in Quotes & Aphorisms (Science and technologies)
A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.
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Science and technologies
in Quotes & Aphorisms (Science and technologies)
Science as subversion has a long history. Davis and Sakharov belong to an old tradition in science that goes all the way back to the rebels Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley in the eighteenth century, to Galileo and Giordano Bruno in the seventeenth and sixteenth. If science ceases to be a rebellion against authority, then it does not deserve the talents of our brightest children. We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Science and technologies)
The danger of asteroid or comet impact is one of the best reasons for getting into space. I'm very fond of quoting my friend Larry Niven: "The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!"
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Science and technologies)
There is a science of numbers, a science of spatial figures, of animal species etc., but there are no special sciences of prime numbers, of trapezia, or of lions, nor of all three taken together.
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We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Science and technologies)
To apply oneself to great inventions, starting from the smallest beginnings, is no task for ordinary minds; to divine that wonderful arts lie hid behind trivial and childish things is a conception for superhuman talents.
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As for the presence of large NGF [nerve growth factor] sources in snake venom and male genital organs, they may be conceived as instances of bizarre evolutionary gene expression.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Science and technologies)
Some years ago, as Your Serene Highness well knows, I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions commonly held among academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors, as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset nature and overturn the sciences. They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts; not their diminution or destruction.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Science and technologies)
The scientist who considers himself absolutely "objective" and believes that he can free himself from the compulsion of the "merely" subjective should try, only in imagination of course, to kill in succession a lettuce, a fly, a frog, a guineapig, a cat, a dog, and finally a chimpanzee. He will then be aware how increasingly difficult murder becomes as the victim's level of organisation rises. The degree of inhibition against killing each one of these beings is a very precise measure for the considerably different values that we cannot help attributing to lower and higher forms of life. To any man who finds it equally easy to chop up a live dog and a live lettuce I would recommend suicide at his earliest convenience!
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Science and religion are two human enterprises sharing many features. They share these features also with other enterprises such as art, literature and music. The most salient features of all these enterprises are discipline and diversity. Discipline to submerge the individual fantasy in a greater whole. Diversity to give scope to the infinite variety of human souls and temperaments. Without discipline there can be no greatness. Without diversity there can be no freedom. Greatness for the enterprise, freedom for the individual, these are the two themes, contrasting but not incompatible, that make up the history of science and the history of religion.
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