Quotes About Progress

us measure progress not by what is discovered but rather by the growing list of mysteries that remind us of how little we really know.

One of my favorites is "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research.

When you're facing in the wrong direction, progress means walking backward.

We are entering the Age of Awareness, marked by machine intelligence everywhere.

Cancer will be understood properly only by positioning it within the great sweep of evolutionary history.

When change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult, and time-consuming.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

There are two kinds of fools: one who says this is old and therefore good, and the other who says this is new and therefore better.

Nikolaus Otto built and sold the first internal-combustion gasoline engine in 1861, and Rudolf Diesel built his engine in 1897

In Europe, the present is perceived as the endpoint of history. In America, the present is perceived as the beginning of the future.

But discoveries are what usually egg us on. Not finding anything would be very bad indeed.

new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Civilizations do fail. We have never seen one that hasn't. The difference is that the torch of progress has, in the past, always passed to another region of the world. But we now for the first time have a single, global civilization. If it fails, we all fail together.

Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its life span. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.ad

RIDLEY Science writer; founding chairman, International Centre for Life; author, The Rational Optimist

When Max Planck began studying physics at the University of Munich in 1874, his teacher, Philipp von Jolly, warned him that it was already a mature field, with little more to learn.

In 1900, Lord Kelvin, the great British physicist, put it clearly: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it," Albert Einstein

Max Planck observed, revolutions in science sometimes have to wait for funerals.

There is no possible protection from technology except by technology," he wrote. "When you create a new environment with one phase of technology,

11:14, twenty minutes; at 11:35, twenty-eight minutes; at 11:58,

Xerography is electricity invading the world of typography, and it means a total revolution in this old sphere.

McLuhan, for one, was convinced that all efforts to preserve the old forms of author protection represent backward thinking and are doomed to failure

The danger in ingenious hardware is that it distracts attention from education. What good is a wonderful machine if you don't know what to put on it?