Quotes

Every scientist knows that the best research emerges from a dialectic between speculation and healthy scepticism. Ideally the two should co-exist in the same brain, but they don’t have to. Since there are people who represent both extremes, all ideas eventually get tested ruthlessly.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the brain: probing the mysteries of the human mind, New York, 1999, p. xvi

Since we are for the most part the descendants of the strivers of the pre-industrial world, those driven to achieve greater economic success than their peers, perhaps these findings reflect another cultural or biological heritage from the Malthusian era. The contented may well have lost out in the Darwinian struggle that defined the world before 1800. Those who were successful in the economy of the Malthusian era could well have been driven by a need to have more than their peers in order to be happy. Modern man might not be designed for contentment. The envious have inherited the earth.

Gregory Clark, A farewell to alms: A brief economic history of the world, Princeton, 2007, p. 16

When I think of our relationship to string theory over the years, I am reminded of an art dealer who represented a friend of mine. When we met, he mentioned that he was also a good friend of a young writer whose book I had admired; we can call her “M.” A few weeks later, he called me and said, “I was speaking to M. the other day, and, you know, she is very interested in science. Could I get you two together sometime?” Of course I was terribly flattered and excited and accepted the first of several dinner invitations. Halfway through a very good meal, the art dealer’s cell phone rang. “It’s M.,” he announced. “She’s nearby. She would love to drop by and meet you . Is that OK?” But she never came. Over dessert, the dealer and I had a great talk about the relationship between art and science. After a while, my curiosity about whether M. would actually show up lost to my embarrassment of over my eagerness to meet her, so I thanked him and went home.A few weeks later he called, apologized profusely, and invited me to dinner again to meet her. Of course I went. For one thing, he ate only in the best restaurants; it seems that the managers of some art galleries have expense accounts that exceed the salaries of academic scientists. But the same scene was repeated that time and at several subsequent dinners. She would call, then an hour would go by, sometimes two, before his phone rang again: “Oh, I see, you’re not feeling well” or “The taxi driver didn’t know where the Odeon is? He took you to Brooklyn? What is this city coming to? Yes, I’m sure, very soon…” After two years of this, I became convinced that the picture of the young woman on her book jacket was a fake. One night I told him that I finally understood: He was M. He just smiled and said, “Well, yes… but she would have so enjoyed meeting you.”

The story of string theory is like my forever postponed meeting with M. You work on it even though you know it’s not the real thing, because it’s as close as you know how to get. Meanwhile the company is charming and the good is good. From time to time, you hear that the real theory is about to be revealed, but somehow that never happens. After a while, you go looking for it yourself. This feels good, but it, too, never comes to anything. In the end, you have little more than you started with: a beautiful picture on the jacket of a book you can never open.

Lee Smolin, The trouble with physics: The rise of string theory, the fall of a science, and what comes next, Boston, 2006, pp. 147-148

That which is most conformable to the experienced course of nature, say, to experience, is in every instance most probable. Error and mendacity are more conformable to experience than miracles are.

Jeremy Bentham, Deontology: Together with a table of the springs of action and the article on utilitarianism, Oxford, 1983, p. 27

A finite limitation cries out for an explanation of why there is just that particular limit, in a way that limitlessness does not. There is a neatness about zero and infinity which particular finite numbers lack.

Richard Swinburne, The existence of God, Oxford, 2004, p. 283

Let us grant that a linguist, qua theoretical and dispassionate scientist, is not in the business of telling people how to talk; it by no means follows that the speakers he is studying are free from rules which ought to be recorded in any faithful and accurate report of their practices. A student of law is not a legislator; but it would be a gross fallacy to argue that therefore there can be no right or wrong in legal matters.

Max Black, The labyrinth of language, London, 1968, p. 70

Being a utilitarian, my interest is in the universe.

Torbjörn Tännsjö, Narrow hedonism, Journal of happiness studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2007, pp. 79–98, p. 80

[I]t is crucial for happiness research to focus more on the biochemical correlates of good and bad feelings in order to create a more trustworthy picture of how well we actually feel.

Will Wilkinson, In pursuit of happiness research: Is it reliable? What does it imply for policy?, 2007, p. 10

Venetian Memories. Jane has agreed to have copied in her brain some of Paul’s memory-traces. After she recovers consciousness in the post-surgery room, she has a new set of vivid apparent memories. She seems to remember walking on the marble paving of a square, hearing the flapping of flying pigeons and the cries of gulls, and seeing light sparkling on green water. One apparent memory is very clear. She seems to remember looking across the water to an island, where a white Palladian church stood out brilliantly against a dark thundercloud.

Derek Parfit, Reasons and persons, Oxford, 1984, p. 220

[T]here is wide agreement that the State should protect the interests of the future in some degree against the effects of our irrational discounting and of our preference for ourselves over our descendants. The whole movement for ‘conservation’ in the United States is based on this conviction. It is the clear duty of Government, which is the trustee for unborn generations as well as for its present citizens, to watch over, and, if need be, by legislative enactment, to defend, the exhaustible natural resources of the country from rash and reckless spoliation.

Arthur Cecil Pigou, The Economics of Welfare, London, 1920, pp. 29-30

The first aquatic creatures crawled onto dry land in the Silurian era, more than three hundred million years ago. They may have been unprepossessing brutes, but had they been clobbered, the evolution of land-based fauna would have been jeopardised. Likewise, the post-human potential is so immense that not even the most misanthropic amongst us would countenance its being foreclosed by human actions.

