Quotes from John Horgan

By the time I finally finished writing The End of Science , I'd concluded that people don't give a shit about science.... They don't give a shit about quantum mechanics or the Big Bang. As a mass society, our interest in those subjects is trivial. People are much more interested in making money, finding love, and attaining status and prestige. So I'm not really sure if a post-science world would be any different than the world of today.

According to Zen legend, when a visitor asked the fifteenth-century master Ikkyu to write down a maxim of "the highest wisdom," Ikkyu wrote one word: "Attention." The visitor asked, irritably, "Is that all?" This time, Ikkyu wrote two words: "Attention. Attention.

At a time when I was trying to make something of myself, they were a destabilizing influence.

At heart I'm still a straight-laced, fuddy-duddy science journalist who believes, knows, that science can discover true facts about the world. But my view of truth has become more expansive lately.

If you think you are advancing toward unity with God or the absolute," he said, "and are not growing in love and charity toward your fellow person, you're just deluding yourself.

But no, I decided, he is just a man at peace with himself and with life—an accomplishment rare in its own right.

Biological determinism is a blight on science. It implies that the way things are is the way they must be. [...] This position is wrong, both empirically and morally.

suggestion of some cognitive scientists that there is no unified self at the core of each individual; the self is just a byproduct of the interaction of a host of cognitive functions.

Although results vary in their effectiveness, particularly when a would-be bomber is exclusively reliant on the Internet and not an apprenticeship with an experienced bomb maker, such information is so easily accessible today that we might usefully ask why there is not even more terrorism as a result.