Viktor Schauberger - Collected Quotes

"In Nature all life is a question of the minutest, but extremely precisely graduated differences in the particular thermal motion within every single body, which continually changes in rhythm with the processes of pulsation. This unique law, which manifests itself throughout Nature's vastness and unity and expresses itself in every creature and organism, is the 'law of ceaseless cycles' that in every organism is linked to a certain time span and a particular tempo. The slightest disturbance of this harmony can lead to the most disastrous consequences for the major life forms. In order to preserve this state of equilibrium, it is vital that the characteristic inner temperature of each of the millions of micro-organisms contained in the macro-organisms be maintained." (Viktor Schauberger," Callum Coats: Water Wizard", 1934)

"This civilization is the work of man, who high-handedly and ignorant of the true workings of Nature, has created a world without meaning or foundation, which now threatens to destroy him, for through his behavior and his activities, he, who should be her master, has disturbed Nature's inherent unity." (Viktor Schauberger, "Callum Coats: Water Wizard", 1934)

"The true foundation of all culture is the knowledge and understanding of water. Water is the ur-substance or ur-cause of all creation and for this reason is the ur-original accumulator, which readily absorbs both earthly and cosmic substances and conveys them to the body in a purely objective form. This must be done in such a way that the ur-attributes will in no way be modified and that change as such can only first come about in the effect, which the organically correctly structured body mediates and imparts. For this reason a good spirit dwells in a healthy body. Conversely a body full of vitality can be created, maintained and further developed by healing the inhering spirit." (Viktor Schauberger, 1936)

"All motion consists of two components. One component serves inwardness (internalisation) and the other outwardness (dispersion). Both preconditions for motion regulate the eternal flow of metamorphosis (panta Rhei)." (Viktor Schauberger, "Callum Coats: Energy Evolution", Implosion Magazine No. 57, 2000)

"If we wish to influence our own life in a particular direction, which is constantly threatened by the danger of the emergence of alien life-forms, and protect it from deterioration, then we must either allow Nature to rule or, if we wish to intervene, we must first acquaint ourselves with the simplest principles of life." (Viktor Schauberger, "Callum Coats: Energy Evolution", Implosion Magazine No. 86, 2000)

"We must look into unknown dimensions, into Nature, into that incalculable and imponderable life, whose carrier and mediator, the blood of the Earth that accompanies us steadfastly from the cradle to the grave, is water." (Viktor Schauberger, "Callum Coats: Energy Evolution", Implosion Magazine No. 103, 2000)

"Naturally moving water augments itself. It improves its quality and matures considerably. Its boiling and freezing points change, and wise Nature makes use of this phenomenon to raise water, without using pumping equipment, to the highest mountain peaks, to appear as mountain springs. This conception of raising water is not to be taken literally, since in this context it is concerned with the natural process of propagation and purification. This in turn helps towards the expansion of air by creating an air cover, which serves to develop a higher form of life." (Viktor Schauberger)

"Nothing falls entirely! Nothing dies away completely! Nothing can totally deprive another of its rights! On the contrary, the deeper the fall, the higher the reactive upswing!" (Viktor Schauberger, "Callum Coats: The Fertile Earth") 

"Our primeval Mother Earth is an organism that no science in the world can rationalize. Everything on her that crawls and flies is dependent upon her and all must hopelessly perish if that Earth dies that feeds us." (Viktor Schauberger)

On Literature: On Limits (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"The limit of man's knowledge in any subject possesses a high interest which is perhaps increased by its close neighbourhood to the realms of imagination." (Charles Darwin, "Journal of Researches Into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle: Under the Command of Captain FitzRoy, R. N., from 1832-6", 1836)

"Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue." (Henry James, "The Art of Fiction", 1884)

