"Apart from an understanding of the solar system as a whole, it is becoming clear that information about any planet or satellite illuminates our knowledge of the others. In particular, if we are to understand the Earth, we must have a comprehensive knowledge of the other planets."(Carl Sagan,"The Solar System", Scientific American Vol. 233 (3), 1975)
"Each of the major sciences has contributed an essential ingredient in our long retreat from an initial belief in our own cosmic importance. Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among millions; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied." (Stephen J Gould, "Uniformity and Catastrophe", 1977)
"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)
"To call a model an idealization is to suggest that the model is a simplification of what occurs in reality, usually a simplification which omits some relevant features, such as the extended mass of the planets or, in the example of the circuit model, the resistance in the bypass capacitor. Sometimes the omitted factors make only an insignificant contribution to the effect under study. But that does not seem to be essential to idealizations, especially to the idealizations that in the end are applied by engineers to study real things. In calling something an idealization it seems not so important that the contributions from omitted factors be small, but that they be ones for which we know how to correct. If the idealization is to be of use, when the time comes to apply it to a real system we had better know how to add back the contributions of the factors that have been left out. In that case the use of idealizations does not seem to counter realism: either the omitted factors do not matter much, or in principle we know how to treat them." (Nancy Cartwright, "How the Laws of Physics Lie", 1983)
"A law explains a set of observations; a theory explains a set of laws. […] a law applies to observed phenomena in one domain (e.g., planetary bodies and their movements), while a theory is intended to unify phenomena in many domains. […] Unlike laws, theories often postulate unobservable objects as part of their explanatory mechanism." (John L Casti, "Searching for Certainty: How Scientists Predict the Future", 1990)
"In practice, the intelligibility of the world amounts to the fact that we find it to be algorithmically compressible. We can replace sequences of facts and observational data by abbreviated statements which contain the same information content. These abbreviations we often call 'laws of Nature.' If the world were not algorithmically compressible, then there would exist no simple laws of nature. Instead of using the law of gravitation to compute the orbits of the planets at whatever time in history we want to know them, we would have to keep precise records of the positions of the planets at all past times; yet this would still not help us one iota in predicting where they would be at any time in the future. This world is potentially and actually intelligible because at some level it is extensively algorithmically compressible. At root, this is why mathematics can work as a description of the physical world. It is the most expedient language that we have found in which to express those algorithmic compressions." (John D Barrow, "New Theories of Everything", 1991)
"There is a multilayering of global networks in the key strategic activities that structure and destructure the planet. When these multilayered networks overlap in some node, when there is a node that belongs to different networks, two major consequences follow. First, economies of synergy between these different networks take place in that node: between financial markets and media businesses; or between academic research and technology development and innovation; between politics and media." (Manuel Castells, "The Rise of the Network Society", 1996)
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