Those who make uncritical observations or fraudulent claims lead us into error and deflect us from the major human goal of understanding how the world works. It is for this reason that playing fast and loose with the truth is a very serious matter.
It is striking that the observational search for extraterrestrial life began in the same generation as the invention of the telescope, and with the greatest theoretician of the age.
There seem to be many people who simply wish to be told an answer, any answer, and thereby avoid the burden of keeping two mutually exclusive possibilities in their heads at the same time.
There are a vast number of stars within our galaxy. The number is not so large as the number of cometary nuclei around the Sun but is nevertheless hardly modest. It’s about 400 billion stars, of which the Sun is one.
The fifth regular solid must then, they thought, correspond to some fifth element that could only be the substance of the heavenly bodies.
In the littered field of discredited self-congratulatory chauvinisms, there is only one that seems to hold up, one sense in which we are special: Due to our own actions or inactions, and the misuse of our technology, we live at an extraordinary moment, for the Earth at least – the first time that a species has become able to wipe itself out.
The tar is an extremely rich collection of complex organic molecules, including the constituent parts of proteins and nucleic acids. The stuff of life, it turns out, can be very easily made.
We are rare and precious because we are alive, because we can think as well as we can. We are privileged to influence and perhaps control our future. I believe we have an obligation to fight for life on Earth – not just for ourselves, but for all those, humans and others, who came before us, and to whom we are beholden, and for all those who, if we are wise enough, will come after. There is no cause more urgent, no dedication more fitting than to protect the future of our species.
When I say I’m an agnostic, I only mean that the evidence isn’t in. There isn’t compelling evidence that God exists – at least your kind of god – and there isn’t compelling evidence that he doesn’t.
What is there in the precepts of science that keeps a scientist from doing evil?
I wonder how many potential Einsteins have been permanently discouraged through competitive examinations and the forced feeding of curricula.
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere. Skepticism enables us to distinguish fancy from fact, to test our speculations. The Cosmos is rich beyond measure – in elegant facts, in exquisite interrelationships, in the subtle machinery of awe.
Most of us are for freedom of expression when there’s a danger that our own views will be suppressed. We’re not all that upset, though, when views we despise encounter a little censorship here and there.
Do you believe in UFOs?’ I’m always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. I’m almost never asked, ‘How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?
No gastes neuronas en lo que no funciona.
Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe. I mean the real universe. All those light-years. All those worlds. I think of the scope of your universe, the opportunities it affords the Creator, and it takes my breath away.
The first law of bureaucracy is to guarantee its own continuance.
In his celebrated little book On Liberty, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is “a peculiar evil.” If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the “opportunity of exchanging error for truth”; and if it’s wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in “its collision with error.” If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.
I remind myself that madmen really exist. Sometimes they achieve the highest levels of political power in modern industrial nations.
Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop.