|
Northrop, FS
|
If one makes a false or superficial beginning,
no matter how rigorous the methods that follow, the initial
error will never be corrected.
|
|
|
Leibniz, Gottfried
|
Let us calculate.
|
|
|
Leibniz, Gottfried
|
Monads are the real atoms of nature.
|
|
|
Lee, Robert E.
|
The education of a man is never completed until
he dies.
|
|
|
Sartre,
Jean-Paul
|
Those
who hide their complete freedom from themselves out of a spirit of
seriousness or by means of deterministic excuses, I shall call cowards.
|
|
|
Lao-tse
|
He who knows others is wise. He who knows
himself is enlightened.
|
|
|
Hoffmann, Banesh
|
Quantum theory does not hold undisputed sway,
but must share dominion with that other rebel
sibling—relativity. And although these two bodies together have led to the most
penetrating advances in the search for knowledge—they must
remain enemies. Their
fundamental disagreement will not be resolved until both are
subdued by a still more powerful theory that will sweep away our
present painfully won fancies concerning such things as space,
time, matter, radiation and causality.
The nature of this theory may only be surmised—but it
will ultimately come down to the very same certainty as to
whether our civilization as a whole survives—no more no less.
|
|
|
Barnett, Lincoln
|
The gateway to universal knowledge may be
opened by the unified field theory upon which Einstein has been
at work for a quarter century.
Today the outer limits of man’s knowledge are defined
by relativity, the inner limits by the quantum theory.
Relativity has shaped all our concepts of space, time,
gravitation and the realities that are too remote and too vast
to be perceived. Quantum
theory has shaped all our concepts of the atom, the basic units
of matter and energy, and the realities that are too elusive and
too small to be perceived.
Yet these two great scientific systems rest on entirely
different and unrelated theoretical foundations.
The purpose of Einstein’s unified field theory is to
construct a bridge between them.
|
|
|
Plato
|
They deem him their worst enemy who tells them
the truth.
|
|
|
Lindley, David —concluding paragraph from The
End of Physics (1993)
|
The final theory of everything will undoubtedly
be a mathematical system of uncommon tidiness and rigor that
accommodates the physical facts of the universe as we know it. The mathematical neatness will arrive first followed by its
explanatory power. Perhaps
one day physicists will find a theory of such compelling beauty
that its truth cannot be denied—truth will be beauty and
beauty will be truth. The
theory will be, in precise terms, a myth.
A myth is a story that makes sense on its own terms,
offers explanations of everything we see before us, but can
neither be disproved nor tested.
This theory of everything will indeed spell the end of
physics. It will be
the end not because physics has been able to explain everything,
but because physics has at last reached the end of all the
things for which it has the power to explain.
|
|
|
Hawking, Stephen —concluding paragraph
from A
Brief History of Time (1996)
|
When we combine quantum theory and relativity,
there seems to be the possibility that space and time might form
a finite, four-dimensional continuum without singularities
or boundaries. If we do discover a complete theory of everything, it
should be understandable by everyone and not just a few
scientists.
Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and ordinary
people, be able to take part in discussing questions as to why
both we and the universe exist.
If we find the answer to that it would be the ultimate
triumph of human reason—for then we would at last know the
mind of God.
|
|
|
Bek, Christopher
|
The theory of one brings the reader face to
face with the stunning realization that the universe is bounded—rather
than unbounded, as Einstein and others have asserted. The
theory of one delivers the ocean.
It is the theory that spells the end of physics.
It is the monolith of 2001—a spacetime odyssey.
|
|
|
Clinton, President William J
|
If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely
be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that
science has ever uncovered.
Its implications are as far-reaching and awe-inspiring as
can be imagined. Even as it promises answers to some of our oldest
questions, it poses others even more fundamental.
We will continue to listen closely to what it has to say
as we continue the search for answers and for knowledge that is
as old as humanity itself, but essential to our people’s
future.
|
|
|
Shakespeare, William
|
This above all—to thine own self be true. And
it must follow, as night follows day, thou canst not then be
false to any man.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Kipling, Rudyard
|
If any question why we died tell them because
our fathers lied.
|
|
|
King, Martin Luther Jr
|
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than
sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
|
Calgary Police
|
|
Leibniz, Gottfried
|
Why is there something rather than nothing?
|
|
|
McLaughlin, Mignon
|
Society honors its live conformists and its dead
troublemakers.
|
|
|
Locke, John
|
If the government violates the rights of individual
citizens, then the people have the right to get rid of the government.
|
|
|
Millay, Edna St Vincent
|
Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand—come
and see my shining palace built upon the sand.
|
Shining
Palaces = Parliament, Senate, Supreme Court
|
|
Millikan, Robert
|
I spent ten years of my life testing
Einstein’s photoelectric effect theory and its attendant
assertion that light exists as particles (ie. light quanta or
photons) as well as waves and, contrary to all expectations, I
am compelled to argue for it unambiguous verification in spite
of its seeming unreasonableness.
|
|
|
Millikan, Robert
|
There are only two kinds of immoral conduct.
The first is due to indifference, thoughtlessness and
failure to reflect upon what is for the common
good. The second is represented by the unpardonable sin
that Christ spoke of—which is the deliberate refusal to follow the light when seen.
|
|
|
Miller,
Henry
|
There
are two paths before us—one backward towards comfort
and the security of death and the other forward to nowhere.
|
|
|
Heisenberg, Werner
|
Just as relativity had to abandon the concept
of simultaneity, so too does quantum theory have to abandon the
concept of electron paths.
The history of physics teaches us that the abandonment of
earlier concepts is much more difficult than the adaptation of
new ones.
|
|
|
Kaku,
Michio
|
Relativity
asks questions like—Is there a beginning and end to time?
Where is the farthest point in the universe?
What lies beyond the farthest point?
What happened at the point of Creation?
By contrast, quantum theory asks the opposite
questions—What is the smallest object in the universe?
Can matter be divided into smaller and smaller units
without limit? In
many ways these two theories appear to be exact opposites.
Relativity concerns itself the cosmic motion of galaxies
and the universe, while quantum mechanics probes the subatomic
world.
|
|
|
Kaku,
Michio
|
Neither
relativity nor quantum theory by themselves provide a satisfactory
description of nature. Einstein showed that relativity
theory alone cannot form the basis for the unified field theory.
Nor is quantum theory satisfactory without relativity.
