Science Authors

"If a scientist saw a cataclysm coming, say a meteor on collision course for earth in 2050, we wouldn’t be saying, “Hallelujah, physics is true, bring it on! Our faith in mathematics is strengthened!” We’d be trying to stop it. Which makes the Christian reaction puzzling. If I actually believed Jesus was coming to end the world, I’d be preparing by stocking up on timber and nails. They were pretty effective last time."

"Religion is a barbarous obsidian knife poised over our chests — put it in a cabinet and admire it as a work of art, but don't ever wield the damned thing ever again."

"I have been told that my position won't win the creationist court cases. Do you think I care? I didn't become a scientist because I want to impress lawyers. The word for people who are neutral about truth is "liars"."

"Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind."

"People who say this cracker is literally and physically the body of their god and that I'm doing this great act of heresy and sacrilege and horror -- even though I didn't actually do anything to it -- is disturbing. It's like discovering there are witch doctors lurking in your community and they've been doing weird practices."

"Look at the bible as a pastiche, a collection of mutually and often internally inconsistent fragments slapped together for crude reasons of politics and art and priestly self-promotion and sometimes beauty and a lot of chest-thumping tribalism, and through that lens, it makes a lot of sense. It does tell us something important…about us, not some fantastic mythological being. It tells us that we are fractious, arrogant, scrappy people who sometimes accomplish great things and more often cause grief and pain to one another. We want to be special in a universe that is uncaring and cold, and in which the nature of our existence is a transient flicker, so we invent these strange stories of grand beginnings, like every orphan dreaming that they are the children of kings who will one day ride up on a white horse and take them away to a beautiful palace and a rich and healthy family that will love them forever. We are not princes of the earth, we are the descendants of worms, and any nobility must be earned."

"...what I want to happen to religion in the future is this: I want it to be like bowling. It's a hobby, something some people will enjoy, that has some virtues to it, that will have its own institutions and its traditions and its own television programming, and that families will enjoy together. It's not something I want to ban or that should affect hiring and firing decisions, or that interferes with public policy. It will be perfectly harmless as long as we don't elect our politicians on the basis of their bowling score, or go to war with people who play nine-pin instead of ten-pin, or use folklore about backspin to make decrees about how biology works."

"This does not mean that scientists can't be religious. We can encompass irrational beliefs without regret and without obligation—I can, actually, look at my kids in a different way than I would an experimental subject under my microscope. I also do not pretend that I view my children rationally and objectively, untainted by emotion or history, and I'm not ashamed of that at all. So, a scientist should have no problem demanding one standard of logic and evidence in the lab, and dropping that demand when they go to church on Sunday."

"… did you know that 60% of measurements and statistics start with a 1, 2 or 3? Distance to the sun, 150,000,000km, starts with a 1. Height of Everest, 29,000ft, starts with a 2. Density of barium, 3.59g/cm3, starts with a 3. You might think that I am (2008 Italian cherry production, 134,407 tonnes, starts with a 1), but if you scan the financial pages of this newspaper then you will see that most numbers do indeed start with a 1, 2 or 3. This eccentricity of the digits is dubbed , because it was made famous by , a physicist at the in New York. He, like the rest of us, had both previously assumed that the starting digit of numbers would be evenly spread among all the numbers from 1 to 9, so he was shocked by his own discovery."

"What seems certain is that Pythagoras developed the idea of mathematical logic... He realized that numbers exist independently of the tangible world and therefore their study was untainted by inaccuracies of perception. This meant he could discover truths which were independent of opinion of prejudice and which were more absolute then any previous knowledge."

"Romantics might like to think of themselves as being composed of stardust. Cynics might prefer to think of themselves as nuclear waste."

"We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe; that's a good estimate with well-defined error bars and with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you."

"There are two other words I do not understand — awareness and intelligence. Well, why am I talking about things when I do not know what they really mean? It is probably because I am a mathematician and mathematicians do not mind so much about that sort of thing. They do not need precise definitions of the things they are talking about, provided they can say something about the connections between them."

"[I]n the June, 1960 issue of... the ', there appeared a paper by... Roger Penrose with the esoteric title "A Approach to General Relativity." Although the paper was highly mathematical, it outlined a very elegant and streamlined technique for solving certain problems in general relativity. ...this new method made some computations almost easy."

"Although I'm regarded as a dangerous radical by particle physicists for proposing that there may be loss of quantum coherence, I'm definitely a conservative compared to Roger. I take the positivist viewpoint that a is just a and that it is meaningless to ask whether it corresponds to reality. All that one can ask is that its predictions should be in agreement with observation. I think Roger is a Platonist at heart but he must answer for himself."

