Academics From The United Kingdom

"The thing you know in the abstract, but which you have to see, is the vastness of the place and how little relationship one side of it has to another. Mostly, the landscape is just unbelievably beautiful. You do a lot of looking and not that much thinking."

"I don’t have much time for the idea that art is some languorous thing on the sidelines, and that you have to wait 50 years before you address a subject…"

"The civilizations of the East are very old; their roots stretch back into the past to a time when Europe was still a cockpit of fighting savages."

"Thus, the doctrines of Hinduism were never reduced to a set of formal creeds and Hindu religion has always been willing to receive new experiences and to incorporate new knowledge."

"If it is, then the sooner they give up the pretence of playing with public affairs and return to private life the better. If they cannot make a job of the House of Commons, let them at least make something of their own houses. If they cannot learn to save men from the destruction which incurable male mischievousness bids fair to bring upon them, let women at least learn to feed them, before they destroy themselves."

"The thought of the Upanishads is bold and free, and their general conclusion is that mystical experience is the pathway to reality."

"The panopticon produces subjects with desires to improve their inner lives. In contrast the superpanopticon constitutes objects, individuals with dispersed identities, who may remain unaware of how those identities are construed by the computer. We are once again back with disappearing bodies."

"Comint represents the effort to gain access to, intercept and process every important modern form of communication, in every significant sphere, and in many countries."

"Geometers have studied the topology of closed surfaces and their higher- dimensional analogues (manifolds) for a long time. But a remarkable breakthrough came in the early 1980s when Simon Donaldson found some totally new and unexpected invariants of four-dimensional manifolds. These were based on the Yang–Mills equations of physics but it was not until later that Edward Witten again showed how to interpret Donaldson's invariants in terms of quantum field theory. Later still, using duality ideas from string theory, Witten and Seiberg made a significant improvement of Donaldson theory which led to solutions of old problems."

"David Lyon, Surveillance society: Monitoring everyday life, Open university press, 2001. ISBN 9780335205462"

"... the dialogue between mathematical physics, geometry, and algebraic topology. The interaction between these subjects has been such a dominant feature of research developments in the past few years that it seems scarcely necessary to recite a list of examples: in fact, on the mathematical side it is quite hard to think of active areas in geometry and topology which have not been noticeably influenced by insights from physics—where by "physics" we mean particularly quantum field theory—and on the other hand the geometrisation of fundamental physical concepts is a profound and pervasive development."

"How long can surveillance theory ignore the implications of this? It seems entirely appropriate to add to the surveillance impetuses of the nation state, capitalism and bureaucracy, the imperatives of an implicit cultural commitment to omniperception. [...] The driving desire to dragnet yet more detailed data is both as old and as ominous as the aspiration to be "as God"."

"But the term surveillance society does have connotations that at least hint at possible negative consequences, in ways that unambiguously optimistic talk of "information societies" and "knowledge-based economies" does not. My point is rather that such societies are in part constituted by a surveillance dimension."

"What a contrast with the lives of ordinary people at the start of twenty-first century! Today, everyday life is constantly monitored."

"What persists into postmodern conditions is an abiding infrastructural dependence on communication and information technologies. They are undoubtedly viewed in the popular and political imaginations as far more beneficial than baleful to humanity. That they will continue to expand their influence is beyond doubt, short of some global catastrophe."

"Surveillance today is a means of sorting and classifying populations and not just of invading personal space or violating the privacy of individuals. In postmodernizing contexts surveillance is an increasingly powerful means of reinforcing social divisions, as the superpanoptic sort relentlessly screens, monitors and classifies to determine eligibility and access, to include and to exclude."

"An experience has to be formed, no doubt, before it is communicated, but it takes the form it does largely because it may have to be communicated."

"The chief lesson to be learnt from it is the futility of all argumentation that precedes understanding. We cannot profitably attack any opinion until we have discovered what it expresses as well as what it states."

"It is very probable that the Hindenburg Line to which the defence of our traditions retired as a result of the onslaughts of the last century will be blown up in the near future. If this should happen a mental chaos such as man has never experienced may be expected. We shall then be thrown back, as Matthew Arnold foresaw, upon poetry. It is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos."

"A book is a machine to think with, but it need not, therefore, usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive."

"The main influence on all of the activity in electromagnetic theory during the later years of the nineteenth century came from Maxwell's famous treatise (Maxwell 1873). Poynting was a member of the group of young physicists led by Heaviside, Fitzgerald, Lodge and Hertz who developed Maxwell's electromagnetic theory in the years following his death in 1879. They transformed his 1873 presentation into the formalism recognizable today as Maxwell's equations. The detailed historical accounts by Hunt (1991) and Warwick (2003) describe Poynting's contributions to electromagnetism, mainly during the 1880s. His name is more familiar to students of electromagnetic theory than those of other important members of the group on account of the widespread use of his eponymous energy-conservation theorem and energy-flow vector."

