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1 " I can't imagine the scientists wanting me to walk into the lab and start fiddling around with some big bowl of electrons they had out. "
― , Okay, So Maybe I Do Have Superpowers (Dear Dumb Diary #11)
2 " Something else gets under your skin, keeps you working days and nights at the sacrifice of your sleeping and eating and attention to your family and friends, something beyond the love of puzzle solving. And that other force is the anticipation of understanding something about the world that no one has ever understood before you.Einstein wrote that when he first realized that gravity was equivalent to acceleration -- an idea that would underlie his new theory of gravity -- it was the " happiest thought of my life." On projects of far smaller weight, I have experienced that pleasure of discovering something new. It is an exquisite sensation, a feeling of power, a rush of the blood, a sense of living forever. To be the first vessel to hold this new thing.All of the scientists I've known have at least one more quality in common: they do what they do because they love it, and because they cannot imagine doing anything else. In a sense, this is the real reason a scientist does science. Because the scientist must. Such a compulsion is both blessing and burden. A blessing because the creative life, in any endeavor, is a gift filled with beauty and not given to everyone, a burden because the call is unrelenting and can drown out the rest of life.This mixed blessing and burden must be why the astrophysicist Chandrasekhar continued working until his mid-80's, why a visitor to Einstein's apartment in Bern found the young physicist rocking his infant with one hand while doing mathematical calculations with the other. This mixed blessing and burden must have been the " sweet hell" that Walt Whitman referred to when he realized at a young age that he was destined to be a poet. " Never more," he wrote, " shall I escape. "
3 " Today it was commerce that Europe valued and it was the businessmen who, having exploited what the scientists and thechnologits had done for the world, now reaped the rewards. "
― , Making History
4 " Science faculties at renowned research institutions were given two identical CVs to assess. Half the scientists received a CV with a female name, and half with a male name. The 'female' applicant was consistently rated as less competent and less hireable, and the scientists were less likely to want to mentor her. The 'male' candidate was offered a significantly higher starting salary "
― Emer O'Toole , Girls Will Be Girls: Dressing Up, Playing Parts and Daring to Act Differently
5 " Today, the people who make things change, the people who have that knowledge, are the scientists and the technologists, who are the true driving force of humanity. And before you say what about the Beethovens and the Michelangelos? Let me suggest something with which you may disagree violently: that at best, the products of human emotion, art, philosophy, politics, music, literature, are interpretations of the world, that tell you more about the guy who's talking, than about the world he's talking about. Second hand views of the world, made third hand by your interpretation of them. "
6 " If you want to see philosophy in action, pay a visit to a robo-rat laboratory. A robo-rat is a run-ofthe-mill rat with a twist: scientists have implanted electrodes into the sensory and reward areas in the rat’s brain. This enables the scientists to manoeuvre the rat by remote control. After short training sessions, researchers have managed not only to make the rats turn left or right, but also to climb ladders, sniff around garbage piles, and do things that rats normally dislike, such as jumping from great heights. Armies and corporations show keen interest in the robo-rats, hoping they could prove useful in many tasks and situations. For example, robo-rats could help detect survivors trapped under collapsed buildings, locate bombs and booby traps, and map underground tunnels and caves. Animal-welfare activists have voiced concern about the suffering such experiments inflict on the rats. Professor Sanjiv Talwar of the State University of New York, one of the leading robo-rat researchers, has dismissed these concerns, arguing that the rats actually enjoy the experiments. After all, explains Talwar, the rats ‘work for pleasure’ and when the electrodes stimulate the reward centre in their brain, ‘the rat feels Nirvana’.To the best of our understanding, the rat doesn’t feel that somebody else controls her, and she doesn’t feel that she is being coerced to do something against her will. When Professor Talwar presses the remote control, the rat wants to move to the left, which is why she moves to the left. When the professor presses another switch, the rat wants to climb a ladder, which is why she climbs the ladder. After all, the rat’s desires are nothing but a pattern of firing neurons. What does it matter whether the neurons are firing because they are stimulated by other neurons, or because they are stimulated by transplanted electrodes connected to Professor Talwar’s remote control? If you asked the rat about it, she might well have told you, ‘Sure I have free will! Look, I want to turn left – and I turn left. I want to climb a ladder – and I climb a ladder. Doesn’t that prove that I have free will? "
― Yuval Noah Harari , Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