Quantum theory can only be used to calculate the behavior of atoms
and not the large-scale behavior of galaxies and the expanding
universe. Merging
the two theories has consumed the Herculean efforts of scores of
theoretical physicists for the past half century.
Only in the last few years have physicists finally
formulated, with the help of superstring theory, a possible
synthesis of the two theories.
|
|
|
Miller, Joaquin
|
If you want immortality then go out and make
yourself immortal.
|
|
|
Milton, John
|
None can love freedom but good men. The rest love not freedom but license, which never hath more
scope than under tyrants.
|
|
|
Miller,
Henry
|
It is
silly to go on pretending that we are all brothers under the skin. The
truth is more like under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins,
traitors, liars, hypocrites and poltroons.
|
|
|
Milton, John
|
Truth is compared in scripture to a streaming
fountain—if her waters flow not in perpetual progression then
they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A
man becomes a heretic in the truth if he believes things without
knowing their reason but instead relies on his pastor’s says
so or because the assembly so determines. Though
his belief may be true, the very truth he holds becomes his
heresy.
|
|
|
Miller,
Arthur
|
When any creativity becomes useful, it is
sucked into the vortex of commercialism, and when a thing
becomes commercial, it becomes
the enemy of man.
|
|
|
Millay, Edna St Vincent
|
I love humanity but I hate people.
|
|
|
Guiterman, Michael
|
He
who learns by finding out has sevenfold the knowledge of he who
learns by being told.
|
|
|
Lindley, David
|
The idea that physical quantities do not take
on any practical reality until someone measures them offended
Einstein to the point where he asked the physicist Abraham Pais
whether he believed the Moon really exists when no one is
looking at it.
|
|
|
Locke, John
|
He who has raised himself above the alms-basket
and, not content to live lazily on scraps of begged opinions,
sets his own thoughts on the work to find and follow truth will,
whatever he lights-on, not miss the hunter’s
satisfaction—every moment of his pursuit will reward his pains
with some delight and he will not have reason to think his time
ill-spent even when he cannot boast of any great trophy for his
efforts.
|
|
|
Shakespeare, William
|
This was something of a paradox for which time
now gives its proof.
|
|
|
Barnett, Lincoln
|
The mathematical orthodoxy of the universe
enables theorists like Einstein to predict and discover natural
laws simply by the solution of equations.
|
|
|
Poe, Edgar Allan
|
The universe begins when God creates a
primordial particle out of nothing.
From it matter irradiates spherically in all directions
in an inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet
not infinitely minute atoms.
|
|
|
Poe, Edgar Allan
|
Men have called me mad, but the question is not
yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest
intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that
is profound—does not spring from disease of thought—from
moods of minds exalted at the expense of general intellect.
|
|
|
Hoffman, Philip Seymour
|
Listen, my advise to you, and I know you think
these guys are your friends, if you want to be a true friend to
them—be honest and unmerciful.
|
|
|
Barnett, Lincoln
|
The functional harmony of nature Berkeley,
Descartes, Spinoza and Einstein attributed to God.
|
|
|
Barnett, Lincoln
|
Right now it is a question whether scientific
man is in touch with reality at all—or can ever hope to be.
|
|
|
Barnett, Lincoln
|
The human eye suppresses most of the light in
the world and what man perceives of the reality around him is
distorted and enfeebled by the limitations of his organ of
vision.
|
|
|
Miller, Henry
|
The task the artist implicitly sets for himself is to
overthrow existing values and make of the chaos about him an order
which is his own. He
seeks to sow strife and ferment so that by the achievement of
emotional release those who are dead may be restored back to life.
|
|
|
Lopez, Jennifer
|
My mind. My rules.
|
|
|
Shakespeare, William
|
All doubts are traitors.
|
|
|
Leibniz, Gottfried
|
Monads are the real atoms of nature.
|
|
|
Descartes, René
|
Make a simple set of rules and follow them.
|
|
|
Hawking, Stephen
|
Nobody wants to believe the truth is as simple
as it is.
|
|
|
Russell, Bertrand
|
Most people would sooner die than think.
In fact they do.
|
|
|
Shakespeare, William
|
This was something of a paradox for which time
now gives its proof.
|
|
|
Jefferson, Thomas
|
I swear my hostility to every form of tyranny
over the mind of man.
|
|
|
Horowitz, Vladimir
|
Mozart is too simple for beginners and too difficult
for experts.
|
|
|
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
|
Man is good by nature and only made bad by
institutions.
|
|
|
Devil, The
|
Better the devil you know than the devil you
don't know.
|
|
|
Voltaire
|
Once a nation begins to think, it is impossible
to stop.
|
|
|
Pascal, Blaise
|
A soul weighs more than the whole universe.
|
|
|
God
|
Thou shall have no other god before me.
|
|
|
Descartes, René
|
I do my best thinking in a warm bed.
|
|
|
Hoffmann, Banesh
|
Great science transcends logic.
|
|
|
Jeans, Sir James
|
God is a mathematician.
|
|
|
Goethe, Johann —the last words
|
More light.
|
|
|
Leibniz, Gottfried
|
Nature never makes leaps.
|
|
|
Descartes, René
|
Conquer yourself rather than the world.
|
|
|
Camus, Albert
|
Memory is the enemy of totalitarianism.
|
|
|
Heraclitus
|
One cannot step in the same river twice.
|
|
|
Socrates
|
I would rather die than give up philosophy.
|
|
|
Spinoza, Baruch
|
The true aim of government is liberty.
|
|
|
Spinoza, Baruch
|
Man is deceived if he thinks himself free.
|
|
|
Socrates
|
We must follow the argument wherever it leads.
|
|
|
Socrates
|
Society attacks people early when they are most
helpless.
|
|
|
Mill, John Stuart
|
Over himself—over his own body and mind—the
individual is sovereign.
|
|
|
Nietzsche, Fredrich
|
Man is a rope tied between the beast and the
Superman—a rope over the abyss.
|
|
|
Hegel, GW
|
There soon creeps in the misconception of
already knowing before you actually know.
|
|
|
Augustine, Saint
|
Miracles happen, not in opposition to nature,
but in opposition to what we know of nature.
|
|
|
Frost, Robert
|
We dance around in a ring and suppose while the
secret sits in the middle and knows.
|
|
|
Heisenberg, Werner
|
Einstein once maintained against me that theory
first decides what can be observed.
|
|
|
Heisenberg, Werner
|
In the early twenties we knew that Bohr’s
model of the atom could not be correct, but that it pointed in
the right direction.
