Background Image

...

Scientists Can Routinely Predict A Solar Eclipse, To The Minute, A Millennium In Advance. You Can Go To The Witch Doctor To Lift The Spell That Causes Your Pernicious Anaemia, Or You Can Take Vitamin B12. If You Want To Save Your Child From Polio, You Can Pray Or You Can Inoculate. If You're Interested In The Sex Of Your Unborn Child, You Can Consult Plumb-bob Danglers All You Want . . . But They'll Be Right, On Average, Only One Time In Two. If You Want Real Accuracy . . . Try Amniocentesis And Sonograms. Try Science.

-Carl Sagan

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Scientists Can Routinely Predict

Carl Sagan

...

Scientists Can Routinely Predict A Solar Eclipse, To The Minute, A Millennium In Advance. You Can Go To The Witch Doctor To Lift The Spell That Causes Your Pernicious Anaemia, Or You Can Take Vitamin B12. If You Want To Save Your Child From Polio, You Can Pray Or You Can Inoculate. If You're Interested In The Sex Of Your Unborn Child, You Can Consult Plumb-bob Danglers All You Want . . . But They'll Be Right, On Average, Only One Time In Two. If You Want Real Accuracy . . . Try Amniocentesis And Sonograms. Try Science.

Views: 5

Topic

More From Carl Sagan

A Still More Glorious Dawn Awaits / Not A Sunrise, But A Galaxy-rise / A Morning Filled With 400 Billion Suns / The Rising Of The Milky Way

When We Look Up At Night And View The Stars, Everything We See Is Shinning Because Of Distant Nuclear Fusion.

Humans — Who Enslave, Castrate, Experiment On, And Fillet Other Animals — Have Had An Understandable Penchant For Pretending Animals Do Not Feel Pain. A Sharp Distinction Between Humans And 'animals' Is Essential If We Are To Bend Them To Our Will, Make Them Work For Us, Wear Them, Eat Them — Without Any Disquieting Tinges Of Guilt Or Regret. It Is Unseemly Of Us, Who Often Behave So Unfeelingly Toward Other Animals, To Contend That Only Humans Can Suffer. The Behavior Of Other Animals Renders Such Pretensions Specious. They Are Just Too Much Like Us.

You Are Worth About 3 Dollars Worth In Chemicals.

We Are The Product Of 4.5 Billion Years Of Fortuitous, Slow Biological Evolution. There Is No Reason To Think That The Evolutionary Process Has Stopped. Man Is A Transitional Animal. He Is Not The Climax Of Creation.

In All Our Searching, The Only Thing We've Found That Makes The Emptiness Bearable Is Each Other.

National Boundaries Are Not Evident When We View The Earth From Space. Fanatical Ethnic Or Religious Or National Chauvinisms Are A Little Difficult To Maintain When We See Our Planet As A Fragile Blue Crescent Fading To Become An Inconspicuous Point Of Light Against The Bastion And Citadel Of The Stars.

Organic As A Dandelion Seed, [the Ship Of Our Imagination] Will Carry Us To Worlds Of Dreams And Worlds Of Facts

Other Things Being Equal, It Is Better To Be Smart Than To Be Stupid.

Man Is A Transitional Animal. He Is Not The Climax Of Creation

Sailors On A Becalmed Sea, We Sense The Stirring Of A Breeze.

It Seems Madness To Say, 'we're Worried That They're Going To Become Addicted To Marijuana' -- There's No Evidence Whatever That It's An Addictive Drug, But Even If It Were, These People Are Dying, What Are We Saving Them From?

The Very Act Of Understanding Is A Celebration Of Joining, Merging, Even If On A Very Modest Scale, With The Magnificence Of The Cosmos.

I Believe That Part Of What Propels Science Is The Thirst For Wonder. It's A Very Powerful Emotion. All Children Feel It. In A First Grade Classroom Everybody Feels It; In A Twelfth Grade Classroom Almost Nobody Feels It, Or At Least Acknowledges It. Something Happens Between First And Twelfth Grade, And It's Not Just Puberty. Not Only Do The Schools And The Media Not Teach Much Skepticism, There Is Also Little Encouragement Of This Stirring Sense Of Wonder. Science And Pseudoscience Both Arouse That Feeling. Poor Popularizations Of Science Establish An Ecological Niche For Pseudoscience.

Cleverly Designed Experiments Are The Key.

Perhaps The Depth Of Love Can Be Calibrated By The Number Of Different Selves That Are Actively Involved In A Given Relationship.

Exploration Is In Our Nature. We Began As Wanderers, And We Are Wanderers Still. We Have Lingered Long Enough On The Shores Of The Cosmic Ocean. We Are Ready At Last To Set Sail For The Stars.

We Are Star Stuff Which Has Taken Its Destiny Into Its Own Hands.

I Also Wish That The Pledge Of Allegiance Were Directed At The Constitution And The Bill Of Rights, As It Is When The President Takes His Oath Of Office, Rather Than To The Flag And The Nation

But Nature Is Always More Subtle, More Intricate, More Elegant Than What We Are Able To Imagine.

Nevertheless, (jefferson) Believed That The Habit Of Skepticism Is An Essential Prerequisite For Responsible Citizenship. He Argued That The Cost Of Education Is Trivial Compared To The Cost Of Ignorance, Of Leaving Government To The Wolves. He Taught That The Country Is Safe Only When The People Rule.

