Jews From The United States

"As much as I loved the ideas, I excelled at experimental failure, I found new ways to make experiments not work. I would mess up PCRs, add the wrong buffers, northerns, westerns, southerns. I would make them not work in quite ingenious ways, and I realized slowly, over the course of those years, that the secret to being a great scientist is to love the manual labor of it."

"We feel like more than just the sum of a trillion neurons. We feel like more than just three pounds of wet flesh, and so simply describing the brain in terms of its neurotransmitters and neurons and all these chemicals and exciting ingredients doesn't fully grapple with what it feels like to be human, the first person subjective experience of being a conscious being. When you think about the really grand epic questions of neuroscience … what is consciousness? How can we form a scientific explanation for consciousness, for human experience? That is the holy grail."

"After all, we're a brain embedded in this larger set of structures. You can call it culture, call it society, call it your family, call it your friend, call it whatever it is. It's the stuff that makes people sign onto their Facebook a thousand times a day. It's the reason Twitter exists. We have got all these systems now that really make us fully aware of just how important social interactions are to what it is to be human. The question is, how can we study that? Because that, in essence, is a huge part of what's actually driving these enzymatic pathways in your brain. What's triggering these synaptic transmissions and these squirts of neurotransmitter back and forth is thoughts of other people, what other people say to us, interacting with the world at large."

"Neuroscience has contributed so much in just a few decades to how we think about human nature and how we know ourselves."

"I have never experienced anything quite like Adam Goldstein. He made me feel warm and whole. He smelled soft. Adam was a remarkable human being, and so many have been blessed by his presence. We talked of marriage and excitement of having children together. He would whisper in my ear sometimes before we went to sleep, 'Goodnight, my sweet angel.' Most mornings when I woke up, he'd make me toast and juice and say, 'Good morning, soul mate.' I will cherish the memories forever. Even though our time together was short, I would change nothing. The love I continue to feel for him and the love that we shared together will live with me and those who witnessed us together forever. I will never be the same without him. A part of me has passed away with him. Even the warmest of days will never compare to the warmth I felt when I touched him. He was my soul mate, and now he is my soul. He was my amazing grace."

"This week has been one of the hardest I've ever lived. My close friend, Adam had passed away. Known for his impeccable DJing. He was much more than that to me and many, many other people. He helped and touched everyone who met him. Treating you as if he had known you forever. He was always sharing such joy among others… and if you were lucky enough to hear the sound of his laughter, you got to hear something very, very, special. It's incredibly hard to think of what to say about you Adam, as tears are running down my face. All I can say is I love you Adam and I miss you and am so glad you were someone in my sister’s, and my life."

"We were live on-air and I had to fill for time, so I just rolled up on him — I didn't know him. And I remember thinking how unfazed he was that we'd just shoved a camera in his face, because he was kind, he was charismatic, he was funny. He was a good guy and I remember that meeting very well. We spoke after that, and we would see each other out a lot and I would go and see him play. He was always cool, like effortlessly cool."

"I just can’t wrap my head around it – I don’t want to believe it’s real – and nothing I can say will serve his memory any justice right now. I’m just f-ng sad sad."

"In complete shock. I really want to use words right now but I can’t get em. Fuck. We’re supposed to lose our friends to time, at an age when we’re ready to agree to the terms of having lived a long life. Not now."

"I am deeply saddened by the news of the passing of DJ AM. He was our resident DJ at Rain Nightclub at the Palms Casino Resort. We considered him a friend and a great artist. He will truly be missed."

"I saw DJ AM play in a mansion in Miami, and he amazed me with his skills and the music he picked to make the crowd move. He made sure everyone — I mean everyone — had a good time!"

"Iam kida the greatest Dj of all time."

"New York, New York. Big city of dreams, but everything in New York ain't always what it seems. Last Twitter posting by DJ AM (August 25, 2009)."

"What I do with the majority of my free time is help people get off drugs. It’s nice to just sit and listen to them talk about what’s going on in their life and not think about what’s going on with me for a while. Success is not money, it’s happiness. Interview with DJ AM"

"The fact that I can be in an airport and someone says, "there's DJ AM" means something, right? I just don't consider myself a celebrity, I've never viewed myself that way. Five Minutes with DJ AM (August 2008)."

"I've prayed every night for the past 10 years. There's a lot more to thank God for now. My philosophy is 'live life to the fullest,' [and] I was saved for a reason. Maybe I'm going to help someone else. I don't question it. All I know is, I'm thankful I'm still here."