|
|
|
Gribbin, John
|
The fate of specialists in anyone area of
science is to focus more and more narrowly on their special
topic, learning more and more about less and less, until
eventually they end up knowing everything about nothing.
|
|
|
Hoffman, Philip Seymour
|
The only true currency in this bankrupt world
is what you share with someone else when you are uncool.
|
|
|
Descartes, René
|
No beauty is comparable to the beauty of truth.
|
|
|
Bek, Christopher
|
If one wishes to better understand the Dark
Ages (430-1630) then the most suitable course of action is to
turn on the television.
|
|
|
Lavine, Thelma
|
The principle concerns expressed by the writers
of the Renaissance was the need to restore to man the
capacities, strengths and powers of the individual person for
which the Dark Ages (430-1630) had denied.
|
|
|
Lavine, Thelma
|
The way in which Plato solved the problems of
philosophy was to identify what was true in each of the
conflicting philosophies and then marshal these truths into a
single, unified, original philosophy of his own.
|
|
|
Schumacher, EF
|
Matter, life, consciousness and
self-awareness—these four elements are ontologically—that
is, in their fundamental nature—different, incomparable,
incommensurable and discontinuous.
|
|
|
Strathern, Paul
|
Leibniz envisioned monads as being like
souls—metaphysical, immortal and each one unique.
A monad is windowless in that there is no perception or
effect on the monads around it—yet, at the same time, each
monad is said to mirror the entire universe.
Together they exist in an exhaustive hierarchy.
Superior monads have a higher degree of consciousness
while others are dimmer and mirror the universe much less
clearly and distinctly.
|
|
|
Lawrence, DH
|
Everything that can possibly be painted has
been painted, every brush-stroke that can possibly be laid on
canvas has been laid on. Then
suddenly at the age of forty I began painting myself and became
fascinated.
|
|
|
Poincaré, Henri
|
A mathematical argument is not a simple
juxtaposition of Forms, it is Forms placed in a certain order. And the order in which these elements are arranged is much
more important than the elements themselves.
|
|
|
Poincaré, Henri
|
What are the mathematical entities to which we
attribute the character of beauty and elegance—and which are
capable of developing in us a sort of aesthetic emotion?
They are those elements harmoniously disposed so that
without effort the mind can embrace their totality while also
realizing the details.
|
|
|
Brennan, Richard
|
Nobody had shaken the world of science more
than Einstein—and now came along another young upstart German
in Heisenberg with still another attack on classical physics.
|
|
|
Brennan, Richard
|
In 1936 the Nobel Prize-winning physicist
Johannes Stark and his followers unleashed a newspaper assault
in Germany against Jewish physics, by which he meant theoretical
physics, which he contrasted with German or experimental
physics.
|
|
|
Hall, Calvin
|
While nineteenth-century psychology was busy at
work analyzing the conscious mind, psychoanalysis was engaged in
explorations of the unconscious mind.
Freud felt that consciousness was only a thin slice of
the total mind, that like an iceberg, the larger part of it
existed below the surface of awareness. Psychologists answered Freud by saying that the notion of
an unconscious mind was a contradiction in terms; the mind, by
definition, was conscious.
The controversy never reached a final conclusion because
both psychology and psychoanalysis changed their objective
during the twentieth century. Psychology became the science of behavior and psychoanalysis
became the science of personality.
|
|
|
Kopp, Sheldon
|
The anti-hero of Franz Kafka’s hauntingly
sinister novel, The Castle, is a wandering stranger,
perhaps a land-surveyor. He
is a hapless wayfarer, searching for some confirmation of his
identity. He is K,
a man with no more name than that.
He strives desperately to attain a place for himself
within the authority of The Castle, wishing to trade his lonely
rootlessness, his permanent homelessness, for a sense of
belonging to something greater than himself.
But the harder he tries to make contact with the faceless
authorities who run The Castle, the more he is confronted with
the frustration of their vagueness and impersonality.
He just cannot get the hang of their ambiguous
procedures. He is
ever in a state of doubt. At
times he feels unfairly treated and so responds with ineffectual
defiance. But more
often, he feels vaguely guilty, as though his frustration must
be his own fault. After all, if there is a rule, it must have some meaning.
There must be some sense to their incomprehensible
regulations. In his
isolation and impotence, he senses that the problem must be the
result of his own basic inferiority.
He is again and again stuck in the obsessional mire of
his indecision, his unwillingness to choose between freedom and
obligation. He
feels that he must keep on trying.
There must be a way to satisfy the unclear requirements
of the authorities, to behave satisfactorily so that they will
accept him. If only
he could figure out the rules, then he would follow them.
|
|
|
Oppenheimer, Robert
|
They should give the Nobel Prize to the first
guy who doesn’t discover a new subatomic particle.
|
|
|
Einstein, Albert
|
The one thing that I have learned in a long
life is that all science measured against reality is primitive
and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
|
|
|
Einstein, Albert
|
Concern for man himself and his fate must
always be the chief interest of all technical endeavors so that
the creations of our mind shall become blessings and not a
curses to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and
equations.
|
|
|
Nicoll, Maurice
|
Once in Sunday school while going over the
Greek New Testament, I asked a question regarding the meaning of
a parable. The
headmaster’s answer was so utterly confused and convoluted
that I actually experienced my first true moment of
consciousness—that is, I suddenly became aware with
excruciating clarity that he knew nothing at all.
From that moment forward I began to think for myself, or
at least knew that I could.
I remember clearly the classroom with its windows so high
that we could not see out, the desks, the platform on which the
headmaster sat, his thin scholarly face, his nervous habits of
twitching his mouth and jerking his hands—and then suddenly
this profound inner revelation that neither he nor anyone else
knew about anything that mattered.
It was this threshold moment that was to be the starting
point of my liberation from the external world.
I knew then for certain that true knowledge could only be
arrived at by authentic inner perception—and that all my
loathing of religion, as it was taught to me, was at last
vindicated.
|
|
|
Locke, John
|
We are compelled by reason to acknowledge the
existence of natural, inalienable rights and duties independent
of convention, agreement or contract.
|
|
|
Scruton, Roger
|
The totalitarian system embodies the conviction
that nothing is sacred. In
such a system, human life is driven underground, and the ideas
of freedom and responsibility—ideas without which our picture
of man as a moral subject disintegrates entirely—have no
public recognition and no place in the administrative process.
|
|
|
Scruton, Roger
|
As Kant himself pointed out, the moral law has
an absolute character. Rights
cannot be arbitrarily overwritten, or weighed against the profit
of ignoring them. Duties
cannot be arbitrarily set aside, or cancelled by the bad results
or due obedience. I must respect your right, regardless of conflicting
interests, since you alone can renounce or cancel it.