"Reading about the lives of geniuses can be a powerful antidote against any envy we might feel for not being among their number. Almost invariably they turn out not only to have had the same flaws, trials and heartbreaks as the rest of us but to be deeply weird to boot. The Nobel Prize-winning British physicist Roger Penrose certainly fits the template."

"Whereas originally the hopes for string theory, and its descendants, were that some kind of uniqueness would be arrived at, whereby the theory would supply mathematical explanations for the measured numbers of experimental physics, the string theorists were driven to find refuge in the strong anthropic argument in an attempt to narrow down an absolutely vast number of alternatives. In my own view, this a very sad and unhelpful place for a theory to find itself."

"What the anthropic principle depends upon is the idea that whatever is the nature of the universe, or universe portion that we see about us, being subject to whatever dynamical laws govern its actions, this must be strongly favourable to our very existence."

"One is left with the uneasy feeling that even if supersymmetry is actually false, as a feature of nature, and that accordingly no supersymmetry partners are ever found by the LHC or by any later more powerful accelerator, then the conclusion that some supersymmetry proponents might come to would not be that supersymmetry is false for the actual particles of nature, but merely that the level of supersymmetry breaking must be greater even that the level reached at that moment, and that a new even more powerful machine would be required to observe it!"

"The idea of having an ambient space-time of some specific dimension seems to play less of a role of string theory than in conventional physics, and certainly less than the kind of role that I would myself feel comfortable with. It is particularly difficult to assess the functional freedom that is involved in a physical theory unless one has a clear idea of its actual space-time dimensionality."

"General relativity is certainly a very beautiful theory, but how does one judge the elegance of physical theories generally?"

"It's a very plausible thing now that the entropy should increase all the time... [T]hese volumes... are... enormously different in scale... I can't convey to you in the picture the absolute stupendous difference in the sizes of these volumes. So if you happen to find yourself in one of them, and you wiggle around, the next one you find yourself in will be overwhelmingly likely to be much much larger, and the entropy therefor goes up."

"[S]ome of these regions may be... indistinguishable, for example the air in the room. We might have molecules in some other places. You might like to say we don't care where the individual molecules are. We just care about overall parameters, and so we lump together the systems which look very much the same. ...[L]et's say with regard to macroscopic parameters we lump them together, and so we have these things called course graining cells in the phase space... [Y]ou then say, well let's measure the volume of these regions... V... and the logarithm of that volume is the entropy. This is a marvelous formula due to Boltzmann. This [k] is Boltzmann's constant, the only thing in the formula that wasn't due to Boltzmann... This was named afterwards. I don't think he was particularly interested in constants..."

"[T]he randomness is measured... by... entropy, and it's telling us that this entropy is increasing with time. ...[I]t can be given a clearer definition ...the idea due to Boltzmann ...we imagine... a ... a space... of a very large number of dimensions, where each point in the space represents a state of the system at one moment. In fact it contains both the positions of all the particles and the momenta (or velocities) of all the particles. So if you know where the point is in this large dimensional space at any moment that describes a particular thing... then the dynamics will tell you where that point moves. So that there will be a unique path through that point, wiggling around somewhere through this phase space."

"The 2nd law of thermodynamics... tells you that randomness increases with time. It's a sort of depressing law... It depends on how you look at it, really..."

"In its simplest form, the 2nd law of thermodynamics... You imagine... a glass of wine sitting on a table... it falls off and wine splashes out onto the carpet...[etc.] If you just think of this as a Newtonian situation, as the system evolves the thing proceeds according to Newtonian laws, but Newtonian laws are reversible in time... What's not so agreeable [about the reverse] is that it violates the 2nd law..."

"If you want fantasy... first of all, you have to believe in string theory... these extra dimensions and the D brains... and these D brains are supposed to have collided in the period before the Big Bang and there they come together and produced our Big Bang... and that expands... [T]he trouble... is a strong element of fantasy. We really haven't the remotest idea... what kind of physics is supposed to go on here, but there's a more serious problem... [T]his... has different forms, one... is... in terms of the 2nd law of thermodynamics... and it's related to a geometrical issue... [T]hese pictures are hard to draw.... because the singularity in the black hole doesn't really fit on the Big Bang singularity... It's a stretch of geometrical imagination... [I]t doesn't make them wrong, because... you really do need some fantasy, and this is an example of this possible kind of fantasy that you might need, but I want to give you a different kind which... has some greater plausibility..."