7 " Meditation has also been proven scientifically to untangle and rewire the neurological pathways in the brain that make up the conditioned personality. Buddhist monks, for example, have had their brains scanned by scientists as they sat still in deep altered states of consciousness invoked by transcendental meditation and the scientists were amazed at what they beheld. The frontal lobes of the monks lit up as bright as the sun! They were in states of peace and happiness the scientists had never seen before. Meditation invokes that which is known in neuroscience as neuroplasticity; which is the loosening of the old nerve cells or hardwiring in the brain, to make space for the new to emerge. Meditation, in this sense, is a fire that burns away the old or conditioned self, in the Bhagavad Gita, this is known as the Yajna;“All karma or effects of actions are completely burned away from the liberated being who, free from attachment, with his physical mind enveloped in wisdom (the higher self), performs the true spiritual fire rite. "
― Craig Krishna , The Labyrinth: Rewiring the Nodes in the Maze of your Mind
8 " Some scientists were conducting an experiment, he said, trying to gauge the impact of abuse on children. Ducks, like people, develop bonds between mother and young. They call it imprinting. So the scientists set out to test how that imprint bond would be affected by abuse. The control group was a real mother duck and her ducklings. For the experimental group, the scientist used a mechanical duck they had created - feathers, sound, and all - which would, at timed intervals, peck the ducklings with its mechanical beak. A painful peck, one a real duck would not give. They varied these groups. Each group was pecked with a different level of frequency. And then they watched the ducklings grow and imprint bond with their mother. Over time, he went on, the ducklings in the control group would waddle along behind their mother. But as they grew, there would be more distance between them. They'd wander and explore.The ducklings with the pecking mechanical mother, though, followed much more closely. Even the scientists were stunned to discover that the group that bonded and followed most closely was the one that had been pecked repeatedly with the greatest frequency. The more the ducklings were pecked and abused, the more closely they followed. The scientist repeated the experiment and got the same results. "
― , Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder
9 " A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not, at this date, menaced to anything like the same extent. This partly accounts for the fact that in all countries it is easier for the scientists than for the writers to line up behind their respective governments. "
― George Orwell , Books v. Cigarettes
10 " The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought--while his hand moved rapidly--what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have not discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words. "
― Ayn Rand , The Fountainhead
11 " The so-called seven colours of the spectrum together go to make up what is known as light — what, in other words, the scientists say is no more than a mere fractional band in the whole range of electro-magnetic waves— the only section of the wave-range which the visual sense can directly grasp. Indeed each colour is experienced as a particular limitation of light: light itself appears to be a particular limitation of the electro- magnetic wave-range. So would the five senses seem to be five specific limitations of the infinite— five exclusive ways of screening off, of shutting out the rest. In fact, the " outer world" , as known through the senses, seems to be conditioned by — shall one say our knowledge of it depends on —the limiting and sifting qualities of our five senses. By means of sifting and excluding, form could be said to be created from Chaos and thus our five senses are at the same time five creators and five ways of being partially blind. We live, as it were, in a cathedral with stained windows whose, to us, magnificent colour patterns let in a little of the light which the sun sheds indiscriminately outside. (1947)(Later addition:) But the " sun" would then stand for Chaos in our simile and how would that be wrong? "
12 " They knew where they were headed but they didn’t know where they were going. Retina shrugged the thought. Roma complained about the possibility they were walking into a trap. After all, he was one of the scientists that decided Solstice’s fate. Retina was adamant no one knew him. Lorenzo didn’t care about anything much but reaching Zharfar after Retina surgically removed his Unicell Groper. They were headed to Africa in what seemed a semi commercial private plane. Eight people including the pilots travelled. They weren’t supposed to know any more particulars. But Lorenzo’s watch placed the coordinates in both numbers and words. They were in West Africa, country Nigeria, state Osun, and township Isura. None of them had ever heard of it, the town, but they were there. And they had travelled for miles, over highly forested nonresidential areas and mountain peaks before they stopped. Wherever they were going was greatly isolated, Roma thought. "
13 " The authors disclose that in less than a century the word " tension" grew from signifying a literal electric charge to a metaphor for emotional stress between two people. Writes Owen Barfield, " The scientists who discovered the forces of electricity actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another. "
