Quotes About Science

For what it's worth, in my experience astronomers are more likely than biologists to be believers. But several surveys, more scientific than my anecdotal experiences, have confirmed that in academic settings, the real atheists are to be found in English Literature departments.

Edwin tells us that he became an atheist in college; but as he grew to know the limits of science and then began seeing what he called "too many coincidences" in the universe, his atheism slipped to agnosticism. Then, he recalls, a professor showed him that you could find truth in poetry and once said to him that "an agnostic is an atheist with no courage." That clearly shook Edwin's easy agnosticism.

NAUDSONCE Bishop Berkeley's famous question about the sound of a falling tree may have no standing in Science. But there is a highly interesting question about "sound" that Science needs to consider....

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

we will have learned to understand and express all of physics in the language of information.

A movement had begun, and the discovery of universality spurred it forward. In the summer of 1977, two physicists, Joseph Ford and Giulio Casati, organized the first conference on a science called chaos. It was held in a gracious villa in Como, Italy

Although Mandelbrot made the most comprehensive geometric use of it, the return of scaling ideas to science in the 1960s and 1970s became an intellectual current that made itself felt simultaneously in many places.

But information is physical.

chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability.

The fractal dimension of a metal's surface, for example, often provides information that corresponds to the metal's strength.

Most seductive of all was an image that the authors called a strange attractor.

Mathematical Ideas in Biology

A system like a globular cluster is far too complex to be treated directly as a many-body problem, but its dynamics can be studied with the help of certain compromises.

WHERE CHAOS BEGINS, classical science stops.

In terms of aesthetic values, the new mathematics of fractal geometry brought hard science in tune with the peculiarly modern feeling for untamed, uncivilized, undomesticated nature.

To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

Wilhelm Johannsen, self-consciously invented the word gene.

In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive. In systems like the weather, sensitive dependence on initial conditions was an inescapable consequence of the way small scales intertwined with large.

Not by accident, he made scientists seem less than perfect rationalists.

By contrast, a twentieth-century fluid dynamicist could hardly expect to advance knowledge in his field without first adopting a body of terminology and mathematical technique. In return, unconsciously, he would give up much freedom to question the foundations of his science.

What we call the past is built on bits. —John Archibald Wheeler

Given an approximate knowledge of a system's initial conditions and an understanding of natural law, one can calculate the approximate behavior of the system.

In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive.