"...when we look at the wealth of opportunities hovering on the horizon - stem cells, genomic sequencing, personalized medicine, longevity research, nanoscience, brain-machine interface, quantum computers, space technology - we realize how crucial it is to cultivate a general public that can engage with scientific issues; there's simply no other way that as a society we will be prepared to make informed decisions on a range of issues that will shape the future."
"These are the standard - and enormously important - reasons many would give in explaining why science matters."
"But here's the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that's precise, predictive and reliable - a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations - for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth - not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences."
"In reality, science is a language of hope and inspiration, providing discoveries that fire the imagination and instill a sense of connection to our lives and our world.....Like a life without music, art or literature, a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension."
"Science is the greatest of all adventure stories, one that's been unfolding for thousands of years as we have sought to understand ourselves and our surroundings. Science needs to be taught to the young and communicated to the mature in a manner that captures this drama. We must embark on a cultural shift that places science in its rightful place alongside music, art and literature as an indispensable part of what makes life worth living."
[Brian Greene, "Put a Little Science in Your Life," New York Times, 1 June 2008]
"A large part of mathematics which becomes useful developed with absolutely no desire to be useful, and in a situation where nobody could possibly know in what area it would become useful; and there were no general indications that it ever would be so. By and large it is uniformly true in mathematics that there is a time lapse between a mathematical discovery and the moment when it is useful; and that this lapse of time can be anything from 30 to 100 years, in some cases even more; and that the whole system seems to function without any direction, without any reference to usefulness, and without any desire to do things which are useful."
[John von Neumann, as quoted in R. Schmalz, Out of the Mouths of Mathematicians: A Quotation Book for Philomaths, 1993. (From Wikiquotes).]
"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about."
[(Attributed to) John von Neumann]
"There are two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show the things that needed to be corrected. And I wanted to show the things that needed to be appreciated."
[Photographer Lewis Hine, quoted in the New York Times' obituary for Cornell Capa, 2080523]
"Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point.....Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea."
[Robert Rauschenberg, quoted in his New York Times obituary, 2008-05-13]
"Regretter, c'est être malheureux deux fois."
[Justine Lévy]
"Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible."
[Edwin Land]
"If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away."
[As quoted by Francis Crick in his presentation "The Impact of Linus Pauling on Molecular Biology" (1995)]
"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."
[Orson Welles (1915 - 1985)]
"Though he wrote copiously..., dutifully turning out his minimum daily quota of 350 words... 'One has no talent,' Greene perversely insisted, 'I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.'.. He once told an interviewer, 'When I describe a scene, I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer's eye -- which leaves it frozen.'"
[Graham Greene, quoted in Adam Begley, "In Search of Graham Greene's Capri." The New York Times, May 27, 2007 (online)]
"The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled."
[John Berger, Ways of Seeing]
"I passionately hate the idea of being with it. I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time."
[Orson Welles (1915 - 1985), 1966]
"Shape the picture from the color - that's the point."
[Paul Cezanne, quoted in Barbara Ireland, "Cezanne's Provence," New York Times, 6/11/2006]
Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.
[Edmund Hillary]
"Irving Langmuir would never have thought to ask the question `when will I ever use this ?'. His scientific inquiries sprang from a curiosity that saw a purpose in everything. That practical applications flowed from his theoretical wanderings was to him the `icing on the cake'.
"...The director of the [GE] research laboratory, Dr. Willis R. Whitney, recognized the potential of this young teacher and persuaded him to join General Electric. Whitney offered him both the freedom and funding to do pure research and placed a staff of research workers at his disposal. Given the luxury of working 'for fun', he and his small team of associates carried on wide-ranging research which more than rewarded G.E. for the confidence placed in him and the freedom granted to him. General Electric was the beneficiary of many of his inventions -- the mercury-condensation vacuum pump, the nitrogen-argon-filled incandescent lamp, and an entire family of high-vacuum radio tubes [and many, many, more]. As a consequence of the success of his research methods, other corporations as well as governmental agencies were encouraged to invest large sums of money in unrestricted research."
"...His life was a model for the philosophy by which he lived : that there is a usefulness in whatever we learn."
[From Irving Langmuir's biographical entry, The History of Chemistry, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (Accessed 5/2005)]
Mr. Ashley tries to get the teachers to do what he does in chess and in life: think backward with a desired outcome in view, generate multiple options as possible solutions to any question, consider the perspectives of others, and give respect to the least powerful, the pawns of the game." ... "A lot of times in education we try to teach kids the one right answer and that leads, in my opinion, to robotic thinking," he told the players, encouraging them to think of multiple possible moves before choosing the best play. "Real life isn't like that. Is there ever one right answer? Generating alternatives for the sake of alternatives is a good thing. ... Knowledge flips every day. What we know becomes wrong tomorrow. We need kids who know how to think."
[Chess grandmaster Maurice Ashley on his new class "Introduction to Logical Thinking Through Chess," as quoted in the NYTimes, 4/12/2005]
"During my tenure at UUNET, I described the real business as operating a giant Petri dish -- we kept it warm, we pumped in nutrients, and we made it bigger when it filled up. And people paid us money to sit in the dish and see what happened." (Mike O'Dell, the former CTO of UUNET)
[Quoted in Tim O'Reilly's Alpha Geeks article.]
