This is one of the reasons that the organized religions do not inspire me with confidence. Which leaders of the major faiths acknowledge that their beliefs might be incomplete or erroneous and establish institutes to uncover possible doctrinal deficiencies?
Skepticism does not sell well.
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.
The book of Nature had waited more than a millennium for a reader.
Modern Roman Catholicism has no quarrel with the Big Bang, with a Universe 15 billion or so years old, with the first living things arising from prebiological molecules, or with humans evolving.
Christiaan Huygens became simultaneously adept in languages, drawing, law, science, engineering, mathematics and music. His interests and allegiances were broad. “The world is my country,” he said, “science my religion.
The first two letters of the name Pluto are the initials of Percival Lowell. Its symbol is, a planetary monogram. But Lowell’s lifelong love was the planet Mars. He was electrified by the announcement in 1877 by an Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, of canali on Mars.
Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our earthly hopes and fears. But our psychological predispositions pro or con must not mislead us. All that matters is the evidence, and the evidence is not yet in.
The Sphinx is missing a nose. Someone shot it off in a moment of idle desecration – some say it was Mameluke Turks, others, Napoleonic soldiers.
A radio telescope works more like a light meter than a camera. You point it toward some fairly broad region of the sky, and it records how much energy, in a particular radio frequency, is coming down to Earth.
A stars rich in europium; of distant galaxies analyzed through the collective light of a hundred billion constituent stars. Astronomical spectroscopy is an almost magical technique. It amazes me still. Auguste Comte picked a particularly unfortunate example.
Kepler and Newton represent a critical transition in human history, the discovery that fairly simple mathematical laws pervade all of Nature; that the same rules apply on Earth as in the skies; and that there is a resonance between the way we think and the way the world works.
If a marker were to be erected today, it might read, in homage to his scientific courage: “He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions.
We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy.
Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.
But you reassure yourself that at least here they are safe from baleen whales and oil slicks and cocktail sauce.
Certainly on this planet it is not apparent that there are beings more intelligent than humans, although a case can be made for dolphins and whales, and in fact if humans succeed in destroying themselves with nuclear weapons, a case can be made that ALL other animals are smarter than humans.
It is clear that the nations of the world now can only rise and fall together. It is not a question of one nation winning at the expense of another. We must all help one another or all perish together.
It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.