"science"タグの名言

La punteggiatura è come l'elettroencefalogramma di un cervello che sogna - non dà le immagini ma rivela il ritmo del flusso sottostante.

the Omegas harnessed Prometheus to revolutionize education. Given any person’s knowledge and abilities, Prometheus could determine the fastest way for them to learn any new subject in a manner that kept them highly engaged and motivated to continue, and produce the corresponding optimized videos, reading materials, exercises and other learning tools. Omega-controlled companies therefore marketed online courses about virtually everything, highly customized not only by language and cultural background but also by starting level. Whether you were an illiterate forty-year-old wanting to learn to read or a biology PhD seeking the latest about cancer immunotherapy, Prometheus had the perfect course for you. These offerings bore little resemblance to most present-day online courses: by leveraging Prometheus’ movie-making talents, the video segments would truly engage, providing powerful metaphors that you would relate to, leaving you craving to learn more. Some courses were sold for profit, but many were made available for free, much to the delight of teachers around the world who could use them in their classrooms—and to most anybody eager to learn anything.

Real science can be hard but, like classical literature or playing the violin, worth the struggle.

Наука і релігія - не конкуренти, це дві різні мови, які говорять про те саме. У світі є місце для них обох.

The moral vacuum we now feel ourselves to be in has always been there, even if we haven’t recognized it Religious people are already entirely accustomed to picking and choosing which texts from holy book they obey and which they reject. There are passages of the Judeo-Christian Bible which no modern Christian or Jew would wish to follow. The story of Isaac’s narrowly averted sacrifice by his father Abraham strikes us moderns as a shocking piece of child abuse, whether we read it literally or symbolically.

It is in the nature of scientific truths that they are waiting to be discovered, by whoever has the ability to do so. If two different people independently discover something in science, it will be the same truth. Unlike works of art, scientific truths do not change their nature in response to the individual human beings who discover them. This is both a glory, and a limitation, of science.

We can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.

A hundred billion years from now, any galaxies not now resident in our neighborhood (a gravitationally bound cluster of about a dozen galaxies called our “local group”) will exit our cosmic horizon and enter a realm permanently beyond our capacity to see unless future astronomers have records handed down to them from an earlier era, their cosmological theories will seek explanations for an island universe, with galaxies numbering no more than students in a backwoods school, floating in a static sea of darkness. We live in a privileged age. Insights the universe giveth, accelerated expansion will taketh away.

I sailed upon oceans, and I thought no challenge could be greater, and now men sail the void between stars. Oh, how I remember them. The constellations burning so bright at night. How could I ever have known? God's creation has a majesty which lays men bare at his feet.

No doubt, there was something that drew people to this particular launch—a sense of something epochal, a passing of the torch from Voyager to a new generation of explorers who had been inspired by Voyager. You could feel it; it was in the air, now it was a new generation’s chance to explore never-before-seen worlds.

They had done it! Against all the struggles, doubts, and naysayers of the past 17 years, a spaceship had left Earth that day on its way to explore the Pluto system. With it rode the hopes of its team and a larger scientific community for what discoveries it would make there, a decade hence, in the cold, cold reaches of the outer solar system.

The people who created this amazing mission of exploration chased their new horizons hard; they never let go of their dream; they put everything they had into it; and eventually they chased it down and accomplished what they set out to do.

When word of the astronomers’ vote in Prague reached the New Horizons team, reactions ranged from indifferent (“Who cares what astronomers think? They’re not the experts in this.”), to bemused, to annoyed, to seriously pissed off. As Fran Bagenal succinctly put it, “Dwarf people are people. Dwarf planets are planets. End of argument.

There are ecological, biological, sociological, and psychological problems that can never be solved to make this idea work. The physical problems of propulsion have capture your fancy, and perhaps they can be solved, but they are the easy ones.

Statistically it was not greatly different than it had been for previous generations, but anecdotally it had become so prominent that every problem was noticed and remarked. The cognitive error called ease of representation thrust them into a space where every problem they witnessed convinced them they were in an unprecedented colapse. They were getting depressed.

In the battle between science and storytelling, there is simply no competition: storytelling wins every time.

Time heals small wounds.

A researcher once played a recording of an elephant who had died. The sound emanated from a speaker hidden in the thicket. The family went wild calling, looking all around. The dead’s elephant daughter called for days afterword. The researchers never again did such a thing.

When the farmer bores the tap hole into the trunk, the tree sends sap to heal the wound. Sure enough, by the next spring, only an extremely observant and knowledgeable person can find the old tap scars. When the wind blows, the tree senses that a branch might break. A broken branch is a much more serious wound than a little clean tap hole in the trunk. Therefore, the tree withholds the sap from the tap hole in case it needs to rush a bunch of sap to a broken limb somewhere. Once the wind subsides, the sap starts flowing again through the little tap hole. Sentient beings, anyone? You bet. Fearfully and wonderfully made.

I pondered the significance of my personal annihilation for the next several months, facing down an existentialist abyss of oblivion and meaningless within me. Eventually, through some unconscious process of recalibration, I returned to my basic attitude that all is as it should be. There is no other way I can describe it: no mountaintop conversion or flash of deep insight, but a sentiment that suffuses my life. I wake up each morning to find myself in a world full of mystery and beauty. And I'm profoundly thankful for the wonder of it all. Here I am, a highly organized pattern of mass and energy, one of seven billion, insignificant in any objective accounting of the world. And in short while I will case to exist. What am I to the universe? Practically nothing. Yet the certainty of my death makes my life more significant. My joy in life, in my children, my love to dogs, running and climbing, books and music, the cobalt blue sky, are meaningful because I will come to an end. And that is as it should be. I do not know what will come afterward, if there is an afterward in the usual sense of the world, but whatever it is, I know in my bones that everything is for the best.