Home > Topic > formulation
21 " Even if we ourselves are not personally scandalized by the notion of other animals as close relatives, even if our age has accommodated to the idea, the passionate resistance of so many of us, in so many epochs and cultures, and by so many distinguished scholars, must say something important about us. What can we learn about ourselves from an apparent error so widespread, propagated by so many leading philosophers and scientists, both ancient and modern, with such assurance and self-satisfaction? One of several possible answers: 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. With untroubled consciences, we can render whole species extinct--for our perceived short-term benefit, or even through simple carelessness. Their loss is of little import: Those beings, we tell ourselves, are not like us. An unbridgeable gap gas thus a practical role to play beyond the mere stroking of human egos. Darwin's formulation of this answer was: " Animals whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equals. "
22 " enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test. "
― Jaron Lanier , You Are Not a Gadget
23 " [Rumsfield's] reply included a complex formulation that would become inextricably associated with him: 'There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. "
― Ian Leslie
24 " The most flattering spin I can put on this phase of paradoxes and metaphysical tangles is that I was smart enough, at age fourteen, to destroy any fledgling hypothesis I came up with. A tentative explanation, theory, or formulation would pop up in my brain only to be attacked by what amounted to a kind of logical immune system, bent on eliminating all that was weak or defective. Which is to say that my mind had become a scene of furious predation, littered with the half-eaten corpses of vast theories and brilliant syntheses. "
― Barbara Ehrenreich , Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
25 " The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning. "
26 " In his first philosophical lecture on modern physics that Pauli gave in November 1934 to the Zurich Philosophical Society he said that only a formulation of quantum theory would be satisfactory which expresses the relation between the value of [the fine structure constant] and charge conservation in the same complementary was as that between the space-time description and energy-momentum conservation. "
― , No Time to Be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli
27 " Since the beginning of physics, symmetry considerations have provided us with an extremely powerful and useful tool in our effort to understand nature. Gradually they have become the backbone of our theoretical formulation of physical laws. "
28 " If decisions were a choice between alternatives decisions would come easy. Decision is the selection and formulation of alternatives. "
29 " The most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be without pretense to be emotionally sincere to be able to put the whole of oneself into one's feelings one's work one's beliefs. "
30 " The birth of science as we know it arguably began with Isaac Newton's formulation of the laws of gravitation and motion. It is no exaggeration to say that physics was reborn in the early 20th-century with the twin revolutions of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. "
31 " As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science. "