Dr. Marc J. Madou
sayings
chapter 1:
Why must our bodies be so large compared with the atom?
Erwin
Schrödinger, What Is Life?
Discovery
consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something
different.
Albert-Szent Györgi
CHAPTER 2:
I think there is a world market for
maybe five computers.
Thomas Watson, Chairman IBM in 1943
Science has a way of getting us to
the future without consulting the futurists and visionaries.
Robert Park, Vodoo Science
CHAPTER
3:
As
an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I
thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life—so I became a scientist.
This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
Matt Cartmill
If
any student comes to me and says he wants to be useful to mankind and go into
research to alleviate human suffering, I advise him to go into charity instead.
Research wants real egotists who seek their own pleasure and
satisfaction, but find it in solving the puzzles of nature.
Albert Szent-Györgi
In
science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to
whom the idea first occurs.
Francis Darwin
CHAPTER
4:
Fear
of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself
calleth religion.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)
Ignorance
more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know
little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that
problem will never be solved by science.
Charles Darwin, Introduction, The Descent of Man (1871)
The
human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it
rejects it.
P. B. Medawar
CHAPTER
5:
It’s
not getting any smarter out there. You have to come to terms with stupidity, and
make it work for you.
Frank Zappa
Only
two things are infinite – the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not so
sure about the universe.
Albert Einstein
CHAPTER 6:
X-rays
will prove to be a hoax.
Lord Kelvin
Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
Albert Einstein
Computers
are useless. They can only give you answers.
Pablo Picasso
CHAPTER 7:
Progress
in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in
that order.
Sydney Brenner, 1980
Surprises in science often arise from new tools rather than from new
concepts.
Freeman Dyson, 1999
CHAPTER
8:
To
create a human through genetic engineering that is more complex, more refined,
more subtle, farther from animals, than the ones we have today.
Daniel Cohen, The Genes of Hope
Aimed
by us are futuristic humane machines wherein human level electronic intelligence
and nerve system are combined to machines of ultraprecision capabilities.
Brochure from Matsushita Research Institute
CHAPTER 9:
Freeman Dyson about the
state of affairs in academia:
First,
the chief character, who is supposed to be a professional astronomer, spends his
time fundraising and doing calculations at his desk, rather than observing the
sky. Second, the driving force of a
scientific project is institutional self-aggrandizement rather than intellectual
curiosity.
Freeman Dyson
If at first, the idea is not absurd,
then there is no hope for it.
Albert Einstein
CHAPTER
10:
Prediction
is extremely difficult. Especially about the future.
Niels Bohr
Cars
will cost as little as $200. People will have two-month vacations. They will
care little for possessions. The happiest people live in one-factory villages.
Predictions for 1960 by General Motors in a “Futurama” exhibit at the
1939-40 New York World’s Fair
To
the electron–may it never be of any use to anybody.
Favorite toast of hardheaded Cavendish scientists in the early 1900s
Crystal Fire,
Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, W.W. Norton, 1998
People
will work every bit as hard to fool themselves as they will to fool
others–which makes it very difficult to tell just where the line between
foolishness and fraud is located.
Robert Park, Voodoo Science,
Oxford University Press 2000