays, the Mormons’ refusal to let blacks be priests, etc. " Catholic official says that angels exist but are wingless http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/21/catholic-official-says-that-angels-exist-but-are-wingless/" December 21, 2013

Love, Death, God, People

“At this point in the dreadful story I am writing, I must interrupt for a moment and describe something that happened to a good friend of mine named Mr. Sirin. Mr. Sirin was a lepidoptrerist, a word which usually means "a person who studies butterflies." In this case, however, the word "lepidopterist" means "a man who was being pursued by angry government officials," and on the night I am telling you about they were right on his heels. Mr. Sirin looked back to see how close they were--four officers in their bright-pink uniforms, with small flashlights in their left hands and large nets in their right--and realized that in a moment they would catch up, and arrest him and his six favorite butterflies, which were frantically flapping alongside him. Mr. Sirin did not care much if he was captured--he had been in prison four and a half times over the course of his long and complicated life--but he cared very much about the butterflies. He realized that these six delicate insects would undoubtedly perish in bug prison, where poisonous spiders, stinging bees, and other criminals would rip them to shreds. So, as the secret police closed in, Mr. Sirin opened his mouth as wide as he could and swallowed all six butterflies whole, quickly placing them in the dark but safe confines of his empty stomach. It was not a pleasant feeling to have these six insects living inside him, but Mr. Sirin kept them there for three years, eating only the lightest foods served in prison so as not to crush the insects with a clump of broccoli or a baked potato. When his prison sentence was over, Mr. Sirin burped up the grateful butterflies and resumed his lepidoptery work in a community that was much more friendly to scientists and their specimens.”

Daniel Handler book The Hostile Hospital

Lemony Snicket
The Hostile Hospital (2001)

Life, Secret, Food, Feeling

“A scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences.”

Fritz Leiber book Conjure Wife

Source: Conjure Wife (1953), Chapter 3 (p. 39).

“I would like this house to join me in paying fulsome tribute to our scientists, engineers and defence personnel whose singular achievements have given us a renewed sense of national pride and self confidence.”

Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1924–2018) 10th Prime Minister of India

Extract from Suo Motto statement made in the Parliament, after India’s underground nuclear tests conducted on 11 May 1998.[Sujata K. Dass, Atal Bihari Vajpayee: Prime Minister of India, http://books.google.com/books?id=N8wnA7EtB0IC, 1 January 2004, Gyan Publishing House, 978-81-7835-277-0, 39]

Confidence, Sense, Housing, Self-confidence

“Did you know you can ask very simple questions to the scientists who claim that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago? You could say to them, in a very nice way of course, "Excuse me, were you there?" You are actually asking them, "Were you there to see the dinosaurs when they first came into existence? Were you there to see them alive? Were you there to see them die out?"”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Obviously, they weren't there, so how could they really know everything about them? Dinosaurs for Kids (2009), p. 14 http://books.google.com/books?id=_2AzUyAj0HQC&pg=PA14

Way, Question

“Natural selection, as it is actually used in evolutionary population biology, serves mainly as an optimization process. In fact, the reasoning that underlies much evolutionary biology often strikes social scientists as strongly reminiscent of neoclassical economics.”

Michael T. Hannan (1943) US-American sociologist of Stanford University

Source: Organizational ecology, 1989, p. 19

Optimism, Nature

“It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting machine. It will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the future. But even this new machine will not take the scientist where he needs to go. Relief must be secured from laborious detailed manipulation of higher mathematics as well, if the users of it are to free their brains for something more than repetitive detailed transformations in accordance with established rules.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

Mathematics, Future, Cry

“It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at this amazing creation and see the genius of the Creator. A child can know that. Your stumbling block isn't intellectual as you maintain… it's moral.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)

“Both science and history are moving targets. Scholars in the twenty-first century are much more aware than those of earlier generations that scientists operate under the influence of powerful metaphors (science as exploration, discovery, documentation, thrust and counterthrust), and that both the scope and the tools of history undergo continual changes. Still, most scientists and most historians would concur that the broad strokes I've sketched, when viewed from sufficient distance, are accurately rendered—that is, that science and history are each in pursuit of statements that represent the truths ascertained by their respective disciplines”

Howard Gardner (1943) American developmental psychologist

Howard Gardner (2011), Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the Age of Truthiness and Twitter, p. 26-27

Truth, History, Science, Change

“In all their polemics, the anti-creationists invariably avoid discussing the actual scientific evidence for macro-evolution. If there were any such evidence, they could easily settle the whole conflict, merely by presenting the evidence! Instead they seem compelled to resort to bombast ridicule, defamation, intimidation, and distortion. Surely that great body of working scientists, largely uninvolved so far in the creation/evolution conflict will soon begin to see that a two-model approach to all scientific study is salutary and will persuade their more emotional brethren to open their minds to potential truth wherever it might be found.”