But, Jefferson Worried That The People - And The Argument Goes Back To Thucydides And Aristotle - Are Easily Misled. He Also Stressed, Passionately And Repeatedly, That It Was Essential For The People To Understand The Risks And Benefits Of Government, To Educate Themselves, And To Involve Themselves In The Political Process. Without That, He Said, The Wolves Will Take Over.

Which Aspects Of Our Nature Will Prevail Is Uncertain, Particularly When Our Visions And Prospects Are Bound To One Small Part Of The Small Planet Earth. But Up There In The Cosmos An Inescapable Perspective Awaits.

Understanding Is A Kind Of Ecstasy

For Years I've Been Stressing With Regard To Ufos That Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.

She Had Studied The Universe All Her Life, But Had Overlooked Its Clearest Message: For Small Creatures Such As We The Vastness Is Bearable Only Through Love.

Small Creatures

I Maintain There Is Much More Wonder In Science Than In Pseudoscience. And In Addition, To Whatever Measure This Term Has Any Meaning, Science Has The Additional Virtue, And It Is Not An Inconsiderable One, Of Being True.

Our Perceptions Are Fallible. We Sometimes See What Isn't There. We Are Prey To Optical Illusions. Occasionally We Hallucinate. We Are Error-prone.

Optical Illusions

Scientists Can Routinely Predict A Solar Eclipse, To The Minute, A Millennium In Advance. You Can Go To The Witch Doctor To Lift The Spell That Causes Your Pernicious Anaemia, Or You Can Take Vitamin B12. If You Want To Save Your Child From Polio, You Can Pray Or You Can Inoculate. If You're Interested In The Sex Of Your Unborn Child, You Can Consult Plumb-bob Danglers All You Want . . . But They'll Be Right, On Average, Only One Time In Two. If You Want Real Accuracy . . . Try Amniocentesis And Sonograms. Try Science.

I Think If We Ever Reach The Point Where We Think We Thoroughly Understand Who We Are And Where We Came From, We Will Have Failed.

The Immense Distances To The Stars And The Galaxies Mean That We See Everything Ins Pace Int He Past, Some As They Were Before The Earth Came To Be. Telescopes Are Time Machines.

Eratosthenes's Only Tools Were Sticks, Eyes, Feet, And Brains; Plus A Zest For Experiment. With Those Tools He Correctly Deduced The Circumference Of The Earth, To High Precision, With An Error Of Only A Few Percent. That's Pretty Good Figuring For 2200 Years Ago.

The Size And Age Of The Cosmos Are Beyond Ordinary Human Understanding. Lost Somewhere Between Immensity And Eternity Is Our Tiny Planetary Home.

If We Are Merely Matter Intricately Assembled, Is This Really Demeaning? If There's Nothing Here But Atoms, Does That Make Us Less Or Does That Make Matter More?

We Are The Universe Experiencing Itself.

You Mustn't Think Of The Universe As A Wilderness. It Hasn't Been That For Billions Of Years," He Said. "think Of It More As... ..cultivated.

You Can Get Into A Habit Of Thought In Which You Enjoy Making Fun Of All Those Other People Who Don't See Things As Clearly As You Do. We Have To Guard Carefully Against It.

And You Are Made Of A Hundred Trillion Cells. We Are, Each Of Us, A Multitude.

The Beauty Of A Living Thing Is Not The Atoms That Go Into It, But The Way Those Atoms Are Put Together. Information Distilled Over 4 Billion Years Of Biological Evolution. Incidentally, All The Organisms On The Earth Are Made Essentially Of That Stuff. An Eyedropper Full Of That Liquid Could Be Used To Make A Caterpillar Or A Petunia If Only We Knew How To Put The Components Together.

There Is A Reward Structure In Science That Is Very Interesting: Our Highest Honors Go To Those Who Disprove The Findings Of The Most Revered Among Us. So Einstein Is Revered Not Just Because He Made So Many Fundamental Contributions To Science, But Because He Found An Imperfection In The Fundamental Contribution Of Isaac Newton.

The Brain Is Like A Muscle. When It Is In Use We Feel Very Good. Understanding Is Joyous.

The Claim Is Also Sometimes Made That Science Is As Arbitrary Or Irrational As All Other Claims To Knowledge, Or That Reason Itself Is An Illusion. As Ethan Allen Said Those Who Invalidate Reason Ought Seriously To Consider Whether They Argue Against Reason With Or Without Reason; If With Reason, Then They Establish The Principle That They Are Labouring To Dethrone. If They Argue Without Reason, Which They Must Do, In Order To Be Consistent With Themselves, They Are Out Of Reach Of Rational Conviction, Nor Do They Deserve A Rational Argument.

There Are Many Hypotheses In Physics Of Almost Comparable Brillance And Elegance That Have Been Rejected Because They Did Not Survive Such A Confrontation With Experiment. In My View, The Human Condition Would Be Greatly Improved If Such Confrontations And Willingness To Reject Hypotheses Were A Regular Part Of Our Social, Political, Economic, Religious And Cultural Lives.

We Are One Species. We Are Starstuff.

Ask Courageous Questions. Do Not Be Satisfied With Superficial Answers. Be Open To Wonder And At The Same Time Subject All Claims To Knowledge, Without Exception, To Intense Skeptical Scrutiny. Be Aware Of Human Fallibility. Cherish Your Species And Your Planet.

It's Perilous And Foolhardy For The Average Citizen To Remain Ignorant About Global Warming, Say, Or Ozone Depletion, Air Pollution, Toxic And Radioactive Wastes, Acid Rain, Topsoil Erosion, Tropical Deforestation, Exponential Population Growth. Jobs And Wages Depend On Science And Technology.