"Somewhat more exotic is the idea... by Lee Smolin in his book... [T]hese pictures are a little hard to draw... The difficulty seems... a... drawback. It may mean... something... troublesome about the geometry. ...[W]e have black holes forming ...You must imagine each one of these forming ...take this funnel ...that's supposed to represent the universe ...which expands from the Big Bang and ...its expansion accelerates because of ... or, if you're more boring like me, the cosmological constant ...and according to Smolin, all these black holes, which form at various places, could be the origins of new universes, and you see them sprouting off at various places... [Y]ou can adopt the Wheeler idea of maybe having the constants of nature changing to reach one of these phases."

"[T]here's a version of this a version of this idea which John Wheeler has promoted, which is that in each of these cycles, since nobody really knows what goes on at the crunch, bang stage... you can... invent any physics you like, and one idea... is to suggest that the... fundamental constants of nature might get changed every time you go through one of these cycles... [T]his might help to explain... puzzles that... the constants have to be just such and such in order that life should exist...[etc.] I always have trouble with many of these arguments. It's not at all clear whether you need them or not. They might be true but we don't know. It may be that these numbers are fixed and they might change through each cycle...[etc.] but our current physics... doesn't allow this kind of thing. These are singular states according to classical theory. Maybe if we had quantum gravity... one could imagine such a scheme..."

"I'm not sure what Friedmann actually said, but he... produced a model in which the universe... started in a Big Bang... expanded to a maximum size... then would shrink down to a crunch, and then start all over again. ...There would be several Big Bangs and before each one, would be a collapsing phase of the universe..."

"[C]razy ideas are the sort of thing one needs when talking about the Big Bang. ...All the ideas I'm going to show you... are put forward by very... respectable cosmologists. It doesn't make the ideas any less crazy..."

"It is quite likely that the 21st century will reveal even more wonderful insights than those that we have been blessed with in the 20th. But for this to happen, we shall need powerful new ideas, which will take us in directions significantly different from those currently being pursued. Perhaps what we mainly need is some subtle change in perspective—something that we all have missed...."

"...the entire physical world is depicted as being governed according to mathematical laws. We shall be seeing in later chapters that there is powerful (but incomplete) evidence in support of this contention. On this view, everything in the physical universe is indeed governed in completely precise detail by mathematical principles — perhaps by equations, such as those we shall be learning about in chapters to follow, or perhaps by some future mathematical notions fundamentally different from those which we would today label by the term ‘equations’. If this is right, then even our own physical actions would be entirely subject to such ultimate mathematical control, where ‘control’ might still allow for some random behaviour governed by strict probabilistic principles."

"Do not seek for reasons in the specific patterns of stars, or of other scattered arrangements of objects; look, instead, for a deeper universal order in the way that things behave."

"Beneath all this technicality is the feeling that it is indeed "obvious" that the conscious mind cannot work like a computer, even though much of what is involved in mental activity might do so. This is the kind of obviousness that a child can see—though the child may, later in life, become browbeaten into believing that the obvious problems are "non-problems", to be argued into nonexistence by careful reasoning and clever choices of definition. Children sometimes see things clearly that are obscured in later life. We often forget the wonder that we felt as children when the cares of the "real world" have begun to settle on our shoulders. Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that may embarrass us, as adults, to ask. What happens to each of our streams of consciousness after we die; where was it before we were born; might we become, or have been, someone else; why do we perceive at all; why are we here; why is there a universe here at all in which we can actually be? These are puzzles that tend to come with the awakenings of awareness in any one of us—and, no doubt, with the awakening of self-awareness, within whichever creature or other entity it first came."

"It is hard to see how one could begin to develop a quantum-theoretical description of brain action when one might well have to regard the brain as "observing itself" all the time!"

"It is hard for me to believe, as some have tried to maintain, that such SUPERB theories could have arisen merely by some random natural selection of ideas leaving only the good ones as survivors. The good ones are simply much too good to be the survivors of ideas that have arisen in that random way. There must, indeed, be some deep underlying reason for the accord between mathematics and physics, i.e. between Plato's world and the physical world."

"According to this view, the mind is always capable of this direct contact. But only a little may come through at a time. Mathematical discovery consists of broadening the area of contact. Because of the fact that mathematical truths are necessary truths, no actual 'information', in the technical sense, passes to the discoverer. All the information was there all the time. It was just a matter of putting things together and 'seeing' the answer! This is very much in accordance with Plato's own idea that (say mathematical) discovery is just a form of remembering! Indeed, I have often been struck by the similarity between just not being able to remember someone's name, and just not being able to find the right mathematical concept. In each case, the sought-for concept is in a sense already present in the mind, though this is a less usual form of words in the case of an undiscovered mathematical idea."