That is the point of the concept—to provide an absolute
barrier against invasion. A
right is an interest that is given special protection, and
cannot be overwritten or cancelled without the consent of the
person who possess it. By
describing an interest as a right we lift it from the account of
cost and benefit, and place it in the sacred precinct of the
self. Likewise
duty, if it is to exist at all, must have an absolute moral
character. In the
final analysis, to treat a person as an end rather than a means
is to acknowledge their rights against ours, and our duties
towards him—and to recognize that neither right nor duty can
be cancelled by some other good.
|
|
|
Barnett, Lincoln
|
In this vast cosmic picture the abyss between
macrocosmos and microcosmos—the very big and the very
little—will be bridged, and the whole complex of the universe
will resolve into a homogeneous fabric in which matter and
energy are indistinguishable and all forms of motion from the
slow wheeling of the galaxies to the wild flight of electrons
become simply changes in the structure and concentration of the
primordial field.
|
|
|
Heisenberg, Werner
|
The violent reaction to the recent development of
modern physics can only be understood when one realizes that the
foundations of physics have started moving—and that this motion has
caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science.
|
|
|
Jung, Carl
|
Modern man has acquired the willpower to
carryout his work proficiently without recourse to chanting,
drumming or praying. He
is able to translate his ideas into actions without a hitch,
while primitive man was hampered by fears and superstitions at
each step along the way. Yet
in maintaining his creed, modern man pays the price in a
remarkable lack of introspection.
He is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality
and efficiency, he is possessed by powers beyond his control
that keep him restlessly on the run.
|
|
|
Locke, John
|
Individuals have the right to the fruits of
their labours only if they leave enough and as good for others.
|
|
|
Bronner,
Stephen
|
John Locke and Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire and others envisioned a new
world in which the arbitrary authority of the Church and an
arrogant aristocracy would cease to exist; a world in which
reason and democracy would temper provincial ethnic and
religious hatreds between states and races; a world of
unfettered freedom, without radical differences in the
distribution of wealth, in which an individual might better his
lot through hard work and without fear of obstruction by the
state. The
constitution was the jewel in the crown of this new world. The
individual would be no longer an object of domination but rather
a subject vested with rights—a citizen.
|
|
|
Barnett, Lincoln
|
Gradually philosophers and scientists have
arrived at the startling conclusion that since every object is
simply the sum of its qualities, and since qualities exist only
in the mind, the whole objective universe of matter and energy,
atoms and stars, does not exist except as a construction of the
consciousness—an edifice of conventional symbols shaped by the
senses of man.
|
|
|
Jefferson, Thomas
|
On matters of style, swim with the current.
On matters of principle, stand like a rock.
|
|
|
Jefferson, Thomas
|
I know no safer depository for the ultimate powers of
society than with the people themselves.
And if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise control
with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but
to shed light on their discretion.
|
|
|
Matrix, Morpheus from the 1999 movie Matrix
|
You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees
because he is expecting to wake up.
And you are here because you know something.
What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world.
You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter
in your mind driving you mad. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to
blind you from the truth. Like
everyone you are a slave. You
were born into bondage, born into a prison you cannot smell or taste
or touch—a prison for your mind.
|
|
|
Einstein, Albert
|
My religion consists of a humble admiration of
the illimitable superior spirit who reveals Himself in the
slight details that we are able to perceive with our frail and
feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence
of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the
incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.
|
|
|
Hobbes, Thomas
|
Unless sovereignty finds concrete expression in
an individual, it neither commands the allegiance of the people
nor supports the cohesion of the state.
|
|
|
Palmer, Donald
|
The true philosopher attempts to transcend the
purely human perspective and view reality from the perspective
of reality itself.
|
|
|
Einstein, Albert
|
The cosmic religious experience is the
strongest and noblest mainspring of scientific research.
|
|
|
Russell, Bertrand
|
A pedant is someone who prefers their arguments
to be true.
|
|
|
Kennedy, Robert
|
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever
achieve greatly.
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Lincoln, Abraham
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Be sure you put your feet in the right place
and then stand firm.
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Flew, Anthony
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To be illogical is to be stupid or to be
incoherent or to be insufficiently concerned with the truth—or
all three together.
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Lincoln, Abraham
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Anyone who makes an assertion without knowing
its truthfulness is guilty of falsehood—and the accidental
truth of the assertion does not justify the lie.
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Microsoft Encarta
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John Locke argued that sovereignty resides in
individuals, not rulers.
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Locke, John
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If the government violates the rights of
individuals, then the people have the right to get rid of the
government.
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Locke, John
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The natural liberty of man is to be free from
any superior power on earth—and not to be under the will or
legislative authority of man but to have only the laws of nature
for his rule.
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Microsoft Encarta
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Thomas Jefferson’s belief in the social
contract came from British political philosopher John Locke, who
argued that government existed by consent of the governed and
that people should rebel if their natural rights are violated.
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Hampshire, Stuart
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Until well past the time of Newton there was no
distinction between philosophy and science.
Natural philosophy was the common term used to describe
what we now call both metaphysics and physics.
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Heisenberg, Werner
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In the early twenties we knew that Bohr’s
model of the atom could not be correct, but that it pointed in
the right direction.
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Barnett, Lincoln
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The functional harmony of nature Berkeley,
Descartes, Spinoza and Einstein attributed to God.
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Blaise Pascal
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If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter,
the entire face of the world would be different.
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Penrose, Roger
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I am able to show that space and time come to a
physical, rather than merely a metaphysical, end.
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End of spacetime is, by definition, boundary
between physical and metaphysical
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Boslough, John
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Physicists are searching for a single
interaction at the heart of the universe that is the key to all
physical phenomena.
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Planck’s constant equals
lightspeed
—Hello, wake up McFly
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Boslough, John
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The universe seems to operate according to
several sets of different rules that act in layers independently
of one another.
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The unified field theory
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Boslough, John
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Not all physicists believe that a unified
theory is possible. The
Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900-58) once joked—What
God has put asunder, no man shall ever join.
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What
about a demigod?
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Hoffmann, Banesh
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The story of relativity tells what happened to
science when one provisional theory of space and time yields to
another. The story
of the quantum tells of adventures which recently befell our
theories of matter and radiation, and of their unexpected
consequences.