"The function of man’s highest faculty, his reason, consists precisely of the continuous limitation of infinity, the breaking up of infinity into convenient, easily digestible portions - differentials. This is precisely what lends my field, mathematics, its divine beauty." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"Man has natural three-dimensional limits, and he also has four-dimensional ones, considering time as an extension. When he reaches those limits, he ceases to grow and mature, and forms rigidly within the mold of those limiting walls. It is stasis, which is retrogression unless all else stands still as well. A man who reaches his limits is tending toward subhumanity. Only when he becomes superhuman in time and space can immortality become practical." (Henry Kuttner & C L Moore, "Time Enough", 1946)

"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)

"Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. And, naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate." (Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965)

"Homo can truly be called sapiens when he practices his specialty of being unspecialized. His repeated attempts to freeze himself into an all-answering pattern or culture or ideology, or whatever he has named it, have repeatedly brought ruin. Give him the pragmatic business of making his living, and he will usually do rather well. He adapts, within broad limits." (Poul Anderson, "The Queen of Air and Darkness", 1971)

"It is tempting to wonder if our present universe, large as it is and complex though it seems, might not be merely the result of a very slight random increase in order over a very small portion of an unbelievably colossal universe which is virtually entirely in heat-death. Perhaps we are merely sliding down a gentle ripple that has been set up, accidently and very temporarily, in a quiet pond, and it is only the limitation of our own infinitesimal range of viewpoint in space and time that makes it seem to ourselves that we are hurtling down a cosmic waterfall of increasing entropy, a waterfall of colossal size and duration." (Isaac Asimov, 1976)

"If we assume the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent being, one that knows and can do absolutely everything, then to my own very limited self, it would seem that existence for it would be unbearable. Nothing to wonder about? Nothing to ponder over? Nothing to discover? Eternity in such a heaven would surely be indistinguishable from hell." (Isaac Asimov, "'X' Stands for Unknown", 1984)

"Intelligence takes chances with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary." (Frank Herbert, "Chapterhouse: Dune", 1985)

"It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth." (Milan Kundera, "Encounter", 2009)

"Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called "other", which is simply another universe, another planet, another species." (Theodore Sturgeon)

On Intelligence: On Swarms (2010-)

"Is a discipline that deals with natural and artificial systems composed of many individuals that coordinate using decentralized control and self-organization. In particular, SI focuses on the collective behaviors that result from the local interactions of the individuals with each other and with their environment." (Elina Pacini et al, "Schedulers Based on Ant Colony Optimization for Parameter Sweep Experiments in Distributed Environments", 2013)

"Swarm intelligence illustrates the complex and holistic way in which the world operates. Order is created from chaos; patterns are revealed; and systems are free to work out their errors and problems at their own level. What natural systems can teach humanity is truly amazing." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action", 2013)

"Swarm intelligence (SI) is a branch of computational intelligence that discusses the collective behavior emerging within self-organizing societies of agents. SI was inspired by the observation of the collective behavior in societies in nature such as the movement of birds and fish. The collective behavior of such ecosystems, and their artificial counterpart of SI, is not encoded within the set of rules that determines the movement of each isolated agent, but it emerges through the interaction of multiple agents." (Maximos A Kaliakatsos-Papakostas et al, "Intelligent Music Composition", 2013) 

"In sharp contrast to the modus operandi of swarm dynamics, political bodies are ill-equipped to protect the integrity of their components and lack the collective wisdom for synchronization. Instead, highly layered command-based systems invade, institutionalize, and indoctrinate society with centralized directives, straitjacket bureaucracies, and self-serving officialdom. These systems hungrily feast on what others have created, cannibalizing other people’s resources like a tribe of pragmatic headhunters." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action", 2013)

"Swarm intelligence illustrates the complex and holistic way in which the world operates. Order is created from chaos; patterns are revealed; and systems are free to work out their errors and problems at their own level. What natural systems can teach humanity is truly amazing." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action", 2013)