Henry M. Morris (1918–2006) American young earth creationist and Christian apologist

" The Anti-Creationist http://www.icr.org/article/179/" (1981)

Truth, Study

“Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.”

Fritz Leiber book Poor Superman

Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1951, under the title "Appointment in Tomorrow".
Short Fiction, Poor Superman (1951)

Life

“I could just tell you it's all bunk; but then you wouldn't be empowered to understand why. Other than to quote, "Oh, Doctor Tyson said…" And I never want you to quote me citing my authority as a scientist for your knowing something. If that's what you have to resort to I have failed as an educator. As an educator, it's my duty to empower you to think. So that you can go forth and think accurate thoughts about how the world is put together. Inoculating you against the [people] out there who will exploit your ignorance on anything they possibly can.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Neil DeGrasse Tyson Debunks 2012 Armageddon http://www.tompainesghost.com/2010/06/neil-degrasse-tyson-debunks-2012.html after the James Webb telescope panel discussion in Battery Park at the World Science Festival, June 4th, 2010 2010s

People, World, Education, Quotes

“I am often asked if I would have liked to have been involved with Jurassic Park. The plain answer is no. Although excellent, it is not with all its dollars what I would have wished to do with my career. I was always a loner and worked best that way. Since the very beginning I fought and struggled under constant pressure to keep the design and final result within my hands. As time moved on this became more difficult, until I was forced to bow to the fact that my method of working, in the financial sense, was no longer practical. Model animation has been relegated to a reflection, or a starting point for creature computer effects that has reached a high few could have anticipated. However, for all the wonderful achievements of the computer, the process creates creatures that are too realistic and for me that makes them unreal because they have lost one vital element - a dream quality. Fantasy, for me, is realizing strange beings that are so removed from the 21st century. These beings would include not only dinosaurs, because no matter what the scientists say, we still don't know how dinosaurs looked or moved, but also creatures of the mind. Fantastical creatures where the unreal quality becomes even more vital. Stop-motion supplies the perfect breath of life for them, offering a look of pure fantasy because their movements are beyond anything we know.”

Ray Harryhausen (1920–2013) American animator

Ray Harryhausen & Tony Dalton (2003), An Animated Life, Aurum Press, p. 8

Life, Dreams, Way, Sense

“The decay of our culture since 1941 can be measured by the fact that academic historians today are no longer interested in historical truth or interested in it only marginally; what really interests them is jobs. They match the anthropologists and geneticists who, with practiced effrontery, can say that all races are equal and there is no difference between them. There are now 'scientists' who boast they are so versatile they can prove anything, for a suitable fee, while others abuse spectroscopes to prove that a painted rag is a 'Holy Shroud,' or use quantum mechanics to prove that the old Jew-god converted mud into Adam. 'Truth' is whatever pays the most. The academicians have conformed to what is now the American ethic. Whether any nation so decadent and depraved can or should survive is a question I am unwilling to consider.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"A World Grown Grey With Their Breath", Liberty Bell magazine (January 1988)
1970s, 1980s

God, Truth, Question, Painting

“There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XVIII, Section 5, p. 208

Thinking, Singing, Dependency

“Xiaomi, founded in Beijing in 2010 by Lei Jun, a computer scientist and charismatic serial entrepreneur now in his mid-forties, has accomplished a lot in half a decade. Even just looking at its sales figures, the superlatives pile up. In its short life, it has gone from a startup focused on making a new mobile phone interface to beating Samsung as the number one phone vendor in the largest market in the world in 2014. Its products are so popular in China that it has become the third largest ecommerce firm there just selling its own products, after the general marketplace sites Alibaba and JD. com, and ahead of Amazon. cn.”