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Hoffmann, Banesh
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The magnificent rise of the quantum to a
dominant position in modern science and philosophy is a story of
drama and high adventure often well-nigh incredible.
It is a chaotic tale, but amid the apparent chaos one
gradually discerns a splendid architecture, each discovery,
however seemingly irrelevant or nonsensical, falling cunningly
into its appointed place till the whole intricate jigsaw is
revealed as one of the major discoveries of the human mind.
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Hoffmann, Banesh
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So abstract a matter as the quantum theory
serves well as the basis for learned treatises whose pages
overflow with the unfriendly symbols of higher mathematics.
Here is a glimpse of the scientific theorist at work, pen
and paper his implements, as he experiments with ideas.
Not the least of his gifts is a talent for reaching
valuable conclusions from what later prove to be faulty
premises. For his
insight is penetrating. Be
it a hint here or a clue there, a crude analogy or a wild guess,
he fashions working hypotheses from whatever material is at
hand, and, with the divine gift of intuition for guide,
courageously follows the faintest will-o-the-wisp till it show
him the way toward truth.
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Hoffmann, Banesh
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What are those potent wraiths we call space and
time, without which our universe would be inconceivable? What is
that mystic essence, matter, which exists within us and around
in so many wondrous forms; which is at once the servant and
master of mind, and holds proud rank in the hierarchy of the
universe as a primary instrument of divine creation?
And what is that swiftest of celestial messengers,
radiation, which leaps the empty vastnesses of space with
lightning speed? Though
true answers there can be none, science is fated to fret about
such problems. It
must forever spin tentative theories around them, seeking to
entrap therewith some germ of truth upon which to poise its
intricate superstructure. The balance is delicate and every change sends tremors
coursing through the edifice to its uttermost tip.
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Jeans, Sir James
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A soap-bubble with corrugations on its surface
is perhaps the best simple and familiar representation of the
new universe revealed to us by Einstein’s relativity.
The universe is not the interior of the soap-bubble but
its surface, and we must always remember that while the surface
of the soap bubble has only two dimensions, the universe bubble
has four—three spatial and one of temporal. And the substance
out of which this bubble is blown, the soap-film, is empty space
welded onto empty time.
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Wheeler, John
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When I became interested in gravitation and general
relativity, I found myself forced to invent the idea of quantum
foam—made up not merely of particles popping into and out of
existence without limit, but of spacetime itself churned into a
lather of distorted geometry.
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Heisenberg, Werner
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The history of physics in this century teaches
us that the abandonment of earlier concepts is much more
difficult than the adaptation of new ones.
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Poe, Edgar Allan
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Men have called me mad, but the question is not
yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest
intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that
is profound—does not spring from disease of thought—from
moods of minds exalted at the expense of general intellect.
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Newton, Sir Isaac
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I know not what the world thinks of me, but as
for myself, I seem to be only a boy playing on the seashore, now
and again finding a smoother stone or a more beautiful
shell—all the while the great ocean of truth lies undiscovered
before me.
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Barnett, Lincoln
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The mathematical orthodoxy of the universe
enables theorists like Einstein to predict and discover natural
laws simply by the solution of equations.
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Hoffmann, Banesh —introductory paragraph from
The Strange
Story of the Quantum (1947)
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The story of the quantum is a confused and
groping search for knowledge conducted by scientists of many
lands on a front far wider than the world of physics had ever
seen before—illuminated by flashes of insight, aided by
accidents and guesses, and enlivened by coincidences that one
would only expect to find in works of fiction.
It is the story of turbulent revolution—of the
undermining of a complacent physics that had long ruled a
limited domain, of a subsequent interregnum predestined for its
own destruction by its inherent contradictions, and of the
tempestuous emergence of a much more chastened regime—quantum
theory. And while
quantum theory rules newly discovered land with a firm hand, its
victory is not complete. What
looks like mere scratches on the brilliant surface of its domain
reveal themselves as fascinating crevasses betraying the
darkness within and luring the intrepid on to new adventure.
Nor does quantum theory hold undisputed sway but must
share dominion with that other rebel sibling—relativity.
And although together these two bodies have led to the
most penetrating advances in the search for knowledge—they
must remain enemies. Their fundamental disagreement will not be resolved until
both are subdued by a still more powerful theory that will sweep
away our present painfully won fancies concerning such things as
space, time, matter, radiation and causality.
The nature of this theory may only be surmised—but it
will ultimately come down to the very same certainty as to
whether our civilization as a whole survives—no more no less.
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Barnett,
Lincoln —concluding paragraph from The Universe and
Dr. Einstein (1948)
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In the evolution of scientific thought, one
fact has become impressively clear—that there is no mystery of
the physical world which does not point to a mystery beyond
itself. All
highroads of the intellect, all byways of theory and conjecture
lead ultimately to an abyss that human ingenuity can never span.
For man is enchained by the very condition of his Being,
his finiteness and his involvement in nature.
The further he extends his horizons, the more vividly he
recognizes the fact that, as the physicist Niels Bohr put it, we
are both spectators and actors in the great drama of existence.
Man is thus his own greatest mystery.
He does not understand the vast veiled universe into
which he has been cast for the reason that he does not
understand himself. He
comprehends little of his organic process and even less of his
unique capacity to perceive the world about him in his
rationality and his dreams.
Least of all does he understand his noblest and most
mysterious faculty—the ability to transcend himself by
perceiving himself in the act of perception.
Man’s inescapable impasse is that he himself is part of
the world that he seeks to explore—his body and proud brain
are but mosaics of the same elemental particles that compose the
dark, drifting clouds of interstellar space.
Man is, in the final analysis, merely an ephemeral
confirmation of the primordial spacetime field.
Standing midway between macrocosm and microcosm, he finds
barriers on every side and can perhaps but marvel, as Saint Paul
did nineteen hundred years ago in saying that the world was
created by the word of God so that what is seen is composed of
things which do not appear.
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Emerson,
Ralph Waldo
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Beware
when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all
things are at risk. It will be as if a conflagration has broken out
in a great city—and
no man knows what is safe or where it will end.
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Pascal,
Blaise
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The art of revolution lies in dislodging established customs by probing down into their origins in order
to show how they lack authority and justice. There must be a return to the basic and primordial laws of the state
which unjust custom has since eradicated.