A Stars Rich In Europium; Of Distant Galaxies Analyzed Through The Collective Light Of A Hundred Billion Constituent Stars. Astronomical Spectroscopy Is An Almost Magical Technique. It Amazes Me Still. Auguste Comte Picked A Particularly Unfortunate Example.

If We Offer Too Much Silent Assent About Mysticism And Superstition - Even When It Seems To Be Doing A Little Good - We Abet A General Climate In Which Scepticism Is Considered Impolite, Science Tiresome, And Rigorous Thinking Somehow Stuffy And Inappropriate.

Is Mankind Alone In The Universe? Or Are There Somewhere Other Intelligent Beings Looking Up Into Their Night Sky From Very Different Worlds And Asking The Same Kind Of Question?

Writing Is Perhaps The Greatest Of Human Inventions, Binding Together People Who Never Knew Each Other, Citizens Of Distant Epochs. Books Break The Shackles Of Time. A Book Is Proof That Humans Are Capable Of Magic.

The Politicians And The Religious Leaders And The Weapons Scientists Have Been At It For A Long Time And They've Made A Thorough Mess Of It. I Mean, We're In Deep Trouble.

Our Ancestors Worshipped The Sun, And They Were Not That Foolish. It Makes Sense To Revere The Sun And The Stars, For We Are Their Children.

So Those Who Wished For Some Central Cosmic Purpose For Us, Or At Least Our World, Or At Least Our Solar System, Or At Least Our Galaxy, Have Been Disappointed, Progressively Disappointed. The Universe Is Not Responsive To Our Ambitious Expectations.

Science Is An Attempt, Largely Successful, To Understand The World, To Get A Grip On Things, To Get Hold Of Ourselves, To Steer A Safe Course. Microbiology And Meteorology Now Explain What Only A Few Centuries Ago Was Considered Sufficient Cause To Burn Women To Death.

Cutting Off Fundamental, Curiosity-driven Science Is Like Eating The Seed Corn. We May Have A Little More To Eat Next Winter But What Will We Plant So We And Our Children Will Have Enough To Get Through The Winters To Come?

We Live At A Moment When Our Relationships To Each Other, And To All Other Beings With Whom We Share This Planet, Are Up For Grabs.

Our Relationship

I Worry That, Especially As The Millennium Edges Nearer, Pseudo-science And Superstition Will Seem Year By Year More Tempting, The Siren Song Of Unreason More Sonorous And Attractive.

When You Realize That No One Really Knows What They Are Doing And That Everyone Is Doing The Best They Can According To Their Own Level Of Consciousness, Life Gets A Lot Easier. Skeptical Scrutiny Is The Means, In Both Science And Religion, By Which Deep Thoughts Can Be Winnowed From Deep Nonsense.

What An Astonishing Thing A Book Is.

I Believe That The Extraordinary Should Be Pursued. But Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.

The Fossil Record Implies Trial And Error, An Inability To Anticipate The Future, Features Inconsistent With An Efficient Great Designer (although Not With A Designer Of A More Remote And Indirect Temperament)

Trial And Error

The Idea That God Is An Oversized White Male With A Flowing Beard, Who Sits In The Sky And Tallies The Fall Of Every Sparrow Is Ludicrous. But If By 'god,' One Means The Set Of Physical Laws That Govern The Universe, Then Clearly There Is Such A God. This God Is Emotionally Unsatisfying... It Does Not Make Much Sense To Pray To The Law Of Gravity.

We Need To Reduce Military Budgets; Raise Living Standards; Engender Respect For Learning; Support Science, Scholarship, Invention, And Industry; Promote Free Inquiry; Reduce Domestic Coercion; Involve The Workers More In Managerial Decisions; And Promote Genuine Respect And Understanding Derived From An Acknowledgement Of Our Common Humanity And Our Common Jeopardy.

Common Humanity

If Intelligence Is Our Only Edge, We Must Learn To Use It Better, To Shape It, To Understand Its Limitations And Deficiencies -- To Use It As Cats Use Stealth, As Katydids Use Camouflage -- To Make It The Tool Of Our Survival.

When Kepler Found His Long-cherished Belief Did Not Agree With The Most Precise Observation, He Accepted The Uncomfortable Fact. He Preferred The Hard Truth To His Dearest Illusions, That Is The Heart Of Science.

When A Honeybee Dies It Releases A Death Pheromone, A Characteristic Odour That Signals The Survivors To Remove It From The Hive. The Corpse Is Promptly Pushed And Tugged Out Of The Hive. The Death Pheromone Is Oleic Acid. What Happens If A Live Bee Is Dabbed With A Drop Of Oleic Acid? Then No Matter How Strapping And Vigourous It Might Be, It Is Carried Kicking And Screaming Out Of The Hive.

Chlorine Is A Deadly Poison Gas Employed On European Battlefields In World War I. Sodium Is A Corrosive Metal Which Burns Upon Contact With Water. Together They Make A Placid And Unpoisonous Material, Table Salt. Why Each Of These Substances Has The Properties It Does Is A Subject Called Chemistry.

The Near Side Of A Galaxy Is Tens Of Thousands Of Light-years Closer To Us Than The Far Side; Thus We See The Front As It Was Tens Of Thousands Of Years Before The Back. But Typical Events In Galactic Dynamics Occupy Tens Of Millions Of Years, So The Error In Thinking Of An Image Of A Galaxy As Frozen In One Moment Of Time Is Small.

We Are The Children Equally Of The Sky And The Earth.