14 " Until I was twenty I was sure there was a being who could see everything I did and who didn't like most of it. He seemed to care about minute aspects of my life, like on what day of the week I ate a piece of meat. And yet, he let earthquakes and mudslides take out whole communities, apparently ignoring the saints among them who ate their meat on the assigned days. Eventually, I realized that I didn't believe there was such a being. It didn't seem reasonable. And I assumed that I was an atheist.As I understood the word, it meant that I was someone who didn't believe in a God; I was without a God. I didn't broadcast this in public because I noticed that people who do believe in a god get upset to hear that others don't. (Why this is so is one of the most pressing of human questions, and I wish a few of the bright people in this conversation would try to answer it through research.)But, slowly I realized that in the popular mind the word atheist was coming to mean something more - a statement that there couldn't be a God. God was, in this formulation, not possible, and this was something that could be proved. But I had been changed by eleven years of interviewing six or seven hundred scientists around the world on the television program Scientific American Frontiers. And that change was reflected in how I would now identify myself.The most striking thing about the scientists I met was their complete dedication to evidence. It reminded me of the wonderfully plainspoken words of Richard Feynman who felt it was better not to know than to know something that was wrong. "
― Alan Alda
15 " . . . [A] creationist spy named Luther Sunderland snuck into a closed scientific meeting of the Systematics Discussion Group at the American Museum in 1981 with a hidden tape recorder. . . . My friend, the distinguished paleoichthyologist Colin Patterson of the British Museum in London, was talking about pattern cladism and how he had abandoned many of the assumptions about evolution that he had once held, including the recognition of ancestors in the fossil record. He was now only interested in the simplest hypotheses that were easily tested, such as cladograms. But, of course, taken out of context, it sounds as though Colin doubted that evolution had taken place, yet he said nothing of the sort! Colin was speaking in a kind of " shorthand" that makes sense to the scientists who understand the subtleties of the debate, but mean something entirely different when taken out of context. I was at that meeting and was stunned to read afterward about Sunderland's account of what had happened because I remembered Colin's ideas clearly and could not imagine how they could be misinterpreted. For decades afterward, Colin had to explain over and over again what he had meant, and why he did not doubt the fact that evolution had occurred, only that he no longer accepted a lot of the other assumptions about evolution that Neo-Darwinists had made. Unfortunately, Colin died in 1998 while he was still in his scientific prime, unable to continue fighting these misinterpretations of his ideas that continue to be propagated by the creationists. "
16 " The Segue Institute was the preeminent research organization for all things paranormal and it was housed in a haunted, renovated turn of-the-century hotel. The place was supposedly loaded with what the scientists there called Shadow, capital S, a scary word for magic. Dark magic. "
― Erin Kellison , Shadow Touched (Shadow Touch #1-4)
17 " One might be led to question whether the scientists acted wisely in presenting the statesmen of the world with this appalling problem. Actually there was no choice. Once basic knowledge is acquired, any attempt at preventing its fruition would be as futile as hoping to stop the earth from revolving around the sun. "
― Enrico Fermi ,
18 " Technological innovations that produced certain major components of the United States military cannot be understood as resulting from a qualitative arms race. Those involved in decisions about new military technologies for the U.S. Army and Air Force simply do not appear to have had access to good intelligence about the Soviet military technological developments. How, then, were decisions made as to technologies to develop?Military research and development decisions are made amid great uncertainties. In an ideal world, such decisions would be managed by estimating the future costs of alternative programs and their prospective military values, and then pursuing the program with the best ratio of cost to value. But...there are tremendous difficulties in forecasting the real value and costs of weapons development programs. These uncertainties, combined with the empirical difficulty American technology managers had in collecting intelligence on the Soviet Union, meant that research and development strategies in the real world tended to become strategies for managing uncertainties. At least two such strategies are conceivable. One of the most politically important can be called, for want of a better phrase, " let the scientists choose." [This approach should be] compared with the theoretical and practical arguments for a strategy that concentrates on low-cot hedges against various forms of uncertainty. "
19 " I went to a foot specialist recently and she said:" You've broken a bone, it's healed funny." " What can you do?" " Not much." She strapped me up though and that's the reason my foot is hurting, because the strapping gave me cramp.When I'm about to die I'm going to head ti a swamp so I topple in when the time comes. In 50,000 years when they dig me up, pretty well preserved, the scientists will have to work out what sort of life I led from my bone structure, teeth and whatnot. Maybe I'll be clutching a Felt record or something to give them a clue. They'll look at my foot and say: " This man broke a bone and it's healed funny." And they'll look at the Felt record, analysing the grooves with a Groove Analyser and they'll say: " He was obviously in an indie band and one day the pressure got too much, and he booted a wall." And they wouldn't be far from the truth, those crazy scientists. "
20 " Advertising, an art, is constantly besieged and compromised by logicians and technocrats, the scientists of our profession who wildly miss the main point about everything we do… "
