Quotes About Science

revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science only a few are competent to practice. It depends on correct organization and, above all, on communications. Then, at the proper moment in history, they strike. Correctly organized and properly timed it is a bloodless coup.

Robert A. Heinlein

As Jurij Lotman has provocatively put it, invoking contemporary notions of computer science, if we understood better how a poem achieved the astonishing degree of "information storage" that it does, our understanding of cybernetics in general might well be advanced.

Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, My current model -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised. In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.

In every state of the Union, Fundamentalists still fight to ban all the science they dislike and prosecute all who teach it. To them, 'traditional family values' denotes their right to keep their children as ignorant as their grandparents (and to hate the same folks grand-dad hated.)

And of course, this is the traditional theme in romantic poetry. I'm very science oriented in many ways. So much so that a lot of people who hate science dislike my books because they dislike the scientific emphasis. But, at the same time I am science oriented, I don't reject other modes of knowledge. When I find something repeated over and over, my thought is, if enough people have thought this over for many centuries, it's worth looking at no matter how wild it sounds.

Oh yes, there are a lot of things that have been known for centuries before we had a scientific explanation for them. Medieval grimoires tell about witches using bee balm for people with heart disease and, of course, bee balm contains digitalis. It's just what modern doctors use. Somehow the witches had learned empirically over millenniums of being village herbalists what herbs really work.

An elementary example: I can give a physicist, or a chemist, a book of poems. After study, the scientist can report back that the book weighs x kilograms, measures y centimeters in thickness, has been printed with ink having a certain chemical formula and bound with glue having another chemical formula etc. But scientific study cannot answer the question, Are these good poems? (Science in fact cannot answer any questions with is or are in them, but not all scientists realize that yet.)

I am interested only in the latter kind of occultism, and even there I am leery of the high nonsense quotient that infests most writings in this field. My aim has always been to learn what occult practices produce concrete results and to reformulate what I have reamed from occultists into scientific and experimental language, as far as that is possible at this date.

To the Transactional psychologist, quantum mechanics has the same fascination (and the same resemblance to brain science) as cryptozoology, lepufology and Disinformation Systems, and all these fields, the scientifically sober and the disreputably weird, bear a distinct family resemblance to each other.

My basic attitude has always been that the greatest drug any chemist could possibly invent would be an anti-gullibility pill, to cure humanity of its addiction to faith and dogma.

Or, as Einstein once said — quoted by Korzybski in Science and Sanity — Insofar as the laws of mathematics are certain, they do not refer to reality; and insofar as they refer to reality, they are not certain.

Dr. Isaac Asimov notes in his Genetic Code that there seems to be a 60-year cycle between the first understanding of a new scientific principle and the transformation of the world by that principle.

Rejection of science and free discussion are, of course, characteristic of all totalitarian movements; thus, nonbiblical astronomy was heretical to the Inquisition, unpalatable anthropology was Jewish to the Nazis, unsatisfactory biology was banned as bourgeois in Stalin's Russia and irritating ethology is sexist (and unpleasant psychology is chauvinist) to these ladies.

Obviously, in the new science or new idiocy of lepufulogy we are approaching the area of dream and myth; however, as James Joyce once remarked, since we already spend one third of our lives there, we ought to give that half-world some serious attention.

I don't know who first said, Science fiction is the mythology of our time. An increasing number of occultists are realizing this and are incorporating science fiction into their rituals.

My basic idea is from Aleister Crowley: "We place no reliance / On Virgin or Pigeon; / Our method is Science, / Our aim is Religion.

UMMO differs from Meier and the other cults in one very significant way. All of the other outer space messages peddled by "contactees" have low-to-zero information content.* They say nothing new. They have all the philosophic, scientific and literary value of Hallmark cards.

In Standard English we may discuss all sorts of metaphysical and spooky matters, often without noticing that we have entered the realms of theology and demonology, whereas in English Prime we can only discuss actual experiences (or transactions) in the space-time continuum. English Prime may not automatically transfer us into a scientific universe, in all cases, but it at least transfers us into existential or experiential modes, and takes us out of medieval theology.

Magic is not a necromanteia – a raising of dead material substances endowed with an imagined life – but a psychological branch of science, dealing with the sympathetic effects of stones, drugs, herbs, and living substances upon the imaginative and reflective faculties – and leading to ever new glimpses of the world of wonders around us, ranking it in due order of phenomena, and illustrating the beneficence of The Great Architect of the Universe.

In dealing with cryptozoology, lepufology, Disinformation Systems and Quantum Mechanics one eventually feels that one has come close to total nonsense, a basic defect in the human mind (or the Universe?) or some mental fugue similar to schizophrenia or solipsism. However, as our opening drawing showed and we will see again and again, the ordinary perceptions of ordinary people contain just as much weirdness and mystery as all these Occult Sciences put together.

This parallelism between physics and psychology should occasion no great surprise. The human nervous system, after all — the mind in pre-scientific language — created modern science, including physics and quantum mathematics. One should expect to find the genius, and the defects, of the human mind in its creations, as one always finds the autobiography of the artist in the art-work.

One of the greatest achievements of the human mind, modern science, refuses to recognize the depths of its own creativity, and has now reached the point in its development where that very refusal blocks its further growth. Modern physics screams at us that there is no ultimate material reality and that whatever it is we are describing, the human mind cannot be parted from it. Roger Jones, Physics as Metaphor

Some people (Roman Catholics, New Agers, heretical holistic physicians, etc.) will eagerly believe this yarn. Other people (the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), the American Medical Association, old-fangled Village Atheists etc.) just as eagerly wish not to believe it at all, at all.