Clay Shirky (1964) American technology writer

Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream (2015)

Life, World

“Logical positivism was progressive compared with the classical positivism of Ptolemy, Hume, d'Alembert, Compte, John Stuart Mill, and Ernst Mach. It was even more so by comparison with its contemporary rivals—neo-Thomisism, neo-Kantianism, intuitionism, dialectical materialism, phenomenology, and existentialism. However, neo-positivism failed dismally to give a faithful account of science, whether natural or social. It failed because it remained anchored to sense-data and to a phenomenalist metaphysics, overrated the power of induction and underrated that of hypothesis, and denounced realism and materialism as metaphysical nonsense. Although it has never been practiced consistently in the advanced natural sciences and has been criticized by many philosophers, notably Popper (1959 [1935], 1963), logical positivism remains the tacit philosophy of many scientists. Regrettably, the anti-positivism fashionable in the metatheory of social science is often nothing but an excuse for sloppiness and wild speculation.”

Mario Bunge (1919) Argentine philosopher and physicist

Mario Bunge (1996). Finding Philosophy in Social Science. Yale University Press. p. 317.
1960s-1990s

Faith, Fashion, Nature, Sense

“Demanding an “ape-man” is actually just as silly as asking to see a mammal-man, or a half-human, half-vertebrate. How about a half dachshund, half dog? It’s the same thing. One may as well insist on seeing a town half way between Los Angeles and California. Because the problem with bridging the gap between humans and apes is that there is no gap because humans are apes –definitely and definitively. The word, “ape” doesn’t refer to a species, but to a parent category of collective species, and we’re included. This is no arbitrary classification like the creationists use. It was first determined via meticulous physical analysis by Christian scientists a century before Darwin, and has been confirmed in recent years with new revelations in genetics. Furthermore, it is impossible to define all the characters exclusively indicative of every known member of the family of apes without describing our own genera as one among them. Consequently, we can and have proven that humans are apes in exactly the same way that lions are cats, and iguanas are lizards, and whales are mammals. So where is the proof that humans descend from apes? How about the fact that we’re still apes right now!”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"9th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfoje7jVJpU, Youtube (May 8, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Family, Dogs, Angels, Way

“The intention of not only the screenwriter, but also the entire production staff, was to focus on how people would react if a creature such as Godzilla really did appear. What would the politicians do? How about the scientists? How would the military handle the situation? Given this, it was inevitable that the film would seem at least somewhat like a documentary.”

Ishirō Honda (1911–1993) Japanese film director

As quoted by David Milner, "Ishiro Honda Interview" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/honda.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1992)

People, Appearance

“We define a fruitful partnership between our twin professions of librarian and information systems scientist in support of this adventure in creativity, and the pursuit of wisdom? If it is the nature of the creative mind that it sets out to grapple with the tensions and contradictions in the "paradigm", as Kuhn calls it, it follows that first of all one must know what the paradigm is.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Librarians and Information Systems (1995)

Wisdom, Support, Nature, Partnership

“the technical work of scientists is blind to nationalities, they overlap and mingle like sounds from different instruments in an orchestra to create and constitute the grand symphony that science is.”

Varadaraja V. Raman (1932) American physicist

page 13
Truth and Tension in Science and Religion

Science

“In their evolution, we see that the earliest pterosaurs were small, and yet still unnecessarily heavy and clumsy, both in the air and on the ground, but 160 million years of refinement has honed their abilities to the limit of incidental engineering. Despite their enormity, they were unbelievably lightweight; even the biggest ones were estimated at less than 500 lbs. They had hollow pneumatic bones of large diameter but only millimeters thick, making a strut-supported tubular frame that's surprisingly strong and highly resistant to the stresses of aeronautics. They also had extraordinarily powerful wing muscles, and this made them capable of vaulting airborne in a single bolt. Once in the air, muscle strands and tendons in the membrane of the wing itself worked with a network of pycnofibres to give them all the data they needed for subtle adjustments to the shape of the wing. The portions of the brain which were dedicated to flight, balance and visual gaze stabilization in birds are all larger and more adapted in pterosaurs. In fact, scientists are now convinced that these animals had such a mastery of flight, that the larger ones could even cross oceans, going 80 mph at 15,000 feet for thousands of miles on a single launch.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Pterosaurs are Terrible Lizards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_htQ8HJ1cA (December 3, 2013)

Support, Bird, Strong, Animals

“The wastage of the skills and talents of our capable young scientists is a disgrace to the world. The resources exist to put them all to work doing constructive things. Instead of that the substance of the earth is expanded on frivolities, on all kinds of power wasting devices and gas guzzling cars. Worst of all is the expenditure of technical expertise, energy and money on the arms race. Despite the wherewithal to wipe man off the face of the earth, ten times over, there is clamor to squander even more.”