"How is it that mathematical ideas can be communicated in this way? I imagine that whenever the mind perceives a mathematical idea, it makes contact with Plato's world of mathematical concepts. ... When one 'sees' a mathematical truth, one's consciousness breaks through into this world of ideas, and makes direct contact with it ('accessible via the intellect'). I have described this 'seeing' in relation to Gödel's theorem, but it is the essence of mathematical understanding. When mathematicians communicate, this is made possible by each one having a direct route to truth, the consciousness of each being in a position to perceive mathematical truths directly, through this process of 'seeing'. (Indeed, often this act of perception is accompanied by words like 'Oh, I see'!) Since each can make contact with Plato's world directly, they can more readily communicate with each other than one might have expected. The mental images that each one has, when making this Platonic contact, might be rather different in each case, but communication is possible because each is directly in contact with the same externally existing Platonic world!"

"What right do we have to claim, as some might, that human beings are the only inhabitants of our planet blessed with an actual ability to be "aware"? … The impression of a "conscious presence" is indeed very strong with me when I look at a dog or a cat or, especially, when an ape or monkey at the zoo looks at me. I do not ask that they are "self-aware" in any strong sense (though I would guess that an element of self-awareness can be present). All I ask is that they sometimes simply feel!"

"It seems to me that we must make a distinction between what is "objective" and what is "measurable" in discussing the question of physical reality, according to quantum mechanics. The state-vector of a system is, indeed, not measurable, in the sense that one cannot ascertain, by experiments performed on the system, precisely (up to proportionality) what the state is; but the state-vector does seem to be (again up to proportionality) a completely objective property of the system, being completely characterized by the results it must give to experiments that one might perform."

"Gödel's theorem shows that this point of view is not really a tenable one in a fundamental philosophy of mathematics. The notion of mathematical truth goes beyond the whole concept of formalism. There is something absolute and 'God-given' about mathematical truth. This is what , as discussed at the end of the last chapter, is about. Any particular formal system has a provisional and 'man-made' quality about it. Such systems indeed have very valuable roles to play in mathematical discussions, but they can supply only a partial (or approximate) guide to truth. Real mathematical truth goes beyond mere man-made constructions."

"I have been arguing that such 'God-given' mathematical ideas should have some kind of timeless existence, independent of our earthly selves."

"Moreover, the complete details of the complication of the structure of Mandelbrot's set cannot really be fully comprehended by anyone of us, nor can it be fully revealed by any computer. It would seem that this structure is not just part of our minds, but it has a reality of its own. ... The computer is being used in essentially the same way that the experimental physicist uses a piece of experimental apparatus to explore the structure of the physical world. The Mandelbrot set is not an invention of the human mind: it was a discovery. Like Mount Everest, the Mandelbrot set is just there!"

"Does life in some way make use of the potentiality for vast quantum superpositions, as would be required for serious quantum computation? How important are the quantum aspects of DNA molecules? Are cellular microtubules performing some essential quantum roles? Are the subtleties of quantum field theory important to biology? Shall we gain needed insights from the study of quantum toy models? Do we really need to move forward to radical new theories of physical reality, as I myself believe, before the more subtle issues of biology — most importantly conscious mentality — can be understood in physical terms? How relevant, indeed, is our present lack of understanding of physics at the quantum/classical boundary? Or is consciousness really “no big deal,” as has sometimes been expressed? It would be too optimistic to expect to find definitive answers to all these questions, at our present state of knowledge, but there is much scope for healthy debate..."

"Understanding is, after all, what science is all about — and science is a great deal more than mindless computation."

"Some years ago, I wrote a book called The Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations. So we are not exactly computers. There's something else going on and the question of what this something else was would depend on some detailed physics and so I needed chapters in that book, which describes the physics as it is understood today. Well anyway, this book was written and various people commented to me and they said perhaps I could use this book for a course Physics for Poets or whatever it is if it didn't have all that contentious stuff about the mind in that. So I thought, well, that doesn't sound too hard, all I'll do is get out the scissor out and snip out all the bits, which have something to do with the mind. The trouble is that if I did that — and I actually didn't do it — the whole book fell to pieces really because the whole driving force behind the book was this quest to find out what could it be that constitutes consciousness in the physical world as we know it or as we hope to know it in future"

"Human sexuality is . . . a long way from the depositing of seminal fluid, like squirting jam in a donut."

"So quiet and subtle is the beauty of December that escapes the notice of many people their whole lives through.. Colour gives way to form. every branch distinct, in a delicate tracery against the sky.. new vistas obscured all Summer by leafage, now open up."

"Faithfully, shrewdly, she has set down her records, and it is hard to say which is the more remarkable—the exactness and detail of the outward scene or the rare objectivity."