"Ants exhibit a 'neuron-like' behavior insofar as inactive ants have a low propensity to become spontaneously active, but can become excited by other ants with whom they come into contact. [...] Conversely, ants are prone to lapse back into inactivity if their activation is not sufficiently reinforced, and even exhibit a short refractory period (similar to neurons) before they can be reactivated – a mechanism which keeps the swarm from getting permanently 'locked' into an excitatory state." (Georg Theiner & John Sutton, "The collaborative emergence of group cognition", 2014) 

"These nature-inspired algorithms gradually became more and more attractive and popular among the evolutionary computation research community, and together they were named swarm intelligence, which became the little brother of the major four evolutionary computation algorithms." (Yuhui Shi, "Emerging Research on Swarm Intelligence and Algorithm Optimization", Information Science Reference, 2014)

"These nature-inspired algorithms gradually became more and more attractive and popular among the evolutionary computation research community, and together they were named swarm intelligence, which became the little brother of the major four evolutionary computation algorithms." (Yuhui Shi, "Emerging Research on Swarm Intelligence and Algorithm Optimization", Information Science Reference, 2014)

"Collective intelligence of societies of biological (social animals) or artificial (robots, computer agents) individuals. In artificial intelligence, it gave rise to a computational paradigm based on decentralisation, self-organisation, local interactions, and collective emergent behaviours." (D T Pham & M Castellani, "The Bees Algorithm as a Biologically Inspired Optimisation Method", 2015)

"It is the field of artificial intelligence in which the population is in the form of agents which search in a parallel fashion with multiple initialization points. The swarm intelligence-based algorithms mimic the physical and natural processes for mathematical modeling of the optimization algorithm. They have the properties of information interchange and non-centralized control structure." (Sajad A Rather & P Shanthi Bala, "Analysis of Gravitation-Based Optimization Algorithms for Clustering and Classification", 2020)

"It is the discipline dealing with natural and artificial systems consisting of many individuals who coordinate through decentralized monitoring and self-organization." (Mehmet A Cifci, "Optimizing WSNs for CPS Using Machine Learning Techniques", 2021)

On Literature: On Fantasy (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

'Of all the fantastic ideas that belong to science fiction, the most remarkable - and, perhaps, the most fascinating - is that of time travel [...] Indeed, so fantastic a notion does it seem, and so many apparently obvious absurdities and bewildering paradoxes does it present, that some of the most imaginative students of science refuse to consider it as a practical proposition." (Idrisyn O Evans, "Can We Conquer Time?", Tales of Wonder, 1940)

"[Science fiction is] that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesised on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin. It is distinguished from pure fantasy by its need to achieve verisimilitude and win the 'willing suspension of disbelief' through scientific plausibility." (Kingsley Amis, "New Maps of Hell", 1960)

"Science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible." (Rod Serling, "The Twilight Zone", "The Fugitive", 1962)

"In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes." (Carl Jung, "The practice of psychotherapy", 1966)

"Phrased rather too simply, science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities." (Miriam Allen deFord, "Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow", 1971))

"The catastrophe story, whoever may tell it, represents a constructive and positive act by the imagination rather than a negative one, an attempt to confront the terrifying void of a patently meaningless universe by challenging it at its own game. [. . .] Each one of these fantasies represents an arraignment of the finite, an attempt to dismantle the formal structure of time and space which the universe wraps around us at the moment we first achieve consciousness." (James G Ballard, "Cataclysms and Dooms" 1977)

"[...] science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be." (Orson Scott Card, "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy", 1990)

"Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem." (Michichio Kaku, Wired Magazine, 2003)

"Every so often I come up with a different definition of what science fiction and fantasy do, and I'm always looking for one that describes what they both do, rather than separating them. Currently I'm saying that one of the things they do is look at the effects of large-scale social change on both populations and individuals. Fantasy tends to look to the past, and science fiction to the future, but what is common to many of the stories is change: huge societal upheaval." (Nalo Hopkinson, "Nalo Hopkinson: Multiplicity", LocusMag, 2007)

