Academics From The United States

"On War and Morality, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1989. ISBN 978-1-4008-6014-2; quoted on Google Books."

"By focusing on the entitlements of collectivities (notably nation states) as opposed to the well-being of individuals, the just war theory frames a rationale for war which omits the central moral issue...whether the massive, systematic and deliberate killing of human beings can ever be justified."

"The Ethics of Nonviolence: Essays by Robert L. Holmes. Ed. Predrag, Cicovaki. Bloomsbury, 2013 ISBN 978-1-6235-6580-0 quoted on Google Books"

"Pacifism: A Philosophy of Nonviolence, Bloomsbury, New York, 2016 pp. 265-266. ISBN 978-1-4712-7983-3; See the review of the book by Cheyney Ryan, Oxford University 2017 in "Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews", quoted on ndpr.nd.edu."

"If one thinks of nonviolence as a way of life, then it works to the extent that one lives nonviolently and infuses everyday conduct with a nonviolent spirit...whether we act nonviolently, considerately, and respectfully of others in all that we do is within our control. Nonviolence in that sense cannot fail to work if we resolve to see that it works."

"To be a pragmatic pacifist, one need only consider that large-scale, organized, and systemic war violence is unacceptable in today's world."

"If a visitor from outer space were to come to know human beings on this earth .... at work and play, and without knowledge of human history or international affairs, what would he conclude? No doubt that virtually everyone values friendship, peace and happiness; ...If having observed all this the visitor were then told that a scheme had been proposed ... which for the present would require that people pour their wealth into the production of weapons of destruction, ... train their sons and daughters to kill and periodically send them off to slaughter..[and] that humans could improve their lot provided only that they do all of these things, he would ridicule the scheme as having not the slightest chance of success, and even less of being accepted by rational beings. Yet this is precisely what humankind has been led to accept in the case of war. It has proven willing to abandon virtually everything worth living for, to do things all agree are abhorrent, for reasons few understand, and for ends (such as peace) that history shows cannot be secured by these means."

"The threat to retaliate massively in the event of a nuclear attack is not rationale...contrary to the usual wisdom, we have no good reason to believe that nuclear deterrence has worked in the past, or that if it has, it will continue to do so in the future...even if nuclear deterrence should be one hundred percent effective, it still increases the probability of nuclear war."

"To justify going to war...that is to establish jus ad bellum in the first place, requires showing that what one would be doing by waging it is justified."

"The most dramatic burst of biological inventiveness came here, just over half a billion years ago, when a whole array of creatures equipped with claws and teeth and tentacles appeared, in what is aptly called the . Its cause is something of a mystery, but the forms taken on by nearly of the organisms on Earth today represent variations of the plans invented during the Cambrian. It makes you wonder just how exotic might be."

"This book argues that ... the was sparked—caused is perhaps not too strong a word—by the scientific revolution, and that science continues to foster today. It's not just that scientific creativity has produced technological improvements, which in turn have enhanced the prosperity and security of the scientific nations, although that is part of the story, but that the freedoms protected by liberal democracies are essential to facilitating scientific inquiry, and that democracy itself is an experimental system without which neither science nor liberty can flourish."

"… For more than a thousand years it was thought that the heavens obeyed a different physics than pertains here on Earth. With the scientific renaissance that culminated in Isaac Newton’s work it became clear that, on the contrary, the same natural laws rule the earth and the sky. The cosmos came to be viewed as a marvel, events following from causes like the tickings of brass cogs. The realm of the inexplicable—where dwell the gods of those dazzled by the unexplained—was thereafter relegated to the first moment of time, when the universe somehow blossomed into being. Then quantum chance reared its indeterminate face, as a creative agency that authored the first phenomena of cosmic time. So we are obliged to consider that even the largest systems are ruled by quantum precepts that govern nature on the smallest scales, and that the origin of the universe may itself have been a cosmic flux."

"Ethical responsibility ... involves more than leading a decent, honest, truthful life, as important as such lives certainly remain... Our moral obligations ... must include a willingness to engage others in the difficult work of defining what the crucial choices are that confront technological society and how intelligently to confront them."

"... the arrival of any new technology that has significant power and practical potential always brings with it a wave of visionary enthusiasm that anticipates the rise of a utopian social order. ... From the coming of the , to the introduction of the telegraph, , motion pictures, centrally generated electrical power, automobile, radio, television, nuclear power, , and the computer (to name just a few), this has been the recurring theme: celebrate! The moment of redemption is at hand."

"... In [the] of , spiritual and working life was divided into precise units of time, the , as a way to magnify the strength of the monks' religious devotion. This regimen gave rise to a need for devices that could measure time: hence the development of the first simple, reliable clocks."

"What do philosophers need to know about technology? I mean, of course, philosophers who want to think and write about technology in fruitful ways. What kind of knowledge do we need to have? And how much?"