Science Arouses A Soaring Sense Of Wonder. But So Does Pseudoscience. Sparse And Poor Popularizations Of Science Abandon Ecological Niches That Pseudoscience Promptly Fills. If It Were Widely Understood That Claims To Knowledge Require Adequate Evidence Before They Can Be Accepted, There Would Be No Room For Pseudoscience.

We Are The Custodians Of Life's Meaning.

We Are All Star Stuff.

The Prediction I Can Make With The Highest Confidence Is That The Most Amazing Discoveries Will Be The Ones We Are Not Today Wise Enough To Foresee.

One Of The Great Commandments Of Science Is, 'mistrust Arguments From Authority'. (scientists, Being Primates, And Thus Given To Dominance Hierarchies, Of Course Do Not Always Follow This Commandment.)

The Cosmic Calendar Compresses The Local History Of The Universe Into A Single Year. If The Universe Began On January 1st It Was Not Until May That The Milky Way Formed. Other Planetary Systems May Have Appeared In June, July And August, But Our Sun And Earth Not Until Mid-september. Life Arose Soon After. We Humans Appear On The Cosmic Calendar So Recently That Our Recorded History Occupies Only The Last Few Seconds Of The Last Minute Of December 31st.

For A Long Time The Human Instinct To Understand Was Thwarted By Facile Religious Explanations.

After The Earth Dies, Some 5 Billion Years From Now, After It's Burned To A Crisp, Or Even Swallowed By The Sun, There Will Be Other Worlds And Stars And Galaxies Coming Into Being - And They Will Know Nothing Of A Place Once Called Earth.

We Can Make A Similar Examination, But With Greater Uncertainty, Of The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis That Holds That A Wide Range Of Ufos Viewed On The Planet Earth Are Space Vehicles From Planets Of Other Stars.

We Live On A Mote Of Dust Suspended In A Sunbeam

The Price We Pay For Anticipation Of The Future Is Anxiety About It

How Is It That Hardly Any Major Religion Has Looked At Science And Concluded, “this Is Better Than We Thought! The Universe Is Much Bigger Than Our Prophets Said, Grander, More Subtle, More Elegant?

The Dumbing Down Of American Is Most Evident In The Slow Decay Of Substantive Content In The Enormously Influential Media, The 30 Second Sound Bites (now Down To 10 Seconds Or Less), Lowest Common Denominator Programming, Credulous Presentations On Pseudoscience And Superstition, But Especially A Kind Of Celebration Of Ignorance.

We Can't Help It. Life Looks For Life.

It Will Not Be We Who Reach Alpha Centauri, And The Other Nearby Stars. It Will Be A Species Very Like Us - But With More Of Our Strengths And Fewer Of Our Weaknesses.

I’m Struck Again By The Irony That Spaceflight-conceived In The Cauldron Of Nationalist Rivalries And Hatreds-brings With It A Stunning Transnational Vision. You Spend Even A Little Time Contemplating The Earth From Orbit And The Most Deeply Engrained Nationalisms Begin To Erode. They Seem The Squabbles Of Mites On A Plum.

It Is The Responsibility Of Scientists Never To Suppress Knowledge, No Matter How Awkward That Knowledge Is, No Matter How It May Bother Those In Power; We Are Not Smart Enough To Decide Which Pieces Of Knowledge Are Permissible, And Which Are Not.

We Are, Each Of Us, A Multitude. Within Us Is A Little Universe.

We Are Prodding, Challenging, Seeking Contradictions Or Small, Persistent Residual Errors, Proposing Alternative Explanations, Encouraging Heresy. We Give Our Highest Rewards To Those Who Convincingly Disprove Established Beliefs.

Thus The Recent Rapid Evolution Of Human Intelligence Is Not Only The Cause Of But Also The Only Conceivable Solution To The Many Serious Problems That Beset Us.

If We Do Not Speak For Earth, Who Will? If We Are Not Committed To Our Own Survival, Who Will Be?

Humans Are Very Good At Dreaming, Although You'd Never Know It From Your Television.

Human Beings Have A Demonstrated Talent For Self-deception When Their Emotions Are Stirred.

We Are, In A Way, Temporary Ambulatory Repositories For Our Nucleic Acids. This Does Not Deny Our Humanity; It Does Not Prevent Us From Pursuing The Good, The True And The Beautiful. But It Would Be A Great Mistake To Ignore Where We Have Come From In Our Attempt To Determine Where We Are Going.

We Are A Way For The Cosmos To Know Itself.

Our Intelligence Is Imperfect, Surely, And Newly Arisen; The Ease With Which It Can Be Sweet-talked, Overwhelmed, Or Subverted By Other Hardwired Propensities - Sometimes Themselves Disguised As The Cool Light Of Reason - Is Worrisome.

Think Of How Many Religions Attempt To Validate Themselves With Prophecy. Think Of How Many People Rely On These Prophecies, However Vague, However Unfulfilled, To Support Or Prop Up Their Beliefs. Yet Has There Ever Been A Religion With The Prophetic Accuracy And Reliability Of Science? ... No Other Human Institution Comes Close.

There Are No Forbidden Questions In Science, No Matters Too Sensitive Or Delicate To Be Probed, No Sacred Truths.

Eratosthenes Was The Director Of The Great Library Of Alexandria, The Centre Of Science And Learning In The Ancient World. Aristotle Had Argued That Humanity Was Divided Into Greeks And Everybody Else, Whom He Called Barbarians And That The Greeks Should Keep Themselves Racially Pure. He Thought It Was Fitting For The Greeks To Enslave Other Peoples. But Erathosthenes Criticized Aristotle For His Blind Chauvinism, He Believed There Was Good And Bad In Every Nation.