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Camus, Albert
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I grew in the sea and poverty was my wealth,
then I lost the sea, then all luxury seemed grey, poverty
intolerable. Since then, I wait. I wait for the return voyage,
the house by the sea, the clear light of day. I wait, I struggle
to be polite. People see me pass in elegant cultured streets, I
admire the views, I applaud like everyone else, I shake hands,
it’s not really me speaking. People praise me, I daydream a
little, I’m offended, but show almost no surprise. Then I
forget and smile at whoever insults me, or I greet those I love
too courteously. What’s to be done if I can only remember a
single image? Finally they urge me to say who I am. Still
nothing, still nothing.
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Camus, Albert
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Of whom and of what indeed can I say—I know
that! This heart
within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists.
This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it
exists. There ends
all my knowledge, and the rest is construction.
For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if
I try to define and summarize it, it is nothing but water
slipping through my fingers.
I can sketch one by one all the aspects that it is able
to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it,
this upbringing, this origin, this ardor of these silences, this
nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up.
This very heart which is mine will forever remain
undefinable to me. Between
the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to
give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled.
Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.
In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.
Socrates’ Know thyself has as much value as the Be
virtuous of our confessionals.
They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance.
They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate insofar as they are approximate.
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Skinner, BF from his tellingly entitled
1971 book Beyond Freedom and Dignity
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Many anthropologists, sociologists and
psychologists have used their expert knowledge to prove that man
is free, purposeful and responsible. This escape route is
slowly being closed as new evidence of the predictability of human
behavior is discovered. Any personal exemption from complete
determinism is being revoked as scientific analysis progresses—particularly when accounting for the behavior of the individual.
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Working for the
clampdown
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Microsoft Encarta
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No simple, agreed-upon definition of
consciousness exists. Attempts to define consciousness have
tended to be merely tautological or descriptive—such as
awareness, sensations, thoughts or feelings. In spite of this,
the subject of consciousness has had a remarkable history and at
one time was the primary subject matter of psychology, although has since suffered an almost complete and total downfall.
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Have we
collectively lost consciousness?
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Skinner, BF
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Consciousness? Can you see it? Measure it? Pass
it around? Then how is it different than something that does not
exist at all?
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Skinner (1904-90) was the father of modern
behaviorism
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Sartre, Jean-Paul
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There can be no other truth to take off from
this—I think, therefore I exist—ie. the Cartesian cogito.
There we have the absolute truth of consciousness
becoming aware of itself. Every
theory which takes man out of the moment in which he becomes
aware of himself is, at its very beginning, a theory which
confounds the truth, for outside the Cartesian cogito,
all views are only probable, and a doctrine of probability which
is not bound to a truth dissolves into thin air. In order to describe the probable, you must have a firm
hold on the true. Therefore,
before there can be any truth whatsoever, there must be an
absolute truth; and this one is easily arrived at; it is on
everyone’s doorstep; it is a matter of grasping it directly.
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Sartre (1905-80) was the father of modern
existentialism
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Schumacher, EF
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Man has the power of life like the plants, the
power of consciousness like the animals, and something
more—the power of consciousness recoiling upon itself—which
is the power of self-awareness. Man is not merely a conscious
being, but a being capable of consciousness of his own
consciousness—not merely a thinker, but a thinker able to
watch and study his own thinking. This power of self-awareness opens up
unlimited possibilities for purposeful learning, investigating,
exploring and of formulating and accumulating knowledge.
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Schumacher, EF
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People
ask for bread and are given stones.
They beg for advice on how to be saved and are told that
salvation is an infantile neurosis.
They long for guidance on how to live responsibly and are
told they are machines, like computers, without freewill and
therefore without responsibility.
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Schumacher, EF
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People
for whom the power of self-awareness is poorly developed cannot
grasp it as a separate power and tend to think of it as nothing
more than a slight extension of consciousness.
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Jaeger, Werner
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Once a human potentiality is realized, it
exists.
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Alighieri, Dante
|
The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who maintain
their neutrality in times of moral crises.
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Einstein, Albert
|
No problem was ever solved by the same mind
that created it.
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Kyoto—Chrétien
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Einstein, Albert
|
When the solution is simple, God has answered.
|
The theory of one, The
unified field theory
|
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Stevenson, Adlai during the 1962 Cuban Missile
Crisis
|
Don’t worry. If they’re still sticking to
their stonewalling tactics—I’ll get them.
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Homer
|
Put
me on earth again and I would rather be a serf in the house of
some landless man than the king of all these dead men that are
done with life.
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Solomon, Robert
|
Christ’s teachings encompassed themes that
were already central to Jewish thought—for example, love and
the importance of helping the unfortunate.
But he also taught the by-no-means-orthodox thesis that
the Jewish law could be summarized in terms of loving God with
one’s whole heart. Christ
sharply criticized those who made a great show of their holiness
but who failed to show compassion—a theme again borrowed from
the Hebrew prophets.
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Solomon, Robert
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Muhammad (570-632) was a merchant in Mecca who
became the central prophet and founder of Islam. The term Islam
derives from slam and means peace and surrender—namely,
the peace that comes from surrendering to the will of God’s
sovereignty. Before Islam the religions of the Arabic world
involved the worship of many gods—Allah being one of them.
Muhammad taught the worship of Allah as the only God, whom he
identified as the same God worshipped by Christians and Jews.
And Muhammad also accepted the authenticity of both the Jewish
prophets and Christ—as do his followers.
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Bek, Christopher
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The
word philosophy comes from ancient Greece and is defined as the
love of wisdom.
Socrates
(470-399 BC) set the table for Plato (427-347 BC) by radically
insisting that we must first answer the question of what X is
before we can say anything else about X.
Plato then founded philosophy by daring to ask what
existence would be like outside the cave.
Plato’s theory of knowledge and theory of Forms
holds that true or a priori knowledge must be certain and
infallible. The Greeks Thales (624-546 BC)
and Pythagoras (582-500 BC)
founded geometry as the very first mathematical
discipline. Mathematics is the systematic treatment of
Forms, the science of drawing conclusion and the primordial
foundation of absolutely all other science. While the Church was jumping up and down on
everyone’s head in the Western world for over a millennium,
Arab mathematicians like Muhammad al-Khwârizmî (780-850) were
carrying the ball in founding algebra and algorithms.
An algorithm is the procedural method for
calculating and drawing conclusions with Arabic numerals and the
decimal notation. Al-Khwârizmî
served as librarian at the court of Caliph al-Mamun and as
astronomer at the Baghdâd observatory.
