Murray Gell-Mann countered in the following weeks by giving a beautiful set of six lectures concerning the linguistic relations of all the languages of the world.
We just have to take what we see, and then formulate all the rest of our ideas in terms of our actual experience.
Have you read anywhere, by any poet, anything about time that compares with real time, with the long, slow process of evolution?
Knowledge isn’t free. You have to pay attention.
I was terrible in English. I couldn’t stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention – it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.
I’ve learned how to live without knowing. I don’t have to be sure I’m succeeding, and as I said before about science, I think my life is fuller because I realize that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m delighted with the width of the world!
So I found hypnosis to be a very interesting experience. All the time you’re saying to yourself, “I could do that, but I won’t” – which is just another way of saying that you can’t.
Nobody yet knows how dogs work.
I’ll never make that mistake again, reading the experts’ opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that’s the end of you.
I will summarize, then, by saying that electrons arrive in lumps, like particles, but the probability of arrival of these lumps is determined as the intensity of waves would be. It is in this sense that the electron behaves sometimes like a particle and sometimes like a wave. It behaves in two different ways at the same time.
If we look away from the science and look at the world around us, we find out something rather pitiful: that the environment that we live in is so actively, intensely unscientific.
Clearly, peace is a great force, as is sobriety, as are material power, communication, education, honesty, and the ideals of many dreamers.
What, then, is the meaning of it all? What can we say to dispel the mystery of existence? If we take everything into account, not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn’t know, then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know.
Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the men of the future a free hand.
You must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. After you’ve not fool yourself, it’s easy not to fool others.
And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking by new direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the race experience from the past. I see it that way. That is my best definition.
You see? That’s why scientists persist in their investigations, why we struggle so desperately for every bit of knowledge, stay up nights seeking the answer to a problem, climb the steepest obstacles to the next fragment of understanding, to finally reach that joyous moment of the kick in the discovery, which is part of the pleasure of finding things out.
How does science show it–how did the scientists find out–how, what, where?
It was the closest thing to science I could find.
My interest in science is to simply find out about the world, and the more I find out the better it is, like, to find out.
All things, even ourselves, are made of fine-grained, enormously strongly interacting plus and minus parts, all neatly balanced out.