We Are Made Of Star-stuff. Our Bodies Are Made Of Star-stuff. There Are Pieces Of Star Within Us All.

One Glance At A Book And You Hear The Voice Of Another Person, Perhaps Someone Dead For 1,000 Years. To Read Is To Voyage Through Time.

Modern Darwinism Makes It Abundantly Clear That Many Less Ruthless Traits, Some Not Always Admired By Robber Barons And Fuhrers - Altruism, General Intelligence, Compassion - May Be The Key To Survival.

[kepler] Preferred The Hard Truth To His Dearest Illusions, And That Is The Heart Of Science.

An Extraterrestrial Being, Newly Arrived On Earth - Scrutinizing What We Mainly Present To Our Children In Television, Radio, Movies, Newspapers, Magazines, The Comics, And Many Books - Might Easily Conclude That We Are Intent On Teaching Them Murder, Rape, Cruelty, Superstition, Credulity, And Consumerism. We Keep At It, And Through Constant Repetition Many Of Them Finally Get It.

The Well-meaning Contention That All Ideas Have Equal Merit Seems To Me Little Different From The Disastrous Contention That No Ideas Have Any Merit.

I Promise To Question Everything My Leaders Tell Me. I Promise To Use My Critical Faculties. I Promise To Develop My Independence Of Thought. I Promise To Educate Myself So I Can Make My Own Judgments.

A Blade Of Grass Is A Commonplace On Earth; It Would Be A Miracle On Mars. Our Descendants On Mars Will Know The Value Of A Patch Of Green. And If A Blade Of Grass Is Priceless, What Is The Value Of A Human Being?

I Never Said It. Honest. Oh, I Said There Are Maybe 100 Billion Galaxies And 10 Billion Trillion Stars. It's Hard To Talk About The Cosmos Without Using Big Numbers. I Said "billion" Many Times On The Cosmos Television Series, Which Was Seen By A Great Many People. But I Never Said "billions And Billions." For One Thing, It's Too Imprecise. How Many Billions Are "billions And Billions"? A Few Billion? Twenty Billion? A Hundred Billion? "billions And Billions" Is Pretty Vague. When We Reconfigured And Updated The Series, I Checked-and Sure Enough, I Never Said It.

He Sought A Way To Preserve The Past. John Hershel Was One Of The Founders Of A New Form Of Time Travel.... A Means To Capture Light And Memories. He Actually Coined A Word For It... Photography. When You Think About It, Photography Is A Form Of Time Travel. This Man Is Staring At Us From Across The Centuries, A Ghost Preserved By Light.

A Religion Old Or New, That Stressed The Magnificence Of The Universe As Revealed By Modern Science, Might Be Able To Draw Forth Reserves Of Reverence And Awe Hardly Tapped By The Conventional Faiths. Sooner Or Later Such A Religion Will Emerge.

Our Loyalties Are To The Species And The Planet. We Speak For Earth. Our Obligation To Survive Is Owed Not Just To Ourselves But Also To That Cosmos, Ancient And Vast, From Which We Spring.

When You Buy A Used Car, You Kick The Tires, You Look At The Odometer, You Open Up The Hood. If You Do Not Feel Yourself An Expert In Automobile Engines, You Bring A Friend Who Is. And You Do This With Something As Unimportant As An Automobile. But On The Issues Of The Transcendent, Of Ethics, Of Morals, Of The Origins Of The World, Of The Nature Of Human Beings, On Those Issues Should We Not Insist Upon At Least Equally Skeptical Scrutiny?

Real Patriots Ask Questions.

The Earth Is A Very Small Stage In A Vast Cosmic Arena. Think Of The Rivers Of Blood Spilled By All Those Generals And Emperors So That, In Glory And Triumph, They Could Become The Momentary Masters Of A Fraction Of A Dot. Think Of The Endless Cruelties Visited By The Inhabitants Of One Corner Of This Pixel On The Scarcely Distinguishable Inhabitants Of Some Other Corner, How Frequent Their Misunderstandings, How Eager They Are To Kill One Another, How Fervent Their Hatreds.

Too Much Openness And You Accept Every Notion, Idea, And Hypothesis-which Is Tantamount To Knowing Nothing. Too Much Skepticism-especially Rejection Of New Ideas Before They Are Adequately Tested-and You're Not Only Unpleasantly Grumpy, But Also Closed To The Advance Of Science. A Judicious Mix Is What We Need.

These Days There Seems To Be Nowhere Left To Explore, At Least On The Land Area Of The Earth. Victims Of Their Very Success, The Explorers Now Pretty Much Stay Home.

But I Try Not To Think With My Gut. If I'm Serious About Understanding The World, Thinking With Anything Besides My Brain, As Tempting As That Might Be, Is Likely To Get Me Into Trouble.

Science Is A Way To Call The Bluff Of Those Who Only Pretend To Knowledge. It Is A Bulwark Against Mysticism, Against Superstition, Against Religion Misapplied To Where It Has No Business Being.

Maybe It's A Little Early. Maybe The Time Is Not Quite Yet. But Those Other Worlds - Promising Untold Opportunities - Beckon. Silently, They Orbit The Sun, Waiting.

Arguments From Authority Carry Little Weight – Authorities Have Made Mistakes In The Past. They Will Do So Again In The Future. Perhaps A Better Way To Say It Is That In Science There Are No Authorities; At Most, There Are Experts.

Somewhere, Something Incredible Is Waiting To Be Known.