Interestingly, both the terms algebra and algorithm
stem from the God, Allah. According
to Arab philosophy, mathematics is the way God’s mind works.
The Arabs believe that, by understanding mathematics,
they are comprehending the mind of God.
In fact the very core of their religion lies with the
belief that the people must submit to the will of God’s
sovereignty—meaning simply that the Godmade laws of nature
(ie. mathematics) trump the manmade laws of government.
The Latin version of al-Khwârizmî’s work is
responsible for a great deal of the mathematical knowledge that
resurfaced during the Renaissance.
The notion that mathematics and God are the very same
thing was adapted as the foundation for the Renaissance by
thinkers like Descartes, Pascal, Fermat, Newton, Locke and
Berkeley. Then, in
what John Stuart Mill called the single greatest advance in the
history of science, Descartes fulfilled the Pythagorean dream in
conceiving analytic geometry and modern mathematics by
synthesizing Greek geometry with Arab algebra.
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Bek, Christopher
|
Totalitarianism is the practice of governance
that attempts to monopolize all possible influences affecting
the behavior of individuals.
It atomizes people and existentially alienates them from
themselves and each other, thus forcing them to capitulate to
the external authority of government in order to survive.
Totalitarianism depends upon the masses to control the
masses by either physical or metaphysical force.
The Canadian Government defines itself as totalitarian in
that it denies the children access to the mind of God by
buggering them with a wrongheaded education that is founded on a
false, flat, dehistorized version of mathematics.
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Kennedy, Robert
|
The future does not belong to those who are
content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their
fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of bold projects
and new ideas. Rather, it will belong to those who can blend
passion, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the
great enterprises and ideals of society.
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Sayers, Dorothy
|
War
is a judgment which overtakes societies that have been living upon
ideas that conflict too violently with the laws of nature.
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Sayers, Dorothy
|
That Dante’s Inferno is a picture of
human society in a state of sin and corruption, everyone will
readily agree. And since we are today fairly well convinced that
society is in a bad way and not necessarily evolving in the
direction of perfectibility, we find it easy enough to recognize
the various stages by which the depth of corruption is reached.
Futility; lack of a living faith; the drift into loose morality,
greedy consumption, financial irresponsibility, and uncontrolled
bad temper; a self-opinionated and obstinate individualism;
violence, sterility, and lack of reverence for life and property
including one’s own; the exploitation of sex, the debasing of
language by advertisement and propaganda, the commercializing of
religion, the pandering to superstition and the conditioning of
people’s minds by mass-hysteria and spell-binding of all
kinds, venality and string pulling in public affairs, hypocrisy,
dishonesty in material things, intellectual dishonesty, the
fomenting of discord (class against class, nation against
nation) for what one can get out of it, the falsification and
destruction of all the means of communication; the exploitation
of the lowest and stupidest mass-emotions; treachery even to the
fundamentals of kinship, country, the chosen friend, and the
sworn allegiance—these are the all-too-recognizable stages that
lead to the cold death of society and the extinguishing of all
civilized relations.
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Plato
|
A just society will only be possible once philosophers become
kings and kings become philosophers.
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Kaku, Michio
|
Einstein always began with the simplest possible ideas, and then
put them into their proper context. But Einstein failed in his
attempt to create a unified field theory because he abandoned
this simple conceptual approach and instead resorted to the
safety of obscure mathematics.
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Kaku, Michio
|
In many ways the destinies of Einstein and Heisenberg were
strangely interwoven, although the theories they created,
relativity and quantum theory, are universes apart. Both
were revolutionary iconoclasts who challenged the established
wisdom of their predecessors.
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Kaku, Michio
|
While relativity uncovers the secrets of energy, gravity and
spacetime—the other theory that dominated the twentieth
century, quantum theory, is the theory of matter. What
Einstein didn’t realize, as physicists do now, is that the key
to the unified field theory is found in the marriage of
relativity theory and quantum theory.
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Hoffmann, Banesh
|
Quantum theory does not hold undisputed sway, but
must share dominion with that other rebel sibling—relativity. And although these two bodies together have led to the most
penetrating advances in the search for knowledge—they must remain
enemies. Their
fundamental disagreement will not be resolved until both are subdued
by a still more powerful theory that will sweep away our present
painfully won fancies concerning such things as space, time, matter,
radiation and causality. The
nature of this theory may only be surmised—but it will ultimately
come down to the very same certainty as to whether our civilization as
a whole survives—no more no less.
|
|
|
Bek, Christopher
|
The single greatest thought problem occupying
the world of physics during the past seventy-five years involved the
attempt to unite the macrocosmos of relativity with the microcosmos of
quantum theory. As
evidence that no prior relationship existed between lightspeed and
Planck’s constant—John Wheeler’s 1999 book A Journey into
Gravity and Spacetime fails to even mention Planck’s constant.
Clearly, the theory of one resolves this seventy-five year old
thought problem in utterly spectacular fashion.
And it is at this point
that I wish to stake claim to the greatest scientific discovery of
all time—that lightspeed and Planck’s constant are in fact the
very same thing—the boundary of the spacetime continuum.
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Scruton, Roger
|
Freedom is lost when the subject surrenders to
the object.
|
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Talbot, Michael
|
One of the most important experiment of the
century was performed in 1982 by physicists Alain Aspect, Jean
Dalibard, and Gerard Roger of the Institute of Optics at the
University of Paris. It
focused on the kind of interconnectedness that manifests itself
between particles in the classic double-slit experiment. In the
1970s the technology became available to provide evidence that
particles believed to be twins were actually connected—but it
wasn’t until 1982 that Aspect and his team settled the matter
conclusively. When Aspect and his team performed the experiment and
tallied the results they discovered that the angles of
polarization were indeed correlated in such a way that indicated
the photons were instantaneously connected with one another. And
this is a mind-boggling finding. It means that some of our most
cherished and accepted notions about reality are radically in
error. What is all the more astounding is that the Aspect
experiment—an experiment which, most assuredly, will
eventually change our understanding of reality as much as the
revelations of Copernicus or Darwin—went almost completely
unnoticed by the mass media. Even the scientific world, as
evidenced by the response of the scientific journals, greeted it
with an unusual lack of fanfare. Articles appeared announcing
the results of the experiment and concluded with remarks such as
leads to realities beyond our common experience and indicates
that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of
reality. But beyond that not much more has been said.