"There’s no reason why I should have lived or why I lived and they didn’t. And it’s something I struggle with every day."

"I have really bad days and I have really OK days. It's strange. I'm blessed. I'm alive. I'm here."

"I hadn't heard his remixes and didn't know how amazing a drummer Travis is. But we got together, I threw on James Brown's 'Funky Drummer,' one of the most sampled beats in hip-hop, and 'I Know You Got Soul' by Bobby Byrd. His face would just open up; he would match the beat perfectly. I thought, 'Damn, this is fun.' It's like a skeleton you get to put the clothes on. And once the clothes are on, you yank out the spine."

"The story of the brain's separation from the body begin with Rene Descartes. The most influential philosopher of the seventeenth century, Descartes divided being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science, and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was "clock-like," just a machine that bleeds. With this schism, Descartes condemned the body to a life of subservience, a power plant for the brain's light bulbs."

"I just think it’s the world we live in and there is no real metric to measure us by because CNN is the only one that is still doing journalism."

"Thomas Kuhn was undoubtedly the strongest influence on the philosophy of science in the last third of the twentieth century. Yet today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is unclear what his legacy really is. In the philosophy of science there is no characteristically Kuhnian school. This could be because we are all Kuhnians now. But it might also be because Kuhn's thought, although revolutionary in its time, has since been superseded. In a sense both may be true."

"I think of the time that Vera and I were spending in cold telescope domes, the wind blowing, coyotes howling off on the mesa, we would have been happy to have a warm room to sit in, whether it was in Flagstaff or a lab back home."

"To my mind, what Vera discovered is both more specific and more profound than the dark matter paradigm it helped to create. What she discovered observationally is that rotation curves are very nearly flat, and continue to be so to indefinitely large radius. Over and over again, for every galaxy in the sky. It is a law of nature for galaxies, akin to Kepler’s laws for planets. Dark matter is an inference, a subsidiary result. It is just one possible interpretation, a subset of amazing and seemingly unlikely possibilities opened up by her discovery."

"Rubin, in collaboration with Kent Ford, became the key figure in extending rotation curves based on optical-wavelength studies to large galactic radii, where their prevalent flatness dovetailed neatly with results from radio-wavelength observations. Rubin’s life story is one of perseverance in the face of occupational and societal obstacles. ... Rubin’s story illustrates the resistance of the scientific community to altering an established paradigm—that light is the essential gauge of mass in the universe."

"Each one of you can change the world, for you are made of star stuff, and you are connected to the universe."

"I live and work with three basic assumptions, 1) There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that cannot be solved by a woman. 2) Worldwide, half of all brains are in women. 3) We all need permission to do science, but, for reasons that are deeply ingrained in history, this permission is more often given to men than to women."

"I'm not a theologian, and I must say honestly that Vatican astronomers' views [on astronomy] are entirely in accord with ours. I'm not aware of any Church positions that contradict modern science. In my own life, my science and my religion are separate. I'm Jewish, and so religion to me is a kind of moral code and a kind of history. I try to do my science in a moral way, and, I believe that, ideally, science should be looked upon as something that helps us understand our role in the universe."

"How stars move tell us that most matter in the universe is dark. When we see stars in the sky, we're only seeing five or 10 percent of the matter that there is in the universe."

"It is well known that I am available twenty-four hours a day to women astronomers."

"Science progresses best when observations force us to alter our preconceptions."

"There is one alternative to dark matter, and that is the assumption that Newton's laws don't hold over distances as great as galaxies. But we know that Newton's laws hold over a very large domain. And virtually one hundred percent of the physics and astronomy community believes that there is matter in the universe that does not radiate."

"We have peered into a new world and have seen that it is more mysterious and more complex than we had imagined. Still more mysteries of the universe remain hidden. Their discovery awaits the adventurous scientists of the future. I like it this way."

"Science is competitive, aggressive, demanding. It is also imaginative, inspiring, uplifting."

"Thomas Kuhn believed that a science has to become a "paradigm", with a shared technical language that excludes outsiders, before it can get any real work done. In the formative stages of a science, according to Kuhn, the adherents go to great pains to make their work comprehensible to outside academics. But (according to Kuhn) a science can only make real progress as a technical discipline once it abandons the requirement of outside accessibility, and scientists working in the paradigm assume familiarity with large cores of technical material in their communications. This sounds cynical, relative to what is usually said about public understanding of science, but I can definitely see a core of truth here."