"But if the general opinion of Mankind is optimistic then we're in for a period of extreme popularity for science fiction. If the general opinion is pessimistic, fantasy is going to hold its own." (David Eddings) 

"Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor." (China Miéville)

On Physicists (Unsourced)

"Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it." (Frederick Soddy [attributed])

"Empirical evidence can never establish mathematical existence - nor can the mathematician's demand for existence be dismissed by the physicist as useless rigor. Only a mathematical existence proof can ensure that the mathematical description of a physical phenomenon is meaningful." (Richard Courant)

"Every physicist knows exactly what the first and the second law mean, but [...] no two physicists agree about them." (Clifford Truesdell)

"I believe that numbers and functions of Analysis are not the arbitrary result of our minds; I think that they exist outside of us, with the same character of necessity as the things of objective reality, and we meet them or discover them, and study them, as do the physicists, the chemists and the zoologists." (Charles Hermite)

"Nothing in physics seems so hopeful to as the idea that it is possible for a theory to have a high degree of symmetry was hidden from us in everyday life. The physicist's task is to find this deeper symmetry." (Steven Weinberg)

"Symmetry does mean something different for physicists than for members of the public. It means that an object or a theory does not change when you make some transformation - either rotating or moving it or doing something to the equations." (Lawrence M Krauss)

"The difference between mathematicians and physicists is that after physicists prove a big result they think it is fantastic but after mathematicians prove a big result they think it is trivial." (Lucien Szpiro)

"The universe of Eastern mysticism is an illusion, A physicist who attempts to link it with his own work has abandoned physics." (Stephen Hawking)

"There is no drawing the line between physics and metaphysics. If you examine every day facts at all closely, you are a physicist; but if you press your physics at all home, you become a metaphysician; if you press your metaphysics at all home, you are in a fog." (Samuel Butler)

"When confronted with the order and beauty of the universe and the strange coincidences of nature, it's very tempting to take the leap of faith from science into religion. I am sure many physicists want to. I only wish they would admit it." (Tony Rothman)

On Physicists (1940-1949)

"[…] there is probably less difference between the positions of a mathematician and of a physicist than is generally supposed, [...] the mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. This may seem a paradox, since it is the physicist who deals with the subject-matter usually described as 'real', but [...] [a physicist] is trying to correlate the incoherent body of crude fact confronting him with some definite and orderly scheme of abstract relations, the kind of scheme he can borrow only from mathematics." (Godfrey H Hardy, "A Mathematician's Apology", 1940)

"At the present time it is of course quite customary for physicists to trespass on chemical ground, for mathematicians to do excellent work in physics, and for physicists to develop new mathematical procedures […] Trespassing is one of the most successful techniques in science." (Wolfgang Köhler, "Dynamics in Psychology", 1940)

"Physicists who are trying to understand nature may work in many different fields and by many different methods; one may dig, one may sow, one may reap. But the final harvest will always be a sheaf of mathematical formulae. These will never describe nature itself, hut only our observations on nature. Our studies can never put us into contact with reality; we can never penetrate beyond the impressions that reality implants in our minds." (James H Jeans, "Physics and Philosophy", 1942)

"Although we can never devise a pictorial representation which shall be both true to nature and intelligible to our minds, we may still be able to make partial aspects of the truth comprehensible through pictorial representations or parables. As the whole truth does not admit of intelligible representation, every such pictorial representation or parable must fail somewhere. The physicist of the last generation was continually making pictorial representations and parables, and also making the mistake of treating the half-truths of pictorial representations and parables as literal truths." (James H Jeans, "Physics and Philosophy" 3rd Ed., 1943)

"Any good architect is by nature a physicist as a matter of fact, but as a matter of reality, as things are, he must be a philosopher and a physician." (Frank L Wright, "Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography", 1943)

