"Nature’s beauty dies. The day dawns when the nautilus is no more. The rainbow passes, the flower fades away, the mountain crumbles, the star grows cold. But the beauty in mathematics - the divine proportion, the golden rectangle, spira mirabilis - endures for evermore." (Henry E Huntley, "The Divine Proportion: A Study in Mathematical Beauty", 1970)
"One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently, generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is ‘really there’." (Thomas S Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1970)
"Engineers, as a rule are not and do not pretend to be philosophers in the sense of building up consistent systems of thought following logically from certain premises. If anything, they pride themselves on being hard-headed practical men concerned only with facts, disdaining mere speculation or opinion. In practice, however, engineers do make many assumptions about the nature of the universe, of man, and of society." (Edwin T Layton Jr., "The Revolt of the Engineers", 1971)
"Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Every word and every language is a model. All maps and statistics, books and databases, equations and computer programs are models. So are the ways I picture the world in my head - my mental models. None of these is or ever will be the real world. […] Our models usually have a strong congruence with the world. That is why we are such a successful species in the biosphere. Especially complex and sophisticated are the mental models we develop from direct, intimate experience of nature, people, and organizations immediately around us." (Donella Meadows, "Limits to Growth", 1972)
"Images apparently occupy a curious position somewhere between the statements of language, which are intended to convey a meaning, and the things of nature, to which we only can give a meaning." (Ernst Gombrich, "Symbolic Images", 1972)
"Mathematics is much more than a language for dealing with the physical world. It is a source of models and abstractions which will enable us to obtain amazing new insights into the way in which nature operates. Indeed, the beauty and elegance of the physical laws themselves are only apparent when expressed in the appropriate mathematical framework." (Melvin Schwartz, Principles of Electrodynamics, 1972)
"Nature is a network of happenings that do not unroll like a red carpet into time, but are intertwined between every part of the world; and we are among those parts. In this nexus, we cannot reach certainty because it is not there to be reached; it goes with the wrong model, and the certain answers ironically are the wrong answers. Certainty is a demand that is made by philosophers who contemplate the world from outside; and scientific knowledge is knowledge for action, not contemplation. There is no God’s eye view of nature, in relativity, or in any science: only a man’s eye view." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Identity of Man", 1972)
"One of the central problems studied by mankind is the problem of the succession of form. Whatever is the ultimate nature of reality (assuming that this expression has meaning). it is indisputable that our universe is not chaos. We perceive beings, objects, things to which we give names. These beings or things are forms or structures endowed with a degree of stability: they take up some part of space and last for some period of time." (René Thom, "Structural Stability and Morphogenesis", 1972)
"The introduction and gradual acceptance of concepts that have no immediate counterparts in the real world certainly forced the recognition that mathematics is a human, somewhat arbitrary creation, rather than an idealization of the realities in nature, derived solely from nature. But accompanying this recognition and indeed propelling its acceptance was a more profound discovery - mathematics is not a body of truths about nature." (Morris Kline, "Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times" Vol. III, 1972)
"Discovery is a double relation of analysis and synthesis together. As an analysis, it probes for what is there; but then, as a synthesis, it puts the parts together in a form by which the creative mind transcends the bare limits, the bare skeleton, that nature provides."(Jacob Bronowski, "The Ascent of Man", 1973)
"The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology." (Ernst F Schumacher, "Small is Beautiful", 1973)
"Life, this anti-entropy, ceaselessly reloaded with energy, is a climbing force, toward order amidst chaos, toward light, among the darkness of the indefinite, toward the mystic dream of Love, between the fire which devours itself and the silence of the Cold. Such a Nature does not accept abdication, nor skepticism." (Albert Claude, [Nobel lecture for award received] 1974)
"Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but man needs both. Mystical experience is necessary to understand the deepest nature of things, and science is essential for modern life. What we need, therefore, is not a synthesis, but a dynamic interplay between mystical intuition and scientific analysis." (Fritjof Capra, "The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism", 1975)
"The sciences have started to swell. Their philosophical basis has never been very strong. Starting as modest probing operations to unravel the works of God in the world, to follow its traces in nature, they were driven gradually to ever more gigantic generalizations. Since the pieces of the giant puzzle never seemed to fit together perfectly, subsets of smaller, more homogeneous puzzles had to be constructed, in each of which the fit was better." (Erwin Chargaff, "Voices in the Labyrinth", 1975)
"To gauge the understanding and insight that metaphysics provides is to ask whether, in the final analysis, it helps us to cope with our world and harmonize our existence with nature, humanity, and ourselves, and leads to greater freedom and self-realization. Metaphysics is only the beginning. The end is human progress." (Rudolph Rummel, "Understanding Conflict and War: The dynamic psychological field", 1975)