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Nietzsche, Friedrich
|
The perfect woman is higher than the perfect
man—and also much rarer. One cannot be gentle enough towards
women.
|
Gretchen
Mol, Jolene Blalock, Jennifer
Connelly, Nicole Kidman
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Durant, Will
|
Too long have we been fragments, shattered
pieces of what might be a whole. How can a great culture grow in
an air of patriotic prejudice and narrowing provincialism? The
time for petty politics is over—the compulsion to great
politics has come. When will the new race of leaders appear?
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Durant, Will
|
The problem of politics is to prevent the
businessman from ruling. For such a man has the short sight and
narrow grasp of a politician, not the long view and wide range
of the born aristocrat trained to statesmanship. The finer man
has a divine right to rule—ie. the right of superior ability.
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Durant, Will
|
Democracy means drift; it means permission
given to each part of an organism to do just what it pleases; it
means the lapse of coherence and interdependence, the
enthronement of liberty and chaos. It means the worship of
mediocrity and the hatred of excellence. It means the
impossibility of great men—how could great men submit to the
indignities and indecencies of an election? What chance would
they have? What is hated by the people, as a wolf by the dogs,
is the free spirit, the enemy of all fetters, the not-adorer,
the man who is not a regular party-member. How can the Superman
arise in such a soil? And how can a nation become great when its
greatest men lie unused, discouraged, perhaps unknown? Such a
society loses character; imitation is horizontal instead of
vertical—not the superior man but the majority man becomes the
ideal and the model; everybody comes to resemble everybody else;
even the sexes approximate—the men become women and the women
become men.
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Pascal, Blaise
|
Man escapes freedom by means of the two
sovereign anodynes of habit and diversion. He chases a bouncing
ball or rides to hounds after a fleeing animal—or the ball and
fleeing game are pursued through the labyrinth of social
intrigue and amusement—anything, so long as he manages to
escape from himself.
|
What about chasing a puck
or managing pucks or writing about chasing and managing pucks?
|
|
Hubben, William
|
Modern man wants neither God nor Christ—for what he
desires is simply the authority of the Church.
He wants the physical security of bread, the spiritual security
of dogma, and the so-called proof of the existence of miracles. To follow God irrespective of the consequences presents too
great a risk. The Church
offers up a lighter burden. It
serves, selects and explains the truth, forgives sins and bestows upon
man the happiness of children. Yet
the price is high. Man
must surrender his freedom of thought and, indeed, he willingly does
so. He no longer serves
God as God demands of him, but only as the Church tells him so.
God’s mysteries and miracles are henceforth monopolized and
administered by the Church.
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Russell,
Bertrand
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I
say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized
in it thirty Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy
of moral progress in the world.
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Durant, Will
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Let our students of philosophy enter the world
with no favor shown them; they shall compete with men of brawn
and men of cunning; in the mart of strife they shall learn from
the book of life itself; they shall hurt their fingers and
scratch their philosophic shins on the crude realities of the
world; they shall earn their bread and butter by the sweat of
their brows. This last and sharpest test shall go on ruthlessly
for fifteen long years. Those that survive, scarred and fifty,
sobered and self-reliant, shorn of scholastic vanity by the
merciless friction of life, and armed now with all the wisdom
that tradition and experience, culture and conflict, can
cooperate to give—these men at last shall become our leaders.
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Bernstein, Peter
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In 1952 a young graduate student named Harry
Markowitz studying operations research demonstrated mathematically why
putting all your eggs in one basket is an unacceptable strategy and
why optimal diversification is the best one can do.
His revelation touched off an intellectual movement that has
revolutionized Wall Street, corporate finance and decisionmaking of
all kinds. Its effects
are still being felt today.
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Bernstein, Peter
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To judge the extent to which today’s methods
of dealing with risk are either a benefit or a threat, we must
know the whole story, from its very
beginnings. We must
know why people of past times did—or did not—try
to tame risk, how they approached the task, what modes of
thinking and language emerged from their experience and how
their activities interacted with other events, large and
small, to change the course of culture. Such
a perspective will bring us to a deeper understanding of where
we stand, and where we may be heading.
Along the way we shall refer often to games of chance,
which have applications that extend far beyond the spin of the
roulette wheel. Many
of the most sophisticated ideas about managing risk and making
decisions have developed from the analysis of the most childish
of games. One does not have to be a gambler or even an investor to
recognize what gambling and investing reveal about risk.
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Bek, Christopher
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Conscious
is the perceptual apparatus by which we comprehend reality and
the essence of reality is fundamentally different than our
conscious perception of it.
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Bek, Christopher
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Socrates said that no god seeks wisdom—for he
is already wise. Upon
assuming behaviorism, doctors, judges, cops and educators
effectively issued press releases declaring themselves gods.
As gods, they have no need for soul-searching to solve
problems beyond their defined roles.
These self-anointed gods instead focus on projecting and
enforcing their god-status.
What society is left with is a bunch of fragile,
narrow-minded egomaniacs who are totally out of their depth when
faced with true freedom and responsibility.
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Bek, Christopher
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Those who believe in God strictly of the basis
of faith are setting themselves up for failure for the reason
that their conception of God is based on a static snapshot that
is, by definition, not subject to reason.
The Devil is the one who seeks out those who blindly
follow. A true God
most certainly wants to be constantly challenged by both faith
and reason. Kevin
Spacey tells us in the 1996 movie The Usual Suspects that
the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the
world he doesn’t exist. And now we know the second greatest trick the Devil ever
pulled was convincing the world we can know God by faith alone.
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Bek, Christopher
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Relativity is the natural law of spacetime
based on lightspeed. Quantum
theory is the natural law of matter based on Planck’s
constant. The theory of one unites relativity
and quantum theory by recognizing lightspeed and
Planck’s constant as the same boundary of spacetime.
Sir James Jeans once described Einstein’s relativistic
universe as the surface of four-dimensional soap bubbles.
John Wheeler once described the universe as empty curved
spacetime churned into lathering distorted geometry of quantum
foam formed in the wake of electrons and positrons popping into
and out of existence without limit—revealing that relativistic
bubbles are thus equivalent to quantum foam.
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Solomon, Robert
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Jewish religion stresses the fact that
Scripture can be interpreted on many different levels.
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Christ
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I will lead the blind by a road they do not
know, by paths they have not known I will guide them, I will
turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into
level ground. These are the things I will do—I will not forsake
them.
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Christ
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No one goes to God who does not go through me.
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Essay—Mathematics
in Eighteen Minutes