"In time they [physicists] hoped to devise a model which would reproduce all the phenomena of physics, and so make it possible to predict them all. […] To-day we not only have no perfect model, but we know that it is of no use to search for one - it could have no intelligible meaning for us. For we have found out that nature does not function in a way that can be made comprehensible to the human mind through models or pictures. […] Although we can never devise a pictorial representation which shall be both true to nature and intelligible to our minds, we may still be able to make partial aspects of the truth comprehensible through pictorial representations or parables. As the whole truth does not admit of intelligible representation, every such pictorial representation or parable must fail somewhere. The physicist of the last generation was continually making pictorial representations and parables, and also making the mistake of treating the half-truths of pictorial representations and parables as literal truths." (James H Jeans, "Physics and Philosophy" 3rd Ed., 1943)

"It is to be hoped that in the future more and more theoretical physicists will command a deep knowledge of mathematical principles; and also that mathematicians will no longer limit themselves so exclusively to the aesthetic development of mathematical abstractions." (George D Birkhoff, "Mathematical Nature of Physical Theories" American Scientific Vol. 31 (4), 1943)

"A permanent state is reached, in which no observable events occur. The physicist calls this the state of thermodynamical equilibrium, or of ‘maximum entropy’. Practically, a state of this kind is usually reached very rapidly. Theoretically, it is very often not yet an absolute equilibrium, not yet the true maximum of entropy. But then the final approach to equilibrium is very slow. It could take anything between hours, years, centuries […]." (Erwin Schrödinger, "What is Life?", 1944)

"[…] analogy [is] an important source of conjectures. In mathematics, as in the natural and physical sciences, discovery often starts from observation, analogy, and induction. These means, tastefully used in framing a plausible heuristic argument, appeal particularly to the physicist and the engineer." (George Pólya, "How to solve it", 1945) 

On Physicists (1960-1969)

"The mathematical formulation of the physicist’s often crude experience leads in an uncanny number of cases to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena. This shows that the mathematical language has more to commend it than being the only language which we can speak; it shows that it is, in a very real sense, the correct language." (Eugene P Wigner, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences", Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13 (1), 1960)

"The word model is used as a noun, adjective, and verb, and in each instance it has a slightly different connotation. As a noun 'model' is a representation in the sense in which an architect constructs a small-scale model of a building or a physicist a large-scale model of an atom. As an adjective 'model' implies a degree of perfection or idealization, as in reference to a model home, a model student, or a model husband. As an adjective 'model' implies a degree or perfection or idealization, as in reference to a model home, a model student, or a model husband. As a verb 'to model' means to demonstrate, to reveal, to show what a thing is like." (Russell L Ackoff, "Scientific Method: optimizing applied research decisions", 1962) 

"For a physicist mathematics is not just a tool by means of which phenomena can be calculated, it is the main source of concepts and principles by means of which new theories can be created." (Freeman J Dyson, "Mathematics in the Physical Sciences", Scientific American, 1964)

"There is one metaphor in the physicist’s account of space-time which one would expect anyone to recognize as such, for metaphor is here strained far beyond the breaking point, i.e., when it is said that time is ‘at right angles to each of the other three dimensions’. Can anyone really attach any meaning to this - except as a recipe for drawing diagrams?" (Clement W K Mundle, "The Space-Time World", Mind, 1967)

"[...] we are essentially viewing the purpose of physics as a scientific discipline as invention rather than discovery. [...] the term 'invention' implies that the physicist uses not only observation but his imaginative powers to construct points of view that identify with experience." (Robert B Lindsay, Arbitrariness in Physics, Physics Today Vol. 120 (12), 1967)

"Experimental physicists [...] walk a narrow path with pitfalls on either side. If we spend all our time developing equipment, we risk the appellation of 'plumber', and if we merely use the tools developed by others, we risk the censure of our peers for being parasitic." (Luis W Alvarez, "Recent Developments in Particle Physics", [Nobel] 1968)