"The Road since Structure is a collection of essays by Kuhn along with a lengthy interview with him conducted in 1995 by Aristide Baltas, Kostas Gavroglu, and Vassiliki Kindi. The essays form part of Kuhn’s thirty-year effort to clarify the contrast between paradigm shifts and normal science, with a focus on philosophical issues. For example, Kuhn alarmed many scientists with his claim that, while science makes progress, this progress is not towards truth but rather involves never-ending change through paradigm shifts. But the scientists have not realized that Kuhn’s claim is based on a philosopher’s definition of “truth,” which is not achieved (if ever) until there is exact knowledge of the ultimate constituents of matter on the quantum-gravity scale. Scientists use a less demanding definition for the word “truth,” in which measured parameters can be subject to nonzero error bars."

"Kuhn rejected our old metaphysics—consciousness consists of an inner representation of an outer reality—as incoherent, impossible, and fundamentally inhuman. That's why he begins SSR by invoking history not as a discipline that can be applied to science, but as a necessary part of scientific understanding. … The problems that dominated Kuhn's life after his great moment of insight arose not because Kuhn wasn't brilliant enough. Rather, they arose and persist because while we increasingly understand that the old metaphysical paradigm has failed, for several generations now we have not found our new paradigm."

"Now, that really was a paradigm shift. For Kuhn it seems to have been the paradigm of paradigm shifts, which set a pattern into which he tried to shoehorn every other scientific revolution. It really does fit Kuhn's description of paradigm shifts: it is extraordinarily difficult for a modern scientist to get into the frame of mind of Aristotelian physics, and Kuhn's statement that all previous views of reality have proved false, though not true of Newtonian mechanics or Maxwellian electrodynamics, certainly does apply to Aristotelian physics. Revolutions in science seem to fit Kuhn's description only to the extent that they mark a shift in understanding some aspect of nature from pre-science to modern science. The birth of Newtonian physics was a mega-paradigm shift, but nothing that has happened in our understanding of motion since then—not the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian mechanics, or from classical to quantum physics—fits Kuhn's description of a paradigm shift."

"By the way, in this respect my friend Thomas Kuhn has a lot to answer for. He distances himself from the postmoderns and the social constructivists, but he is endlessly quoted by them. He distances himself in saying that there is a place for evidence and reason in the scientific process—good to hear—but he attacks the idea that we are moving toward objective truth. As far as I can tell from one of his recent articles, his reason for rejecting the idea that science moves toward objective truth is that he and other philosophers have not succeeded in defining truth—and he cannot say what truth would be. This seems a bit like saying that because farmers cannot define cows or the difference between cows and, say, buffaloes, one should doubt the objective existence of cows. I would argue that it’s not the job of farmers to define cows; that’s the job of zoologists. Likewise, it’s not the job of physicists or other scientists to define truth; that’s the job of philosophers. If they haven’t done that job, too bad for them. But just as the farmer generally knows cows when he sees them, we scientists usually know truth when we see it."

"The changes in the way we judge our theories have bothered philosophers and historians of science. Thomas Kuhn’s early book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, emphasized this process of change in our scientific standards. I think Kuhn went overboard in concluding that there was a complete incommensurability between present and past standards, but it is correct that there is a qualitative change in the kind of scientific theory we want to develop that has taken place at various times in the history of science. But Kuhn then proceeded to the fallacy—much clearer in what he has written recently—that in science we are not in fact moving toward objective truth. I call this a fallacy because it seems to me a simple non sequitur. I do not see why the fact that we are discovering not only the laws of nature in detail, but what kinds of laws are worth discovering, should mean that we are not making objective progress."

"In his celebrated book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn went a step further and argued that in scientific revolutions the standards (or “paradigms”) by which scientists judge theories change, so that the new theories simply cannot be judged by the prerevolutionary standards. There is much in Kuhn’s book that fits my own experience in science. But in the last chapter Kuhn tentatively attacked the view that science makes progress toward objective truths: “We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.” Kuhn’s book lately seems to have become read (or at least quoted) as a manifesto for a general attack on the presumed objectivity of science."