Lawrence H. Aller (1913–2003) astronomer

Interview of Lawrence Hugh Aller by David DeVorkin at Montreal, Quebec, Canada, August 18, 1979 http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4481.html Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA.

Money, World, Cars, Time

“Viennese life at the turn of the century provided opportunities in salons and coffeehouses for scientists, writers, and artists to come together in an atmosphere that was at once inspiring, optimistic, and politically engaged. …science was no longer the narrow and restrictive province of scientists but had become an integral part of Viennese culture. …a paradigm for how an open dialogue can be achieved.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

The Age of Insight (2012)

Life, Science, Parting

“Let's be clear: all professions look bad in the movies. And there's a good reason for this. Movies don't portray career paths, they conscript interesting lifestyles to serve a plot. So lawyers are all unscrupulous and doctors are all uncaring. Psychiatrists are all crazy, and politicians are all corrupt. All cops are psychopaths, and all businessmen are crooks. Even moviemakers come off badly: directors are megalomaniacs, actors are spoiled brats. Since all occupations are portrayed negatively, why expect scientists to be treated differently?”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

"Ritual Abuse, Hot Air, and Missed Opportunities: Science Views Media" http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote01.html - Speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Anaheim, California (25 January 1999)

“This doctrine found wide acceptance among the nonconformist clergy who later made up the Congregational Church. The great apostle of this movement was the Reverend John Wise, of Massachusetts. He was one of the leaders of the revolt against the royal governor Andros in 1687, for which he suffered imprisonment. He was a liberal in ecclesiastical controversies. He appears to have been familiar with the writings of the political scientist, Samuel Pufendorf, who was born in Saxony in 1632. Wise published a treatise, entitled "The Church's Quarrel Espoused", in 1710, which was amplified in another publication in 1717. In it he dealt with the principles of civil government. His works were reprinted in 1772 and have been declared to have been nothing less than a textbook of liberty for our Revolutionary fathers.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

Suffering, Appearance

“Scientists are used to debating with one another about the finer points of new research. But increasingly, they find themselves battling their televisions and computer screens, which transmit ever-more-heated rhetoric from politicians, pundits, and other public figures who misinterpret, misrepresent, and malign scientific results.”

Lewis M. Branscomb (1926) physicist and science policy advisor

Lewis M. Branscomb and Andrew A. Rosenberg, " Science and Democracy http://the-scientist.com/2012/10/01/science-and-democracy" The Scientist, October 1, 2012.

“Well, he wasn't a relativist. There's a long and complicated story of the rise of a desire for scientific relativism. Part of it may well be simply sort of rage against reason, the fear of the sciences and a kind of total dislike of the arrogance of a great many scientists who say we're finding out the truth about everything—and here [with Kuhn] there was a way to undermine that arrogance.”

Ian Hacking (1936) Canadian philosopher

Ian Hacking, in Gary Stix, "A Q&A with Ian Hacking on Thomas Kuhn's Legacy as "The Paradigm Shift" Turns 50" (April 27, 2012)

Truth, Fear, Way, Rage

“I believe that robotic thinking helps precision of psychological thought, and will continue to help it until psychophysiology is so far advanced that an image is nothing other than a neural event, and object constancy is obviously just something that happens in the brain. That time is still a long way off, and in the interval I choose to sit cozily with my robot, squeezing his hand and feeling a thrill -- a scientist's thrill -- when he squeezes mine back again.”

Edwin Boring (1886–1968) American psychologist

Edwin Boring (1946). Mind and mechanism; Cited in: Melford E. Spiro (1992) Anthropological Other Or Burmese Brother?: Studies in Cultural Analysis.. p. 68

Way, Feeling, Thinking, Time

“Israel has extended its hand in peace from the moment it was established… In Israel our hope for peace never wanes. Our scientists, doctors, and innovators apply their genius to improve the world of tomorrow. Our artists, our writers, enrich the heritage of humanity. Now, I know that this is not exactly the image of Israel that is often portrayed…”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

2010s, 2011 Source: Address to the U.N. General Assembly https://web.archive.org/web/20130615172321/http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/pressroom/2011/pages/remarks_pm_netanyahu_un_general%20_assembly_23-sep-2011.aspx (23 September 2011).

World, Peace, Hope

Quotes about scientist page 7

Quotes about scientist
page 7