"Modern science is characterized by its ever-increasing specialization, necessitated by the enormous amount of data, the complexity of techniques and of theoretical structures within every field. Thus science is split into innumerable disciplines continually generating new subdisciplines. In consequence, the physicist, the biologist, the psychologist and the social scientist are, so to speak, encapusulated in their private universes, and it is difficult to get word from one cocoon to the other." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, "General System Theory", 1968)

"Most of us who become experimental physicists do so for two reasons; we love the tools of physics because to us they have intrinsic beauty, and we dream of finding new secrets of nature as important and as exciting as those uncovered by our scientific heroes." (Luis W Alvarez, "Recent Developments in Particle Physics", [Nobel] 1968)

"Let us consider, for a moment, the world as described by the physicist. It consists of a number of fundamental particles which, if shot through their own space, appear as waves, and are thus [...] of the same laminated structure as pearls or onions, and other wave forms called electromagnetic which it is convenient, by Occam’s razor, to consider as travelling through space with a standard velocity. All these appear bound by certain natural laws which indicate the form of their relationship." (G Spencer-Brown, "Laws of Form", 1969)

On Physicists (1950-1959)

"To seek not for end but for antecedents is the way of the physicist, who finds causes" in what he has learned to recognise as fundamental properties, or inseparable concomitants, or unchanging laws, of matter and of energy." (Sir D’Arcy W Thompson, "On Growth and Form", 1951)

"The older physicist believed in Nature and thought of himself as making experiments to see what She was like. She was there whether he could observe her or not. But the modern physicist thinks first of all of what he observes in his experiments and is not interested in anything that he cannot possibly observe. He looks for relations between his observations and ignores everything else. But he still expresses his results as though they were discoveries of the essence of Nature, because he is so used to this way of speaking that he does not realise that his discoveries no longer conform to it. When they are expressed as the characteristics of a world existing outside us and independently of us, which causes our experience by its impact on our sense organs, these discoveries require such a world to have contradictory properties. Hence, by retaining this form of expression, the physicist finds himself presenting his perfectly rational achievements as though they were nonsensical." (Herbert Dingle, "The Scientific Adventure", British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1952)

"We secure our mathematical knowledge by demonstrative reasoning, but we support our conjectures by plausible reasoning. A mathematical proof is demonstrative reasoning, but the inductive evidence of the physicist, the circumstantial evidence of the lawyer, the documentary evidence of the historian, and the statistical evidence of the economist belong to plausible reasoning." (George Pólya, "Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning", 1954)

"The mathematicians know a great deal about very little and the physicists very little about a great deal." (Stanislaw Ulam, "On the Ergodic Behavior of Dynamical Systems", 1955)

"Mathematicians who build new spaces and physicists who find them in the universe can profit from the study of pictorial and architectural spaces conceived and built by men of art." (György Kepes, "The New Landscape In Art and Science", 1956)

"We frequently find that nature acts in such a way as to minimize certain magnitudes. The soap film will take the shape of a surface of smallest area. Light always follows the shortest path, that is, the straight line, and, even when reflected or broken, follows a path which takes a minimum of time. In mechanical systems we find that the movements actually take place in a form which requires less effort in a certain sense than any other possible movement would use. There was a period, about 150 years ago, when physicists believed that the whole of physics might be deduced from certain minimizing principles, subject to calculus of variations, and these principles were interpreted as tendencies - so to say, economical tendencies of nature. Nature seems to follow the tendency of economizing certain magnitudes, of obtaining maximum effects with given means, or to spend minimal means for given effects." (Karl Menger, "What Is Calculus of Variations and What Are Its Applications?" [James R Newman, "The World of Mathematics" Vol. II], 1956)

"With the advent of special and general relativity, the symmetry laws gained new importance. Their connection with the dynamic laws of physics takes on a much more integrated and interdependent relationship than in classical mechanics, where logically the symmetry laws were only consequences of the dynamical laws that by chance possess the symmetries. Also in the relativity theories the realm of the symmetry laws was greatly enriched to include invariances that were by no means apparent from daily experience. Their validity rather was deduced from, or was later confirmed by complicated experimentation. Let me emphasize that the conceptual simplicity and intrinsic beauty of the symmetries that so evolve from complex experiments are for the physicists great sources of encouragement. One learns to hope that Nature possesses an order that one may aspire to comprehend." (Chen-Ning Yang, "The Law of Parity Conservation and Other Symmetry Laws of Physics", [Nobel lecture] 1957)

"Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached." (Werner K Heisenberg, "Physics and Philosophy", 1958)

"Physicists do not start from hypotheses; they start from data. By the time a law has been fixed into an H-D [hypothetico-deductive] system, really original physical thinking is over." (Norwood R Hanson, "Patterns of Discovery", 1958)

On Literature: On Necessity (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards." (Jules Verne, "The Mysterious Island", 1875

"What is called science today consists of a haphazard heap of information, united by nothing, often utterly unnecessary, and not only failing to present one unquestionable truth, but as often as not containing the grossest errors, today put forward as truths, and tomorrow overthrown." (Leo Tolstoy, "What Is Art?", 1897)

"The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world-wide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write." (Herbert G Wells, "Mankind in the Making", 1903)

"I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. [...] We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon." (H P Lovecraft, "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", 1919)

"No revolution, no heresy is comfortable or easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth evolutionary curve, and a break is a wound, a pain. But the wound is necessary; most of mankind suffers from hereditary sleeping sickness, and victims of this sickness (entropy) must not be allowed to sleep, or it will be their final sleep, death."  (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)

"To be so closely caught up in the teeth of things that they kill you, no matter how infinitesimally kill you, is, truly, to be a poet: and to be a poet in fact it is additionally necessary that you should possess the tongues and instruments with which to record this series of infinitesimal deaths." (George Barker,"Therefore All Poems Are Elegies", 1940)

"It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion." (Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects", 1957) 

"Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media, 1964)

"Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. And, naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate." (Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965)

"If everything, everything were known, statistical estimates would be unnecessary. The science of probability gives mathematical expression to our ignorance, not to our wisdom." (Samuel R Delany, "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones", 1969) 

"Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process."(Isaac Asimov, "'X' Stands for Unknown", 1984)

"There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they’re necessary to reach the places we’ve chosen to go." (Richard Bach, "The Bridge across Forever", 1984)

"Intelligence takes chances with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary." (Frank Herbert, "Chapterhouse: Dune", 1985)

"Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order though." (Douglas N Adams, "Mostly Harmless", 1992)

"Life - all life - is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships." (Frank Herbert, "Dune: House Corrino", 2001)

"It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth." (Milan Kundera, "Encounter", 2009)

On Physicists (1980-1989)

"The prevailing trend in modern physics is thus much against any sort of view giving primacy to [...] undivided wholeness of flowing movement. Indeed, those aspects of relativity theory and quantum theory which do suggest the need for such a view tend to be de-emphasized and in fact hardly noticed by most physicists, because they are regarded largely as features of the mathematical calculus and not as indications of the real nature of things." (David Bohm, "Wholeness and the Implicate Order?", 1980)

"The physicist […] engages in complex and difficult calculations, involving the manipulating of ideal, mathematical quantities that, at first glance, are wholly lacking in the music of the living world and the beauty of the resplendent cosmos. It would seem as if there exists no relationship between these quantities and reality. Yet these ideal numbers that cannot be grasped by one's senses, these numbers that only are meaningful from within the system itself, only meaningful as part of abstract mathematical functions, symbolize the image of existence. […] As a result of scientific man's creativity there arises an ordered, illumined, determined world, imprinted with the stamp of creative intellect, of pure reason and clear cognition. From the midst of the order and lawfulness we hear a new song, the song of the creature to the Creator, the song of the cosmos to its Maker." (Joseph B Soloveitchik, "Halakhic Man", 1983)