We Are Rare And Precious Because We Are Alive, Because We Can Think As Well As We Can. We Are Privileged To Influence And Perhaps Control Our Future. I Believe We Have An Obligation To Fight For Life On Earth - Not Just For Ourselves, But For All Those, Humans And Others, Who Came Before Us, And To Whom We Are Beholden, And For All Those Who, If We Are Wise Enough, Will Come After.

There Are Huge Advertising Budgets Only When There's No Difference Between The Products. If The Products Really Were Different, People Would Buy The One That's Better. Advertising Teaches People Not To Trust Their Judgment. Advertising Teaches People To Be Stupid.

The Values Of Science And The Values Of Democracy Are Concordant, In Many Cases Indistinguishable. Science And Democracy Began - In Their Civilized Incarnations - In The Same Time And Place, Greece In The Seventh And Sixth Centuries B.c. . . . Science Thrives On, Indeed Requires, The Free Exchange Of Ideas; Its Values Are Antithetical To Secrecy. Science Holds To No Special Vantage Points Or Privileged Positions. Both Science And Democracy Encourage Unconventional Opinions And Vigorous Debate. Both Demand Adequate Reason, Coherent Argument, Rigorous Standards Of Evidence And Honesty.

The Total Number Of Stars In The Universe Is Larger Than All The Grains Of Sand On All The Beaches Of The Planet Earth.

Science Is Merely An Extremely Powerful Method Of Winnowing What's True From What Feels Good.

In Science It Often Happens That Scientists Say, "you Know That's A Really Good Argument; My Position Is Mistaken..."

Theoretical Physics

What Is Called For Is An Exquisite Balance Between Two Conflicting Needs: The Most Skeptical Scrutiny Of All Hypotheses That Are Served Up To Us And At The Same Time A Great Openness To New Ideas. If You Are Only Skeptical, Then No New Ideas Make It Through To You. On The Other Hand, If You Are Open To The Point Of Gullibility And Have Not An Ounce Of Skeptical Sense In You, Then You Cannot Distinguish Useful Ideas From The Worthless Ones.

Accommodation To Change, The Thoughtful Pursuit Of Alternative Futures Are Keys To The Survival Of Civilization And Perhaps Of The Human Species.

My Long-time View About Christianity Is That It Represents An Amalgam Of Two Seemingly Immiscible Parts-the Religion Of Jesus And The Religion Of Paul. Thomas Jefferson Attempted To Excise The Pauline Parts Of The New Testament. There Wasn't Much Left When He Was Done, But It Was An Inspiring Document.

The Cosmos Is All That Is Or Was Or Ever Will Be. Our Feeblest Contemplations Of The Cosmos Stir Us -- There Is A Tingling In The Spine, A Catch In The Voice, A Faint Sensation, As If A Distant Memory, Of Falling From A Height. We Know We Are Approaching The Greatest Of Mysteries.

Extraordinary Observations Require Extraordinary Evidence To Make Them Believable.

Any Sufficiently Crisp Question Can Be Answered By A Single Binary Digit-0 Or 1, Yes Or No.

Even Through Your Hardest Days, Remember We Are All Made Of Stardust.

We Invest Far Off Places With A Certain Romance... Long Summers, Mild Winters, Rich Harvests, Plentiful Game; None Of Them Lasts For Ever. Your Own Life, Or Your Bands, Or Even Your Species - Might Be Owed To A Restless Few, Drawn By A Craving They Can Hardly Articulate Or Understand, To Undiscovered Lands, And New Worlds.

For Small Creatures Such As We The Vastness Is Bearable Only Through Love.

It Goes With A Courageous Intent To Greet The Universe As It Really Is, Not To Foist Our Emotional Predispositions On It But To Courageously Accept What Our Explorations Tell Us.

Clutching Our Crystals And Religiously Consulting Our Horoscopes, Our Critical Faculties In Steep Decline, Unable To Distinguish Between What's True And What Feels Good, We Slide, Almost Without Noticing, Into Superstition And Darkness.

The Cosmos Is All There Is, All There Ever Was, And All There Ever Will Be.

But I Could Be Wrong.

If Chimpanzees Have Consciousness, If They Are Capable Of Abstractions, Do They Not Have What Until Now Has Been Described As 'human Rights'? How Smart Does A Chimp Have To Be Before Killing Him Constitutes Murder?

The Impediment To Scientific Thinking Is Not, I Think, The Difficulty Of The Subject. Complex Intellectual Feats Have Been Mainstays Even Of Oppressed Cultures. Shamans, Magicians And Theologians Are Highly Skilled In Their Intricate And Arcane Arts. No, The Impediment Is Political And Hierarchical.

Demon Mean Knowledge In Greek, Especially About The Material World. Science Means Knowledge In Latin. A Jurisdictional Dispute Is Exposed, Even If We Look No Further

Nature Does Not Always Conform To Our Predispositions And Preferences, To What We Deem Comfortable And Easy To Understand.

Knowing A Great Deal Is Not The Same As Being Smart; Intelligence Is Not Information Alone But Also Judgement, The Manner In Which Information Is Coordinated And Used.

We Live In A Society Exquisitely Dependent On Science And Technology, In Which Hardly Anyone Knows Anything About Science And Technology.

It Would Be Wryly Interesting If In Human History The Cultivation Of Marijuana Led Generally To The Invention Of Agriculture, And Thereby To Civilization.

Scientists Make Mistakes. Accordingly, It Is The Job Of The Scientist To Recognize Our Weakness, To Examine The Widest Range Of Opinions, To Be Ruthlessly Self-critical. Science Is A Collective Enterprise With The Error-correction Machinery Often Running Smoothly.