"[the notion of Musk buying MSNBC was] a bombshell on the broadcasting landscape."

"In all, Kepler tested seventy circular orbits against 's Mars data, all to no avail. At one point, performing a leap of the imagination like Leonardo's to the moon, he imagined himself on Mars, and sought to reconstruct the path the earths motion would trace out across the skies of a Martian observatory; this effort consumed nine hundred pages of calculations, but still failed to solve the major problem."

"Neuroscience has begun to reveal some fascinating things about how the brain works, shedding light on the concept of personal identity, the data-handling limitations of the central nervous system, and the way that the brain smooths over its liabilities and discontinuities to sustain a sense of unified consciousness. We are beginning to realize that each of us really does contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman put it, and that the chorus of voices within was built up over eons of evolution, like geological strata in the or the ."

"Religion is more than a set of individual experiences, important as they are. It is also a set of shared beliefs that make it possible for large numbers of people to work together, to endure the restraints and meet the demands imposed by organized society, to be willing to play a part in an intricate process that no one can fully understand, to find satisfaction in life without being flooded by material benefits."

"Strayer always claimed that medieval historians made terrific CIA operatives because they were especially good at drawing conclusions based on very fragmentary evidence."

"The universe is filled with thermal radiation having a current temperature of 2.75 K. Originating in the very early universe, this radiation furnishes strong evidence that the Big Bang cosmology best describes our expanding universe from an incredibly hot, compacted early stage until now. The model can be used to extrapolate our physics backward in time to predict events whose effects might be observable in the 2.75 K radiation today. The spectrum and isotropy are being studied with sophisticated microwave radiometers on the ground, in balloons, and in satellites. The results are as predicted by the simple theory: the spectrum is that of a blackbody (to a few percent) and the radiation is isotropic (to 0.01 percent) except for a local effect due to our motion through the radiation."

"David Todd Wilkinson died on 5 September 2002 in Princeton, New Jersey, after having battled cancer for 17 years. His role in the measurements of the thermal (CMB) was key to the completion of the program of cosmological tests that began with Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the expanding universe in 1929."

"It is in proportion to our success or failure in conceiving facts simply that sciences are abstract or concrete, rational or descriptive. In these respects the contrast is great between the physical and the biological sciences. The figure of the earth, its path about the sun, and its relations to the other planets are readily conceivable in a first approximation as simple; but the forms of life seem complex, their activities manifold, and the concatenations interminable. Therefore, unlike celestial mechanics, the science of biology, which is the record of efforts accurately to describe and clearly to understand living things, is chiefly a science descriptive of concrete fact. It bears little resemblance to the more perfect science and as yet is in no danger of a relativist revolution. It has never attained, perhaps, as some have argued, it can never in any respect achieve and should not strive for the abstractness, the elegance, and the simplicity which are the mark of the classical epoch of many the physical sciences and the ideal of those who follow Newton and Willard Gibbs."

"Four centuries ago, Machiavelli was thinking of certain great problems of human society and writing two famous books. In so doing he reached scientific generalizations about the influence of the sentiments upon the actions of men and, through these actions, upon the fate of human societies. As a whole, these conclusions stand; but from this great and ingenious work of Machiavelli's almost no developments have followed. The science of statecraft and of the influence of the sentiments upon human behavior is little different to-day from what it was in in the 16th century."

"... More explicitly than ever before the modern principles of physical science seem to compel us to recognized absolute mechanical necessity in all things. We may not understand organic regulations, or organic evolution, or the origin of life; in fact we are still unable with the necessary clearness to represent to ourselves the structure of a cell; yet theses are at least phenomena. As phenomena they are subject to the two laws of thermodynamics. For the laws of conservation and degradation of energy have long since supplanted Leibniz's rudimentary idea of the conservation of ', as the ground of our conception of necessary causation."

"... a very special type of falsehood common in explanations of physics for nonexperts ... a physics fib or, more simply, a phib. Phibs are often found in articles and books about the universe. They arise when well-intentioned physicists, faced with a nonexpert's question, are trying to concoct a short, memorable tale to serve as a compromise between giving no answer at all and giving a correct but incomprehensible one."

"What physics explains the enormous disparity between the gravitational scale and the typical mass scale of the elementary particles?"

"... Are we thinking about the wrong? Are we thinking about quantum field theory wrong? Are there particles at the Large Hadron Collider that are hiding from us? ... It's true that the Large Hadron Collider has vast data sets. And when you have a gigantic amount of data, if you don't ask exactly the right question, you might not see what's actually in there. So, we have to be very thoughtful about all the different questions that we should ask of this data."

"... there's an argument that the Standard Model plus gravity is all there is, and the has nothing to do with nature. And that argument is that the properties of the world, the properties of particle physics in particular, are determined partly ... largely? ... by a ."

