Le migliori citazioni sulla Terra!

If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.

Stuart A. Kauffman

Tag: science systems emergence cybernetics

The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.

John Stuart Mill

Tag: science systems cybernetics

Educators may bring upon themselves unnecessary travail by taking a tactless and unjustifiable position about the relation between scientific and religious narratives. We see this, of course, in the conflict concerning creation science. Some educators representing, as they think, the conscience of science act much like those legislators who in 1925 prohibited by law the teaching of evolution in Tennessee. In that case, anti-evolutionists were fearful that a scientific idea would undermine religious belief. Today, pro-evolutionists are fearful that a religious idea will undermine scientific belief. The former had insufficient confidence in religion; the latter insufficient confidence in science. The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other.

Neil Postman

Tag: science education religion

The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in corrrecting its mistakes.

Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry--is not even a "subject"--but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.

Neil Postman

Tag: science learning

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

Bertrand Russell

Tag: science philosophy

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

Hippocrates

Tag: science knowledge opinion ignorance

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.

Albert Einstein

Tag: science art cybernetics

This seems charmingly paradoxical: scientists seek one truth but often voice many opinions; journalists often speak of many truths while voicing a uniform view.

Christopher Essex

Tag: science journalism

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

Carl Sagan

Tag: science philosophy spirituality metaphysics sense-of-wonder