The Neurochemistry Of The Brain Is Astonishingly Busy, The Circuitry Of A Machine More Wonderful Than Any Devised By Humans. But There Is No Evidence That Its Functioning Is Due To Anything More Than The 10(14) Neural Connections That Build An Elegant Architecture Of Consciousness.

Observation: I Can't See A Thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.

Human Beings Grew Up In Forests; We Have A Natural Affinity For Them. How Lovely A Tree Is, Straining Toward The Sky.

Is It Fair To Be Suspicious Of An Entire Profession Because Of A Few Bad Apples? There Are At Least Two Important Differences, It Seems To Me. First, No One Doubts That Science Actually Works, Whatever Mistaken And Fraudulent Claim May From Time To Time Be Offered. But Whether There Are Any Miraculous Cures From Faith-healing, Beyond The Body's Own Ability To Cure Itself, Is Very Much At Issue. Secondly, The Expose' Of Fraud And Error In Science Is Made Almost Exclusively By Science. But The Exposure Of Fraud And Error In Faith-healing Is Almost Never Done By Other Faith-healers.

Science ... Looks Skeptically At All Claims To Knowledge, Old And New. It Teaches Not Blind Obedience To Those In Authority But To Vigorous Debate, And In Many Respects That's The Secret Of Its Success.

Every Cell Is A Triumph Of Natural Selection, And We’re Made Of Trillions Of Cells. Within Us, Is A Little Universe.

The Earth Is A Place. It Is By No Means The Only Place. It Is Not Even A Typical Place.

The Surface Of The Earth Is The Shore Of The Cosmic Ocean.

How Is It That Hardly Any Major Religion Has Looked At Science And Concluded, “this Is Better Than We Thought! The Universe Is Much Bigger Than Our Prophets Said, Grander, More Subtle, More Elegant?” Instead They Say, “no, No, No! My God Is A Little God, And I Want Him To Stay That Way.” A Religion, Old Or New, That Stressed The Magnificence Of The Universe As Revealed By Modern Science Might Be Able To Draw Forth Reserves Of Reverence And Awe Hardly Tapped By The Conventional Faiths.

The Suppression Of Uncomfortable Ideas May Be Common In Religion Or In Politics, But It Is Not The Path To Knowledge; It Has No In The Endeavor Of Science. We Do Not Know In Advance Who Will Discover Fundamental Insights.

My Wonder Button Is Being Pushed All The Time.

Modern Science Has Been A Voyage Into The Unknown, With A Lesson In Humility Waiting At Every Stop. Many Passengers Would Rather Have Stayed Home.

The Significance Of Our Lives And Our Fragile Planet Is Then Determined Only By Our Own Wisdom And Courage. We Are The Custodians Of Life's Meaning. We Long For A Parent To Care For Us, To Forgive Us Our Errors, To Save Us From Our Childish Mistakes. But Knowledge Is Preferable To Ignorance. Better By Far To Embrace The Hard Truth Than A Reassuring Fable. If We Crave Some Cosmic Purpose, Then Let Us Find Ourselves A Worthy Goal.

If I Finish A Book A Week, I Will Read Only A Few Thousand Books In My Lifetime, About A Tenth Of A Percent Of The Contents Of The Greatest Libraries Of Our Time. The Trick Is To Know Which Books To Read.

It Took The Church Until 1832 To Remove Galileo 's Work From Its List Of Books Which Catholics Were Forbidden To Read At The Risk Of Dire Punishment Of Their Immortal Souls.

I Find Science So Much More Fascinating Than Science Fiction. It Also Has The Advantage Of Being True.

The Nuclear Arms Race Is Like Two Sworn Enemies Standing Waist Deep In Gasoline, One With Three Matches, The Other With Five.

Books Are Key To Understanding The World And Participating In A Democratic Society.

For Me, The Most Ironic Token Of [the First Human Moon Landing] Is The Plaque Signed By President Richard M. Nixon That Apollo 11 Took To The Moon. It Reads, ‘we Came In Peace For All Mankind.’ As The United States Was Dropping Seven And A Half Megatons Of Conventional Explosives On Small Nations In Southeast Asia, We Congratulated Ourselves On Our Humanity. We Would Harm No One On A Lifeless Rock.

Science Is Far From A Perfect Instrument Of Knowledge. It's Just The Best We Have.

We Are The Only Species On The Planet, So Far As We Know, To Have Invented A Communal Memory Stored Neither In Our Genes Nor In Our Brains. The Warehouse Of This Memory Is Called The Library

At The Extremes It Is Difficult To Distinguish Pseudoscience From Rigid, Doctrinaire Religion.

We Make Our World Significant By The Courage Of Our Questions And The Depth Of Our Answers

What An Astonishing Thing A Book Is. It’s A Flat Object Made From A Tree With Flexible Parts On Which Are Imprinted Lots Of Funny Dark Squiggles. But One Glance At It And You’re Inside The Mind Of Another Person, Maybe Somebody Dead For Thousands Of Years. ... Books Break The Shackles Of Time. A Book Is Proof That Humans Are Capable Of Working Magic.

We Have Begun To Contemplate Our Origins: Starstuff Pondering The Stars; Organized Assemblages Of Ten Billion Billion Billion Atoms Considering The Evolution Of Atoms; Tracing The Long Journey By Which, Here At Least, Consciousness Arose.

We Are Made Of Starstuff.