Martin J. Rees, Our final hour: A scientist's warning: How terror, error, and environmental disaster threaten humankind's future in this Century—on earth and beyond, New York, 2003, p. 183

[T]he general term [‘pleasure’] does not appear to call up with equal facility all the particulars which are meant to be included under it, but rather the grosser feelings than for instance the ‘joy and felicity’ of devotion.

F. Y. Edgeworth, Mathematical psychics: An essay on the application of mathematics to the moral sciences, London, 1881, pp. 56-57

Science is predicated upon the belief that the Universe is algorithmically compressible and the modern search for a Theory of Everything is the ultimate expression of that belief, a belief that there is an abbreviated representation of the logic behind the Universe’s properties that can be written down in finite form by human beings.

John D. Barrow, Theories of everything : the quest for ultimate explanation, Oxford, 1991, p. 11

Let us suppose, unrealistically, that IQ tests really measure intellectual ability. Let us in fact assume, even more unrealistically, that they measure the intellectual abilities that are relevant to success in metaphysics. Why should we suppose that a species with a mean IQ of 100—our own species—is able to solve the problems of metaphysics? Pretty clearly a species with a mean IQ of 60 wouldn’t be in a position to achieve this. Pretty clearly, a species with a mean IQ of 160 would be in a better position than we to achieve this. Why should we suppose that the “cut-off-point” is something like 90 or 95? Why shouldn’t it be 130 or 170 or 250? The conclusion of this meditation on mystery is that if metaphysics does indeed present us with mysteries that we are incapable of penetrating, this fact is not itself mysterious. It is just what we should expect, given that we are convinced that beings only slightly less intellectually capable than ourselves would certainly be incapable of penetrating these mysteries. If we cannot know why there is anything at all, or why there should be rational beings, or how thought and feeling are possible, or how our conviction that we have free will could possibly be true, why should that astonish us? What reason have we, what reason could we possibly have, for thinking that our intellectual abilities are equal to the task of answering these questions?

Peter van Inwagen, Metaphysics, Boulder, CO, 2009, p. 201

The constants of Nature give our Universe its feel and its existence. Without them, the forces of Nature would have no strengths; the elementary particles of matter no masses; the Universe no size. The constants of Nature are the ultimate bulwark against unbridled relativism. They define the fabric of the Universe in a way that can side-step the prejudices of a human-centred view of things. If we were to make contact with an intelligence elsewhere in the Universe we would look first to the constants of Nature for common ground. We would talk first about those things that the constants of Nature define. The probes that we have dispatched into outer space carrying information about ourselves and our location in the Universe pick on the wavelengths of light that defined the hydrogen atom to tell where we are and what we know. The constants of Nature are potentially the greatest shared physical experience of intelligent beings everywhere in the Universe. Yet, as we have followed the highways and by-ways of the quest to unravel their meaning and significance, we have come full circle. Their architects saw them as a means of lifting our understanding of the Universe clear from the anthropomorphisms of human construction to reveal the otherness of a Universe not designed for our convenience. But these universal constants, created by the coming together of relativistic and quantum realities, have turned out to underwrite our very existence in ways that are at once mysterious and marvellous. For it is their values, measured with ever greater precision in our laboratories, but still unexplained by our theories, that make the Universe a habitable place for minds of any sort. And it is through their values that the uniqueness of our Universe is impressed upon us by the ease with which we can think of less satisfactory alternatives.

John D. Barrow, The constants of nature: From Alpha to Omega, London, 2002, pp. 290-291

Willard Van Orman Quine, The Meaning of Life: According to Our Century's Greatest Writers and Thinkers, Chicago, 1988, pp. 154-155

Suppose that we were to divide a square into a million smaller squares by dividing each of its sides into a thousand equal parts. And suppose that we took the first million digits in the decimal part of pi and interpreted each as corresponding to one of the million squares by some simple correspondence rule (something like this: the top left square is assigned the first digit, the next square to the right is assigned the second digit, and so on). And suppose that we assigned a color to each of the numbers 0 through 0 and painted each of the small squares with the color corresponding to the number assigned to it.

What would we say if the result turned out to be a meaningful picture—a landscape or a still life or something equally representational—of surpassing beauty?

Peter van Inwagen, Metaphysics, Boulder, CO, 2009, p. 137

The purpose of philosophy is to find out by rigorous methods what the truth is. Often its results clash with the common sense view. In such cases it is reasonable to maintain that our relatively unexamined common sense views should be abandoned and give way to the conclusions of rigorous philosophical analysis.

George N. Schlesinger, Possible worlds and the mystery of existence, Ratio, vol. 26, no. 1, 1984, pp. 1–18, p. 10

We do not want our theories to tell us that what we see is surprising in the last analysis, i.e., surprising even when every explanation has been found; for that would just show that our theories are probably wrong. Our project must be one of showing instead that all this smoke, so to speak, could in the end be very much to be expected, were there a fire.

John Leslie, Universes, London, 1989, p. 108

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with the tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators, and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

Steven Weinberg, The first three minutes: a modern view of the origin of the universe, New York, 1977, p. 147