"Let me end with... man's ageless fantasy, to fly to the moon. ...Plutarch and Lucian, Ariosto and Ben Jonson wrote about it, before the days of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and science fiction. The seventeenth century was heady with... fables about voyages to the moon. Kepler wrote one full of deep scientific ideas... wrote... '... wrote... The Discovery of a New World. They did not draw a line between science and fancy... they all tried to guess where... earth's gravity would stop. Only Kepler understood that gravity has no boundary, and put a law to it—... the wrong law. All this was a few years before Isaac Newton was born, and it was all in his head that day in 1666, when he... came to conceive... that the moon is like a ball... thrown so hard that it falls exactly as fast as the horizon... he went on to calculate how long... the distant moon would take to round the earth... [T]he imagination that day chimed with nature, and made a harmony."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United KingdomMathematicians from PolandHistorians of scienceMathematicians from the United KingdomBiologists from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jacob_Bronowski
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Jacob Bronowski
Jacob Bronowski (January 18, 1908 – August 22, 1974) was a British mathematician, biologist, and science historian of Polish origin. He is remembered as the writer and presenter of the 1973 BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man.
111 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Jacob Bronowski →
Related Quotes
"Science is not a special sense. It is as wide as the literal meaning of its name: knowledge."
"We cannot change our character, we can only enlarge it. If we are wise, then we go on learning all through life, and …"
"These are the moments when the powerful mind or the forceful character feels the ferment of the times, when his thoug…"
"The air in a man's lungs contains 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breat…"
"I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two lang…"
"The most modest research worker at his bench, pushing a probe into a neuron to measure the electric response when a l…"
"The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike…"
"It has been one of the most destructive modern prejudices that art and science are different and somehow incompatible…"
"The sneer that science is only critical came from others. It was made by the timid and laboured artists of the nineti…"
"Unhappily, common sense has no recorded history."