The Hindu Religion Is The Only One Of The World’s Great Faiths Dedicated To The Idea That The Cosmos Itself Undergoes An Immense, Indeed An Infinite, Number Of Deaths And Rebirths. It Is The Only Religion In Which The Time Scales Correspond, No Doubt By Accident, To Those Of Modern Scientific Cosmology. Its Cycles Run From Our Ordinary Day And Night To A Day And Night Of Brahma, 8.64 Billion Years Long, Longer Than The Age Of The Earth Or The Sun And About Half The Time Since The Big Bang.

The Fact That Some Geniuses Were Laughed At Does Not Imply That All Who Are Laughed At Are Geniuses.

There Are More Potential Combinations Of Dna [physical Forms] Than There Are Atoms In The Universe.

But Amid Much Elegance And Precision, The Details Of Life And The Universe Also Exhibit Haphazard, Jury-rigged Arrangements And Much Poor Planning. What Shall We Make Of This: An Edifice Abandoned Early In Construction By The Architect?

Details Of Life

If We Ruin The Earth, There Is No Place Else To Go

Religions Are Often State-protected Nurseries Of Pseudoscience, Although There's No Reason Why Religions Have To Play That Role. In A Way, It's An Artefact From Times Long Gone.

The Earth Is A Very Small Stage In A Vast Cosmic Arena.

Better By Far To Embrace The Hard Truth Than A Reassuring Fable. If We Crave Some Cosmic Purpose, Then Let Us Find Ourselves A Worthy Goal.

The Romans Called The Christians Atheists. Why? Well, The Christians Had A God Of Sorts, But It Wasn't A Real God. They Didn't Believe In The Divinity Of Apotheosized Emperors Or Olympian Gods. They Had A Peculiar, Different Kind Of God. So It Was Very Easy To Call People Who Believed In A Different Kind Of God Atheists. And That General Sense That An Atheist Is Anybody Who Doesn't Believe Exactly As I Do Prevails In Our Own Time.

We Humans Look Rather Different From A Tree. Without A Doubt We Perceive The World Differently Than A Tree Does. But Down Deep, At The Molecular Heart Of Life, The Trees And We Are Essentially Identical.

Many Statements About God Are Confidently Made By Theologians On Grounds That Today At Least Sound Specious. Thomas Aquinas Claimed To Prove That God Cannot Make Another God, Or Commit Suicide, Or Make A Man Without A Soul, Or Even Make A Triangle Whose Interior Angles Do Not Equal 180 Degrees. But Bolyai And Lobachevsky Were Able To Accomplish This Last Feat (on A Curved Surface) In The Nineteenth Century, And They Were Not Even Approximately Gods.

We Live In A Society Exquisitely Dependent On Science And Technology And Yet Have Cleverly Arranged Things So That Almost No One Understands Science And Technology.

Information Society

A Single Message From Space Will Show That It Is Possible To Live Through Technological Adolescence. . . . It Is Possible That The Future Of Human Civilization Depends On The Receipt Of Interstellar Messages.

We Were Wanderers From The Beginning.

In Many Cultures It Is Customary To Answer That God Created The Universe Out Of Nothing. But This Is Mere Temporizing. If We Wish Courageously To Pursue The Question, We Must, Of Course Ask Next Where God Comes From? And If We Decide This To Be Unanswerable, Why Not Save A Step And Conclude That The Universe Has Always Existed?

Except In Pure Mathematics, Nothing Is Known For Certain (although Much Is Certainly False).

Books Break The Shackles Of Time, Proof That Humans Can Work Magic.

Even Today The Most Jaded City Dweller Can Be Unexpectedly Moved Upon Encountering A Clear Night Sky Studded With Thousands Of Twinkling Stars. When It Happens To Me After All These Years It Still Takes My Breath Away.

Each Of Us Is A Tiny Being, Permitted To Ride On The Outermost Skin Of One Of The Smaller Planets For A Few Dozen Trips Around The Local Star.

We Are Made Of Stellar Ash. Our Origin And Evolution Have Been Tied To Distant Cosmic Events. The Exploration Of The Cosmos Is A Voyage Of Self-discovery.

All Colours Are Arbitrary.

Our Children Long For Realistic Maps Of The Future That They Can Be Proud Of. Where Are The Cartographers Of Human Purpose?

Before We Invented Civilization Our Ancestors Lived Mainly In The Open Out Under The Sky. Before We Devised Artificial Lights And Atmospheric Pollution And Modern Forms Of Nocturnal Entertainment We Watched The Stars. There Were Practical Calendar Reasons Of Course But There Was More To It Than That. Even Today The Most Jaded City Dweller Can Be Unexpectedly Moved Upon Encountering A Clear Night Sky Studded With Thousands Of Twinkling Stars. When It Happens To Me After All These Years It Still Takes My Breath Away.

Books Tap The Wisdom Of Our Species -- The Greatest Minds, The Best Teachers -- From All Over The World And From All Our History. And They're Patient.

[science] Is Not Perfect. It Can Be Misused. It Is Only A Tool. But It Is By Far The Best Tool We Have, Self-correcting, Ongoing, Applicable To Everything. It Has Two Rules. First: There Are No Sacred Truths; All Assumptions Must Be Critically Examined; Arguments From Authority Are Worthless. Second: Whatever Is Inconsistent With The Facts Must Be Discarded Or Revised. ... The Obvious Is Sometimes False; The Unexpected Is Sometimes True.

I Am Often Amazed At How Much More Capability And Enthusiasm For Science There Is Among Elementary School Youngsters Than Among College Students.

Science Is A Way Of Thinking Much More Than It Is A Body Of Knowledge.

Trending Author

Category