When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.
C.P. SnowTags: truth
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
He was a big, rather clumsy man, with a substantial bay window that started in the middle of the chest. I should guess that he was less muscular than at first sight he looked. He had large staring blue eyes and a damp and pendulous lower lip. He didn't look in the least like an intellectual. Creative people of his abundant kind never do, of course, but all the talk of Rutherford looking like a farmer was unperceptive nonsense. His was really the kind of face and physique that often goes with great weight of character and gifts. It could easily have been the soma of a great writer. As he talked to his companions in the streets, his voice was three times as loud as any of theirs, and his accent was bizarre…. It was part of his nature that, stupendous as his work was, he should consider it 10 per cent more so. It was also part of his nature that, quite without acting, he should behave constantly as though he were 10 per cent larger than life. Worldly success? He loved every minute of it: flattery, titles, the company of the high official world...But there was that mysterious diffidence behind it all. He hated the faintest suspicion of being patronized, even when he was a world figure.
Archbishop Lang was once tactless enough to suggest that he supposed a famous scientist had no time for reading. Rutherford immediately felt that he was being regarded as an ignorant roughneck. He produced a formidable list of his last month’s reading. Then, half innocently, half malevolently: "And what do you manage to read, your Grice?"
I am afraid", said the Archbishop, somewhat out of his depth, "that a man in my position doesn't really have the leisure..."
Ah yes, your Grice," said Rutherford in triumph, "it must be a dog's life! It must be a dog's life!
The division of our culture is making us more obtuse than we need be: we can repair communications to some extent: but, as I have said before, we are not going to turn out men and women who understand as much of their world as Piero della Francesca did of his, or Pascal, or Goethe. With good fortune, however, we can educate a large proportion of our better minds so that they are not ignorant of the imaginative experience, both in the arts and in science, nor ignorant either of the endowments of applied science, of the remediable suffering of most of their fellow humans, and of the responsibilities which, once seen, cannot be denied.
C.P. SnowI want a man who knows something about himself. And is appalled. And has to forgive himself to get along.
C.P. SnowMorality existed only in action. It arose out of action: was formed and tested in action: expressed itself in action. That was why we mustn't cheapen it with words
C.P. SnowTags: morality
Technology is a queer thing. It brings you gifts with one hand, and stabs you in the back with the other.
C.P. SnowTags: technology-addiction
What will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of some of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have that right.
C.P. SnowWhen you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find that far more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have been committed in the name of rebellion.
C.P. SnowA scientist has to be neutral in his search for the truth, but he cannot be neutral as to the use of that truth when found. If you know more than other people, you have more responsibility, rather than less.
C.P. SnowTags: science truth knowledge responsibility search neutrality bias scientist
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