"Many philosophers have now sadly come to the conclusion that there is no ultimate procedure which will wring the last drops of uncertainty from what scientists call their knowledge." (John M Ziman, "Public Knowledge: An Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science", 1968)
"Although the best and most famous scientific discoveries
seem to open whole new windows of the mind, a typical scientific paper has
never pretended to be more than another piece in a large jig-saw not
significant in itself but as an element in a grander scheme. This technique, of
soliciting many modest contributions to the vast store of human knowledge, has
been the secret of western science since the seventeenth century, for it
achieves a corporate collective power that is far greater than any one
individual can exert. Primary scientific papers are not meant to be final
statements of indisputable truths; each is merely a tiny tentative step
forward, through the jungle of ignorance." (John M Zimer, Vol. 224, 1969)
"It is not enough to observe, experiment, theorize, calculate and communicate; we must also argue, criticize, debate, expound, summarize, and otherwise transform the information that we have obtained individually into reliable, well established, public knowledge." (John M Ziman, "Information, Communication, Knowledge", Nature Vol. 224 (5217), 1969)
"The sooner we all face up to the fact that theory and
practice are indissoluble, and that there is no contradiction between the
qualities of usefulness and beauty, the better." (John M Ziman, "Growth and
Spread of Science", Nature Vol. 221 (5180), 1969)
"A significant fraction of the ordinary scientific literature
in any field is concerned with essentially irrational theories put forward by a
few well-established scholars who have lost touch with reality." (John M Ziman, "Some
Pathologies of the Scientific Life", Nature Vol. 227, 1970)
"The communication of modern science to the ordinary citizen,
necessary, important, desirable as it is, cannot be considered an easy task.
The prime obstacle is lack of education. [...] There is also the difficulty of
making scientific discoveries interesting and exciting without completely
degrading them intellectually. [...] It is a weakness of modern science that the
scientist shrinks from this sort of publicity, and thus gives an impression of
arrogant mystagoguery." (John M Ziman,"The Force of Knowledge: The Scientific
Dimension of Society", 1976)
"Physics defines itself as the science devoted to
discovering, developing and refining those aspects of reality that are amenable
to mathematical analysis." (John M Ziman, "Reliable Knowledge: An Exploration of
the Grounds for Belief in Science", 1978)
"The most astonishing achievements of science, intellectually
and practically, have been in physics, which many people take to be the ideal
type of scientific knowledge. In fact, physics is a very special type of
science, in which the subject matter is deliberately chosen so as to be
amenable to quantitative analysis."
"'Disorder' is not mere chaos; it implies defective order." (John M Ziman, "Models of Disorder", 1979)
"A philosopher is a person who knows less and less about more
and more, until he knows nothing about everything. […] A scientist is a person
who knows more and more about less and less, until he knows everything about
nothing." (John M Ziman, "Knowing Everything about Nothing: Specialization and
Change in Scientific Careers", 1987)
"Any research organization requires generous measures of the
following: (1) Social space for personal initiative and creativity; (2) Time
for ideas to grow to maturity; (3) Openness to debate and criticism; (4)
Hospitality towards novelty; and (5) Respect for specialized expertise." (John M
Ziman, "Prometheus Bound", 1994)
"Theoretical physicists are like pure mathematicians, in that they are often interested in the hypothetical behaviour of entirely imaginary objects, such as parallel universes, or particles traveling faster than light, whose actual existence is not being seriously proposed at all." (John M Ziman, "Real Science: What it Is, and what it Means", 2000)
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