"Very simple experiences – a cold bath in an enamelled tin, or running for a train – may to some extent be compared without elaborate vehicles; and friends exceptionally well acquainted with one another may manage some rough comparisons in ordinary conversation. But subtle or recondite experiences are for most men incommunicable and indescribable, though social conventions or terror of the loneliness of the human situation may make us pretend the contrary.”"

"A space containing electric currents may be regarded as a field where energy is transformed at certain points into the electric and magnetic kinds by means of batteries, dynamos, thermoelectric actions, and so on, while in other parts of the field this energy is again transformed into heat, work done by electromagnetic forces, or any form of energy yielded by currents. Formerly a current was regarded as something travelling along a conductor, attention being chiefly directed to the conductor, and the energy which appeared at any part of the circuit, if considered at all, was supposed to be conveyed thither through the conductor by the current. But the existence of induced currents and of electromagnetic actions at a distance from a primary circuit from which they draw their energy, has led us, under the guidance of Faraday and Maxwell, to look upon the medium surrounding the conductor as playing a very important part in the development of the phenomena. If we believe in the continuity of the motion of energy, that is, if we believe that when it disappears at one point and reappears at another it must have passed through the intervening space, we are forced to conclude that the surrounding medium contains at least a part of the energy, and that it is capable of transferring it from point to point."

"The Earth, then, is very round. If an exact model were made the size of a two-inch billiard ball, we should just be able to see that it was flatter at the poles, and, no doubt, in rolling it would exhibit its want of roundness. The highest mountains would be represented by elevations of \frac {1} {800}th inch, say by the thinnest smear of grease, the deepest oceans by the spreading of a drop into a film but \frac {1} {700}th inch thick."

"... as soon as I got backpropagation working, I realized--because of what we'd been doing with Boltzmann machines--that you could use autoencoders to do unsupervised learning. You just get the output layer to reproduce the input layer, and then you don't need a separate teaching signal. Then the hidden units are representing some code for the input."

"In late 1985, I actually had a deal with Dave Rumelhart that I would write a short paper about backpropagation, which was his idea, and he would write a short paper about autoencoders, which was my idea. It was always better to have someone who didn't come up with the idea write the paper because he could say more dearly what was important. So I wrote the short paper about backpropagation, which was the Nature paper that came out in 1986, but Dave still hasn't written the short paper about autoencoders. I'm still waiting."

"A very simple experiment shows that a black surface is a better radiator, or pours out more energy when hot, than a surface which does not absorb fully, but reflects much of the radiation which falls upon it. If a platinum foil with some black marks on it be heated to redness, the marks, black when cold, are much brighter than the surrounding metal when hot; they are, in fact, pouring out much more visible radiation than the metal."

"When we see the havoc wrought on a sea-wall by a storm, it is easy to believe that ocean waves exert a pressure against the shore on which they beat. But it is not easy to think that the tiny ripples of light also press against every body on which they fall, to think that when a lamp is lighted waves of pressure are sent out from it—pressing against the source from which they start, pressing against every surface which they illuminate. It is a very minute pressure, far too small, even when it is strongest, to be felt by our bodies, and only to be detected by exceeding sensitive apparatus."

"Then we got very excited because now there was this very simple local-learning rule. On paper it looked just great. I mean, you could take this great big network, and you could train up all the weights to do just the right thing, just with a simple local learning rule. It felt like we'd solved the problem . That must be how the brain works. I guess if it hadn't been for computer simulations, I'd still believe that, but the problem was the noise. It was just a very very slow learning rule. It got swamped by the noise because in the learning rule you take the difference between two noisy variables--two sampled correlations, both of which have sampling noise. The noise in the difference is terrible. I still think that's the nicest piece of theory I'll ever do. It worked out like a question in an exam where you put it all together and a beautiful answer pops out."

"We got quite a few applications, and one of these applications I couldn't decide if the guy was a total flake or not... He wrote a spiel about the machine code of the brain and how it was stochastic, and so the brain had this stochastic machine code. It looked like rubbish to me, but the guy obviously had some decent publications and was in a serious place, so I didn't know what to make of him... David Marr said, "Oh yes, I've met him." I said, "So what did you think of him?" David Marr said, 'Well, he was a bit weird, but he was definitely, smart." So I thought, OK, so we'll invite him. That guy was Terry Sejnowski, of course... the book was one of the first books to come out about neural networks for a long time. It was the beginning of the end of the drought... both Dave Rumelhart and Terry said that from their point of view, just getting all these people interested and in the same room was a real legitimizing breakthrough."

"I think political systems will use it to terrorize people."

"I first of all explained to him why it wouldn't work, based on an argument in Rosenblatt's book, which showed that essentially it was an algorithm that couldn't break symmetry... The next argument I gave him was that it would get stuck in local minima... We programmed a backpropagation net, and we tried to get this fast relearning. It didn't give fast relearning, so I made one of these crazy inferences that people make--which was, that backpropagation is not very interesting... [One year of trying and failing to scale up Boltzmann machines later] "Well, maybe, why don't I just program up that old idea of Rumelhart's, and see how well that works on some of the problems we've been trying?"... We had all the arguments: It's assuming that neurons can send real numbers to each other; of course they can only send bits to each other ; you have to have stochastic binary neurons; these real-valued neurons are totally unrealistic. It's ridiculous." So they just refused to work on it, not even to write a program, so I had to do it myself."