"Owing to his lack of knowledge, the ordinary man cannot attempt to resolve conflicting theories of conflicting advice into a single organized structure. He is likely to assume the information available to him is on the order of what we might think of as a few pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle. If a given piece fails to fit, it is not because it is fraudulent; more likely the contradictions and inconsistencies within his information are due to his lack of understanding and to the fact that he possesses only a few pieces of the puzzle. Differing statements about the nature of things […] are to be collected eagerly and be made a part of the individual's collection of puzzle pieces. Ultimately, after many lifetimes, the pieces will fit together and the individual will attain clear and certain knowledge." (Alan R Beals, "Strategies of Resort to Curers in South India" [contributed in Charles M. Leslie (ed.), "Asian Medical Systems: A Comparative Study", 1976])
"Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a ‘correct’ one by excessive elaboration. On the contrary following William of Occam he should seek an economical description of natural phenomena. Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity." (George Box, "Science and Statistics", Journal of the American Statistical Association 71, 1976)
"The notion that the 'balance of nature' is delicately poised and easily upset is nonsense. Nature is extraordinarily tough and resilient, interlaced with checks and balances, with an astonishing capacity for recovering from disturbances in equilibrium. The formula for survival is not power; it is symbiosis." (Sir Eric Ashby, [Encounter] 1976)
"The very nature of science is such that scientists need the metaphor as a bridge between old and new theories." (Earl R MacCormac, "Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion", 1976)
"Her dance spoke of nothing more and nothing less than the tragedy of being alive, and being human. It spoke, most eloquently, of pain. It spoke, most knowingly, of despair. It spoke of the cruel humor of limitless ambition yoked to limited ability, of eternal hope invested in an ephemeral lifetime, of the driving need to try and create an inexorably predetermined future. It spoke of fear, and of hunger, and, most clearly, of the basic loneliness and alienation of the human animal. It described the universe through the eyes of man: a hostile environment, the embodiment of entropy, into which we are all thrown alone, forbidden by our nature to touch another mind save secondhand, by proxy. It spoke of the blind perversity which forces man to strive hugely for a peace which, once attained, becomes boredom. And it spoke of folly, of the terrible paradox by which man is simultaneously capable of reason and unreason, forever unable to cooperate even with himself." Spider Robinson and Jeanne Robinson, "Stardance", 1977)
"[...] much of the information on which human decisions are based is possibilistic rather than probabilistic in nature, and the intrinsic fuzziness of natural languages - which is a logical consequence of the necessity to express information in a summarized form - is, in the main, possibilistic in origin." (Lotfi A Zadeh, "Fuzzy Sets as the Basis for a Theory of Possibility", Fuzzy Sets and Systems, 1978)
"[Human consciousness] depends wholly on our seeing the outside world in such categories. And the problems of consciousness arise from putting reconstitution beside internalization, from our also being able to see ourselves as if we were objects in the outside world. That is in the very nature of language; it is impossible to have a symbolic system without it." (Jacob Bronowski, "The origins of knowledge and imagination", 1978)
"All nature is a continuum. The endless complexity of life is organized into patterns which repeat themselves - theme and variations - at each level of system. These similarities and differences are proper concerns for science. From the ceaseless streaming of protoplasm to the many-vectored activities of supranational systems, there are continuous flows through living systems as they maintain their highly organized steady states." (James G Miller, "Living Systems", 1978)
"Because of mathematical indeterminancy and the uncertainty principle, it may be a law of nature that no nervous system is capable of acquiring enough knowledge to significantly predict the future of any other intelligent system in detail. Nor can intelligent minds gain enough self-knowledge to know their own future, capture fate, and in this sense eliminate free will." (Edward O Wilson, "On Human Nature", 1978)
"Here is one way to look at physics: the physicists are men looking for new interpretations of the Book of Nature. After each pedestrian period of normal science, they dream up a new model, a new picture, a new vocabulary, and then they announce that the true meaning of the Book has been discovered." (Richard Rorty, "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing", 1978)
"Truth cannot be defined or tested by agreement with 'the world'; for not only do truths differ for different worlds but the nature of agreement between a world apart from it is notoriously nebulous." (Nelson Goodman, "Ways of Worldmaking", 1978)
"It is unscientific to say that within the many billions of galactic systems, ours is the only planet that supports life in advanced form. Nature shuns one of a kind as much as it abhors a vacuum. Given infinite time and space, anything that occurs at one place or time in the universe will occur elsewhere or ‘elsewhen’." (Norman Cousins, "Rendezvous with Infinity", Cosmic Search Magazine Vol. 1 (1), 1979)
"Just as one can appreciate the beauty of a Beethoven quartet without being able to read a note of music, it is possible to learn about the scope and power and, yes, beauty of a scientific explanation of nature without solving equations." (Gilbert Shapiro, "Physics Without Math", 1979)
No comments:
Post a Comment