"[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions] was hugely influential, especially on the liberal arts, giving them ammunition to suggest that science was no better way of knowing the truth than any other way of investigating. It made a huge case of scientists gathering around one truth, and then there’s a tipping point and everyone moves away from that truth to gather around another truth. Hence the title of the book. And this left people with the sense that science is just whatever is in fashion. Kuhn used, as his best example of this, Copernicus. That’s half his book ... almost half of that book describes the Copernican Revolution as an example of the way science works. But that’s not how science works. It’s just not. It’s how things happened until 1600."

"Although Kuhn's emphasis on revolutionary change was an antidote to the simplistic models of the logical empiricists, a finer-grained theory of revolutionary change than Kuhn presented need not succumb to irrationalism. To develop such a theory, however, we need tools different from both the formal ones of the logical empiricists and the vague historical ones of Kuhn."

"I’m one of the few physicists I know who likes Thomas Kuhn. He was partly a historian of science, partly a sociologist. He got the basic idea right of what happens when the scientific paradigm shifts. A radical change of perspective suddenly occurs. Wholly new ideas, concepts, abstractions and pictures become relevant. Relativity was a big paradigm shift. Quantum mechanics was a big paradigm shift. So we keep on inventing new realisms. They never completely replace the old ideas, but they do largely replace them with concepts that work better, that describe nature better, that are often very unfamiliar, that make people question what is meant by “reality.” Then the next thing comes along and turns that on its head. And we are always surprised that the old ways of thinking, the wiring that we have or the mathematical wiring that we may have created, simply fail us."

"Not long after publication of my first article on the subject, I was given a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions written by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. This book deals with the process by which scientific paradigms are produced and replaced. I warmly endorse this book because I have lived through several of the stages described in the book."

"To put the mater simply, I think that Kuhn might have vastly overemphasized the role of scientific revolutions. I also don’t believe that an evolutionary view can be compatible with Kuhnian discontinuities."

"Finally, by the early 1960s, Thomas Kuhn’s picture of “normal science” portrayed scientific activity not as an open-minded philosophical quest but as puzzle-solving—the extension and application of existing paradigms. To the shock and indignation of some, Kuhn argued that being a scientist involved obedience to “dogma” and a narrowing of perception. Science remained, of course, the most reliable knowledge we had, but whatever moral authority might follow from regarding science as uniquely free of prejudice was—for those persuaded by Kuhn—no longer available."

"Whatever Kuhn’s intentions, I believe that his effect on general culture, though not on the practices of real scientists, has been unfortunate, because it has served to “demythologize” science, to “debunk” it, to prove that it is not what ordinary people have supposed it to be. Kuhn paved the way for the even more radical skeptical view of Paul Feyerabend, who argued that as far as giving us truths about the world, science is no better than witchcraft."

"Up until the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, the history, philosophy, and sociology of science maintained an internalist approach to scientific knowledge claims. Science was seen as somehow above any social, political, or cultural influences, and therefore, the examinations of scientific knowledge focused on areas such as 'discoveries,' 'famous men,' and 'the scientific revolution in the West.' When Kuhn opened the door to the possibility that external factors were involved in the development of scientific paradigms, science studies assumed a more critical tone."

"Kuhn’s (and Feyerabend’s) account of the historical development of science threatens inductivist and hypothetico-deductivist methodologies in a straightforward and dramatic way. When we look at what past scientists do, their work does not seem to fit the methods described by either inductivists or hypothetico-deductivists. Scientists engaged in normal science are pursuing neither confirmations nor refutations of their theory. They are engaged in an activity that Kuhn calls articulating the paradigm, which as we have seen involves many things other than theory testing. That is an important negative conclusion, and the method of arriving at it should appeal to the naturalist. The argument is essentially an empirical one. The history of science refutes (or at least shows the inadequacy of) the most popular methodologies of science. But Kuhn’s and Feyerabend’s description of scientific revolutions also presents two problems for the naturalist. First, since both claim that there is never a compelling reason to change from one paradigm to another, their accounts of science threaten to make scientific change look irrational. If that story is right, it should shake the naturalists’ conviction that science is to be admired as much as they think. Secondly, even if we could retell the story of scientific progress to remove some of the arbitrariness that Kuhn and Feyerabend claim exists; even if we could explain why scientists have changed paradigms and thereby methods from one period to the next, then we shall still have to confront another issue. If the methods of science have changed through history, that means there is no such thing as the scientific method, and so obviously no way to make use of the methods of science in philosophy."