"Until now, physical theories have been regarded as merely models with approximately describe the reality of nature. As the models improve, so the fit between theory and reality gets closer. Some physicists are now claiming that supergravity is the reality, that the model and the real world are in mathematically perfect accord." (Paul C W Davies, "Superforce", 1984)

"Simple rules can have complex consequences. This simple rule has such a wealth of implications that it is worth examining in detail. It is the far from self-evident guiding principle of reductionism and of most modern investigations into cosmic complexity. Reductionism will not be truly successful until physicists and cosmologists demonstrate that the large-scale phenomena of the world arise from fundamental physics alone. This lofty goal is still out of reach. There is uncertainty not only in how physics generates the structures of our world but also in what the truly fundamental rules of physics are. (William Poundstone, "The Recursive Universe", 1985)

"As glimpsed by physicists, Nature's rules are simple, but also intricate: Different rules are subtly related to each other. The intricate relations between the rules produce interesting effects in many physical situations. [...] Nature's design is not only simple, but minimally so, in the sense that were the design any simpler, the universe would be a much duller place." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her." (Steven Weinberg, "Lectures on the Applicability of Mathematics" , Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 1986)

"Physicists dream of a unified description of Nature. Symmetry, in its power to tie together apparently unrelated aspects of physics, is linked closely to the notion of unity." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"The beauty that Nature has revealed to physicists in Her laws is a beauty of design, a beauty that recalls, to some extent, the beauty of classical architecture, with its emphasis on geometry and symmetry. The system of aesthetics used by physicists in judging Nature also draws its inspiration from the austere finality of geometry." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity." (Richard Dawkins, "The Blind Watchmaker", 1986)

"Toward the end of the last century, many physicists felt that the mathematical description of physics was getting ever more complicated. Instead, the mathematics involved has become ever more abstract, rather than more complicated. The mind of God appears to be abstract but not complicated. He also appears to like group theory." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"Unlike an architect, Nature does not go around expounding on the wondrous symmetries of Her design. Instead, theoretical physicists must deduce them. Some symmetries, such as parity and rotational invariances, are intuitively obvious. We expect Nature to possess these symmetries, and we are shocked if She does not. Other symmetries, such as Lorentz invariance and general covariance, are more subtle and not grounded in our everyday perceptions. But, in any case, in order to find out if Nature employs a certain symmetry, we must compare the implications of the symmetry with observation." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"When it comes to very highly organized systems, such as a living cell, the task of modeling by approximation to simple, continuous and smoothly varying quantities is hopeless. It is for this reason that attempts by sociologists and economists to imitate physicists and describe their subject matter by simple mathematical equations is rarely convincing." (Paul C W Davies, "The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature’s Creative Ability to Order the Universe", 1987)

"Where chaos begins, classical science stops. For as long as the world has had physicists inquiring into the laws of nature, it has suffered a special ignorance about disorder in the atmosphere, in the fluctuations of the wildlife populations, in the oscillations of the heart and the brain. The irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side these have been puzzles to science, or worse, monstrosities." (James Gleick, "Chaos", 1987)

"All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules." (Iain Banks, "The Player of Games", 1988)

"Physicists are all too apt to look for the wrong sorts of generalizations, to concoct theoretical models that are too neat, too powerful, and too clean. Not surprisingly, these seldom fit well with data. To produce a really good biological theory, one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could build on what was already there." (Francis H C Crick, "What Mad Pursuit?: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery", 1988)

"Theoretical physicists are accustomed to living in a world which is removed from tangible objects by two levels of abstraction. From tangible atoms we move by one level of abstraction to invisible fields and particles. A second level of abstraction takes us from fields and particles to the symmetry-groups by which fields and particles are related. The superstring theory takes us beyond symmetry-groups to two further levels of abstraction. The third level of abstraction is the interpretation of symmetry-groups in terms of states in ten-dimensional space-time. The fourth level is the world of the superstrings by whose dynamical behavior the states are defined." (Freeman J Dyson, "Infinite in All Directions", 1988)