"One very interesting idea is that when we get to the smallest size of all, we don't find a particle, but rather an ultra-tiny vibrating string."

"Two well-regarded measurements for the expansion rate of the universe disagree, leaving cosmologists very puzzled. It may be that something large has been overlooked in our theory of the . This discrepancy is called the and it has led to a very interesting conversation within the cosmology community."

"The history of can be considered nothing less than a huge triumph for science. Over the course of a little more than a century of effort, our understanding of the world of atomic and subatomic physics went from a vague understanding of atoms, to one that is much more detailed. Early in this hundred-year-long period, we learned about electrons (1897), then how they circle a dense nucleus (1911), followed by the discovery of the s (1917) and s (1932) that form the nucleus. From the 1930s onward, researchers used both cosmic rays and particle accelerators to discover antimatter (1932), and particles that don’t exist in atoms (e.g., the [1936] and [1956], as well as a huge number of others)."

"One of the first scientific concepts taught to children is the idea that matter can be a solid, liquid, or gas. Indeed, if you were to ask most American adults how many there are, the most likely answer you would get is three. It would not be unreasonable to consider this to be common knowledge. Yet the scientifically savvy know of far more phases of matter than the familiar three. is another, as is . And there are many more that exist at extreme temperatures or pressures. Change the conditions under which matter finds itself, and it will act in unexpected ways."

"I'm not personally a fan of the idea of SUSY and I never have been. But it's possible and we should continue to look for it. For one thing, if supersymmetry is false, then superstring theory is false. I don't believe in superstring theory either, but I like it. I kind of hope it's right. But hope isn't good enough in science."

"Working with Eli Stein is amazing. There are good teachers and there are great teachers — and then there is Eli. He was simply the best teacher, I believe, of advanced math, I believe, in the whole world, by far. ... he conveyed a spirit of optimism. ... He has a wonderful style of explaining math — in which almost all of the effort of explanation goes into finding the right point of view and getting the essence of the problem."

"What I like about mathematics is the interplay with other people. And that generates extra energy — because it really helps you think."

"The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs."

"That geometric considerations enter in a decisive way in many questions of harmonic analysis is by now a well-known fact. In explicit form such ideas arose first in the estimation of the of surface-carried measure; they have since played a key role in averages over lower-dimensional varieties, restriction theorems, in connection with the study of s and Fourier integral operators, and in application to linear and non-linear s."

"He is the most omniverous of scientists and scholars. He has become an excellent dye chemist, a good mammalogist, he knows the sedges, mushrooms and the birds of New England. He knows neuroanatomy and neurophysiology from their original sources in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and German for he learns any language he needs as soon as he needs it. Things like electrical circuit theory and the practical soldering in of power, lighting, and radio circuits he does himself. In my long life, I have never seen a man so erudite or so really practical."

"(edited by Noga Alon, Jean Bourgain, Alain Connes, Misha Gromov, and Vital D. Milman; quote from p. 434)"

"He recognized that we learn in part by disrupting what we knew in the past, and that can be dislodging to our stability and sense of what we understand, but that’s how we grow."

"He read incessantly and omnivorously, but stayed away from everyone. He read like someone waiting to die but willing to be distracted during the last hours."

"Pitts was married to abstract thought... We never knew anything about his family or his feelings about us. He died mysterious, sad and remote, and not once did I find out, or even want to find out more about how he felt or what he hoped. To be interested in him as a person was to lose him as a friend. One was to be interested only in what he knew."

"[Pitts] was in no uncertain terms the genius of our group. He was absolutely incomparable in the scholarship of chemistry, physics, of everything you could talk about history, botany, etc. When you asked him a question, you would get back a whole textbook … To him, the world was connected in a very complex and wonderful fashion."

"Urban education in the nineteenth century did more to industrialize humanity than to humanize industry."

"It was apparent to him after we had done the frog’s eye that even if logic played a part, it didn’t play the important or central part that one would have expected. It disappointed him. He would never admit it, but it seemed to add to his despair at the loss of Wiener’s friendship."

"The movie Forrest Gump made the point that the greatest, most heroic Americans are people of extraordinary character who flicker briefly into public consciousness and are quickly forgotten... while his contemporaries Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John von Neumann entered the pantheon of fame, Pitts remains a shadowy folk hero. Stories about Pitts have circulated among the cognescenti for years, but almost nothing has been written about him."

"“What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain”... devastated Pitts because it showed that retinal ganglion cells were not simply acting as logical devices, thus appearing to shatter his dream that logic could be used to explain the nervous system."

"At about the time of the break with Wiener, and arguably because of it, Pitts destroyed his thesis and all of his papers, felt unable to become interested in anything new, and began a long, slow decline. He did not simply begin to drink—as befitting a man of his talents, he synthesized novel analogues of barbituates and opiates in the laboratory and experimented on himself by ingesting long-chain alcohols."