On Universe (1940-1949)

"[…] the major mathematical research acquires an organization and orientation similar to the poetical function which, adjusting by means of metaphor disjunctive elements, displays a structure identical to the sensitive universe. Similarly, by means of its axiomatic or theoretical foundation, mathematics assimilates various doctrines and serves the instructive purpose, the one set up by the unifying moral universe of concepts. " (Dan Barbilian, "The Autobiography of the Scientist", 1940)

"Mathematical research can lend its organisational characteristics to poetry, whereby disjointed metaphors take on a universal sense. Similarly, the axiomatic foundations of group theory can be assimilated into a larger moral concept of a unified universe. Without this, mathematics would be a laborious Barbary." (Dan Barbilian, "The Autobiography of the Scientist", 1940)

"Mathematicians deal with possible worlds, with an infinite number of logically consistent systems. Observers explore the one particular world we inhabit. Between the two stands the theorist. He studies possible worlds but only those which are compatible with the information furnished by observers. In other words, theory attempts to segregate the minimum number of possible worlds which must include the actual world we inhabit. Then the observer, with new factual information, attempts to reduce the list further. And so it goes, observation and theory advancing together toward the common goal of science, knowledge of the structure and observation of the universe." (Edwin P Hubble, "The Problem of the Expanding Universe", 1941)

"Science, in the broadest sense, is the entire body of the most accurately tested, critically established, systematized knowledge available about that part of the universe which has come under human observation. For the most part this knowledge concerns the forces impinging upon human beings in the serious business of living and thus affecting man’s adjustment to and of the physical and the social world. […] Pure science is more interested in understanding, and applied science is more interested in control […]" (Austin L Porterfield, "Creative Factors in Scientific Research", 1941)

"At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art." (Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus", 1942)

"Our theory has some bleaker consequences. [...] What is knowledge, if we are but a part of the mechanical system of the world we seek to know? What becomes of our ceaseless effort to explain the universe we live in, if explanation is but a part of the mechanical process?" (Kenneth Craik, "The Nature of Explanation", 1943)

"There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man's mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties." (Simone Weil, "Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation", 1943)

"No substantial part of the universe is so simple that it can be grasped and controlled without abstraction. Abstraction consists in replacing the part of the universe under consideration by a model of similar but simpler structure. Models, formal or intellectual on the one hand, or material on the other, are thus a central necessity of scientific procedure." (Arturo Rosenblueth & Norbert Wiener, "The Role of Models in Science", Philosophy of Science Vol. 12 (4), 1945)

"The straight line of the geometers does not exist in the material universe. It is a pure abstraction, an invention of the imagination or, if one prefers, an idea of the Eternal Mind." (Eric T Bell, "The Magic of Numbers", 1946)

"This whole electric universe is a complex maze of similar tensions. Every particle of matter in the universe is separated from its condition of oneness, just as the return ball is separated from the hand, and each is connected with the other one by an electric thread of light which measures the tension of that separateness." (Walter Russell, "The Secret of Light", 1947)

"We shall walk together on this path of life, for all things are a part of the universe, and are connected with each other to form one whole unity." (Maria Montessori, "To Educate the Human Potential", 1947)

"[…] the universe is not a rigid and inimitable edifice where independent matter is housed in independent space and time; it is an amorphous continuum, without any fixed architecture, plastic and variable, constantly subject to change and distortion. Wherever there is matter and motion, the continuum is disturbed. Just as a fi sh swimming in the sea agitates the water around it, so a star, a comet, or a galaxy distorts the geometry of the spacetime through which it moves." (Lincoln Barnett, "The Universe and Dr. Einstein", 1948)

"Facts are the raw material of science - the bricks from which our model of the universe must be built - and we are rightly taught to search for sound and solid facts, for strong and heavy bricks that will serve us well in building foundations, for clean and polished bricks that will fi t neatly into ornamental towers. But while accumulating the bricks may be a contribution to science, we must take care that the pile does not become a hopelessly discouraging jumble. For science itself is not brickmaking - it is, at the workaday and technical level, bricklaying; and at the creative and artistic level, architecture, the designing of an edifice that will utilize all the bricks to the very best of advantage." (Marston Bates, "The Natural History of Mosquitoes", 1949)