To my mind, the history of science is most illuminating when the frailties of human actors are put into juxtaposition with the transcendence of nature’s laws.
The cult of military obedience and the cult of weapons of mass destruction are the two great follies of the modern age.
Sanity is, in essence, nothing more than the ability to live in harmony with nature’s laws.
The ethical standards of scientists must change as the scope of the good and evil caused by science has changed. In the long run, as Haldane and Einstein said, ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.
My message is that science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practice it.
Science flourishes best when it uses freely all the tools at hand, unconstrained by preconceived notions of what science ought to be. Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature’s imagination is richer than ours.
I do not deny the power and the beauty of reductionist science, as exemplified in the axioms and theorems of abstract algebra... But I assert the equal power and beauty of constructive science as exemplified in Godel’s construction of an undecidable proposition...
Any society which idolizes soldiers is tainted with a collective insanity and is likely in the end to come to grief.
Some Western readers commonly use the Japanese word manga to mean serious comic-book literature. According to one of my Japanese friends, this usage is wrong. The word manga means “idle picture” and is used in Japan to describe collections of trivial comic-book stories. The correct word for serious comic-book literature is gekiga, meaning “dramatic picture.
Nonviolence is often the path of wisdom, but not always. Love and passive resistance are wonderfully effective weapons against some kinds of tyranny, but not against all.
It is important for long-range stability that peaceful countries be well armed and well organized in self-defense.
The primary difference between the classical layer and the quantum layer is that the classical layer deals with facts and the quantum layer deals with probabilities. In situations where classical laws are valid, we can predict the future by observing the past. In situations where quantum laws are valid, we can observe the past but we cannot predict the future. In the quantum layer, events are unpredictable.
The craft of writing software will not become obsolete. And the craft of using soft ware creatively is flourishing even more than the craft of writing it. The availability of software and.
Gandhi’s satyagraha was an effective weapon for a subject people to use against their oppressors, but his followers discarded it promptly as soon as they gained control of their own government and stood in the oppressors’ shoes.
Scientists who become icons must not only be geniuses but also performers, playing to the crowd and enjoying public acclaim.
The debacle of European pacifism has at least one clear lesson to teach us: pacifists, if they are to be effective in the modern world, must be as wholehearted and as brave as Gandhi.
It is impossible to make real progress in technology without gambling.
Life had to invent death to evolve.
The international community of scientists may help to abolish war by setting an example to the world of practical cooperation extending across barriers of nationality, language, and culture.
Today I discovered a little theorem which gave me some intense moments of pleasure. It is beautiful and fell into my hand like a jewel from the sky.