"It seems very likely to a large number of people that we will get massive unemployment caused by Ai."

"If you or I learn something and want to transfer that knowledge to someone else, we can’t just send them a copy. But I can have 10,000 neural networks, each having their own experiences, and any of them can share what they learn instantly. That’s a huge difference. It’s as if there were 10,000 of us, and as soon as one person learns something, all of us know it. It’s a completely different form of intelligence. A new and better form of intelligence."

"I got Christianity at school and Stalinism at home. I think that was a very good preparation for being a scientist because I got used to the idea that at least half the people are completely wrong."

"I'm much more interested in how the brain does it. I'm only interested in applications just to prove that this is interesting stuff to keep the funding flowing. To do an application really well, you have to put your whole heart into it; you need to spend a year immersing yourself in what the application' s all about. I guess I've never really been prepared to do that."

"The reason hidden units in neural nets are called hidden units is that Peter Brown told me about hidden Markov models. I decided "hidden" was a good name for those extra units, so that's where the name "hidden" comes from."

"The tradition that they originally came from Lydia, reported as a Lydian story by Herodotus, is based on erroneous etymologies, like many other traditions about the origins of 'fringe' peoples of the Greek world. Although the (no doubt numerous) early group movements in and out of Italy, and within its borders, are irretrievably lost, the Etruscans must be regarded as an Italian people."

"John Mortimer: Now that nuclear weapons exist, you have to face the fact that you would rather be conquered by, say, the Russians than have the world blown up? Thompson: Yes, I think so. Don't you? Mortimer: Better red than dead? Thompson: Yes. Mortimer: So, if nuclear weapons had existed in 1939, we would have had to accept conquest by Hitler to save a nuclear war? Thompson: Yes."

"[I]n the early eighties, I was turned aside once again, by the emergency of the “second cold war” and by the heavy demands of the peace movement. I do not regret this: I am convinced that the peace movement made a major contribution to dispersing the cold war, which had descended like a polluting cloud on every field of political and social life."

"The man who has done more than anyone else to rouse the national conscience over nuclear weapons is E. P. Thompson... Like Gladstone, who felt himself called away from writing about the Christine doctrine of eternal punishment to lead the agitation over the Bulgarian atrocities, Thompson abandoned his scholar's desk and the book that he is writing on William Blake last autumn to devote himself to the anti-nuclear cause."

"We are going to stop those piffling cruise missiles, you know, on land if not on sea. What we have to do is seize this moment of mass consciousness to move directly into the structures of the Cold War themselves, the blocs behind the missiles. We have to keep to some very large and simple ideas – like remaking Europe and putting peace and liberty together... This is the most serious political work I have ever done or will ever do in my life. It won't last long. If we succeed a little, the politicians will move in and take it off us."

"...class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way."

"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties."

"We must commence to act as if a united, neutral and pacific Europe already exists. We must learn to be loyal, not to 'East' or 'West' but to each other, and we must disregard the prohibitions and limitations imposed by any national state."

"The distinctive contribution of working people to the agitation for Reform between 1789 and 1832 is brilliantly invoked in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class."

"Not many authors of general books about the Romans feel bound to discuss the alleged Trojan ancestry of their subject. In sharp contrast, hardly anyone outside the inner circle of tecnici seems able to write about the Etruscans without reflecting at length on the supposed mystery of their origins and on the solution that may or (as has long been beyond all doubt) may not lie in the East, specifically in Lydia. The reason for this is the erroneous but still widely held conviction that' the authority of Herodotus is involved."

"He once called himself the Muggletonian Marxist, and the title is too tempting to resist. He claimed some special affinity with one associate of the sect, William Blake, and all those who ever heard him lecture on the subject must at least draw some comfort from the fact that he completed this volume before his death. Almost every page offers fresh evidence, not merely of his vast, overflowing erudition, but of his wit, his humanity, his soaring historical imagination, the combination of qualities which made the publication of The Making of the English Working Class such an event not merely in the writing of English history but in the politics of our century."

"Unlike the extreme radical, the Peace Movement does not make light of physical death. In fact, it feeds almost entirely upon the age-old fear of it. A few half-hearted realists (E.P. Thompson among them) admit that the probable consequence of unilateralist policies would be Soviet domination in some form. They know also that, much more than socialism (which they favour), it would be the end of most of what we, and even they themselves, value. But that, apparently, is less important than saving our own skins."

"[W]orking-class consciousness is no longer the talismanic concept it once was among historians. In retrospect it is clear that E. P. Thompson's magical evocation in The Making of the English Working Class (1963; rev. edn. 1968) brought a prominent line of inquiry to its culmination. Perhaps this should have been obvious at the time, given the author's determination to define class, not in material terms, but as a product of the daily experience of individual men and women."