"For the years I was watching him, Koufax was tops," Johnny Podres, a Dodgers pitcher and later a pitching coach, told Donald Honig in "October Heroes." "But for the long haul, for year-after-year performance, Warren Spahn was the best I ever saw. He was just a master of his trade. I couldn't take my eyes off him. Watching him was an education." .... Whitlow Wyatt, Spahn's pitching coach at Milwaukee, once said: "He makes my job easy. Every pitch he throws has an idea behind it."
"Home plate is 17 inches wide," [Spahn] once remarked. "I give the batter the middle 13 inches. That belongs to him. But the two outside inches on either side belong to me. That's where I throw the ball."
Even better, he often made the batter swing at a pitch he could not hit solidly. "You have to be able to throw strikes," Spahn said. "But you try not to whenever possible."
"I'm smarter now than when I had the big fastball," he told Time magazine in 1960. "Sometimes I get behind hitters on purpose. That makes them hungry hitters. They start looking for fat pitches. I make my living off hungry hitters."
[From the New York Times' obituary for pitcher Warren Spahn, November 24, 2003.]
"For any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery." (Jacob Bronowski)
[quoted in William J. Broad and James Glanz, "Does Science Matter?" The New York Times, November 11, 2003.]
"Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize."
[James Joyce]
"The successes of the natural sciences in explaining the physical and biological world have affected not only the content of explanations of social phenomena but the image of how we are to go about investigating them. Studies of human societies become social sciences with an apparatus of investigation and statistical analysis that pretends that the process of investigation is not itself a social process."
"I have considerable sympathy for the position in which sociologists find themselves. They are asking about the most complex and difficult phenomena in the most complex and recalcitrant organisms, without that liberty to manipulate their objects of study which is enjoyed by natural scientists. In comparison, the task of the molecular biologist is trivial."
[Richard Lewontin. It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome Project and Other Illusions. New York Review Books, 2000:xxii.]
"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better."
[John Updike]
"Our very study implies always the attitude about everything that... 'It could have been otherwise.' This is an intolerable and dangerous idea in a world of conflicting social ideologies.
The peculiarity of the social scientist is not that there is a realm toward which he has this attitude, for all true academic people have this attitude toward some realm, but rather that we have this attitude toward social arrangements and sentiments. Our particular objective attitude demands an apparent neutrality toward those very problems where neutrality makes one appear a potential ally of the enemy. The social scientist, to the extent that he claims and acts on such a mandate to think that any social arrangement might be otherwise is the ultimate egalitarian, in that he can conceive the underdog being on top; the ultimate traitor, since he tries to understand the enemy and that seems to imply that he might have a case; and the ultimate conservative, in that he does not easily espouse new social doctrines. He is also the ultimate defender of academic freedom, this freedom being defined as the right to enough intellectual elbow room among sacred social arrangements to do his work.
[Everett C. Hughes, ``The Academic Mind: A Review'' in The Sociological Eye, Chicago: Aldine, 1971, pp 551-2]
"Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts."
[Jean Cocteau]
"The work of the intellectual is not to shape others' political will; it is, through the analyses that he carries out in his own field, to question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people's mental habits, the way they do and think things, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to reexamine rules and institutions and on the basis of this re-problematization . . . to participate in the formation of a political will (in which he has his role as citizen to play)." Foucault, M. (1988). Politics, philosophy, culture. L. Kritzman (Ed.). NY: Routledge, pg. 265.
[From Raymie McKerrow, Foucault and Surrealism of the Truth, accessed 1/2/2001]
"What is truth? a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors without sensory impact, coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer as coins." F. Nietzsche(1989). On truth and lying in an extra-moral sense (1873). D. J. Parent (Trans.). In S. L. Gilman, C. Blair, & D. J. Parent (Eds.). Friedrich Nietzsche on rhetoric and language (pp. 246- 57). NY: Oxford Univ. Press.[From Raymie McKerrow, Foucault and Surrealism of the Truth, accessed 1/2/2001]
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I've found it!), but "That's funny...". (Isaac Asimov)
[From NewsScan, 19 December 2000]
"One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid." (James Watson)
[From NewsScan, 12 December 2000]
"Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going." (Tennessee Williams)
[From NewsScan, 15 May 2000]
The rules of the game: learn everything, read everything, inquire into everything. When two texts, or two assertions, or perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is complex.
[Marguerite Yourcenar]
"I do not seek. I find." (Pablo Picasso)
[From NewsScan, 6 March 2000]
"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." (Andre Gide)
[From NewsScan, 27 October, 1999]
The great American journalist and savant H.L. Mencken once observed: "In the sciences, hypothesis always precedes law, which is to say, there is always a lot of tall guessing before a new fact is established. The guessers are often quite as important as the fact-finders; in truth, it would not be difficult to argue that they are more important. New facts are seldom plucked from the clear sky; they have to be approached and smelled out by a process of trial and error, in which bold and shrewd guessing is an integral part. The Greeks were adept at such guessing, and the scientists of the world have been following the leads they opened for more than two thousand years."
[H. L. Mencken, "A Mencken Chrestomathy," 1982, in NewsScan, 30 August 1999]
"Every known form of energy is the expression of difference and not the result of leveling."
From Mihai Nadin's, "The Civilization of Illiteracy" (1997)
[From NewsScan, Thu, 17 Jun 1999.]
