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By relating the human predicament to the scientific solution, Davy produced one of the great demonstrations of scientific ‘Hope’. He showed that applied science could be a force for good previously unparalleled in human society, and might gradually liberate mankind from untold misery and suffering. Deliberately…
John Buddle, now entirely won over by Davy, was also concerned about a reward. By August there were 144 safety lamps ‘in daily use’ at Walls End, and they were rapidly spreading to all the other collieries in the North-East.91 Buddle urged Davy to take out a patent, pointing out that he could not only make his fortune…
Here Coleridge was defending the intellectual discipline of science as a force for clarity and good. He then added one of his most inspired perceptions. He thought that science, as a human activity, ‘being necessarily performed with the passion of Hope, it was poetical’. Science, like poetry, was not merely…
There was a time – and very recently – when the idea of the possibility of learning the composition of the celestial bodies was considered senseless even by prominent scientists and thinkers. That time has now passed. The idea of the possibility of a closer, direct study of the universe will today, I believe, appear…
The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But, they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most…
Visionaries had in common five characteristics, which the researchers termed “Innovator’s DNA.” Here are the first three: • An ability to associate creatively. They could see connections between seemingly unrelated concepts, problems or questions. • An annoying habit of consistently asking “what if”.And “why not” and…
Nature study also heightens our perceptive abilities: we see, hear and smell more, and more keenly, because of them. In the cities, our senses tend to atrophy. The relentless commercial badgering of signs, and the general dullness and ugliness of city landscapes, push the urban walker into the safe cocoon of his mind…
Anthropocentrism isn’t just a faulty value system, but also a faulty way of understanding the world. Modern science has shown this, displacing human beings from the center of the universe, opening up immense vistas of space and time, telling a story of life in which chance, not destiny, has raised an unusual primate…
Each branch of natural history study demands its special abilities: the superior ear of the birdwatcher, the attention to minute detail of the entomologist, the courage of the herpetologist wading into swamps full of poisonous snakes. But some “field skills” are nearly ubiquitous. Perhaps the most important are…
The passage shows how different aspects of virtue connect. Patience is part intellectual virtue, part moral virtue and part physical virtue, as it is portrayed here. The humility which allows Leopold to lie down in the muck unselfconsciously is a moral virtue, but humble recognition of our own ignorance is also a key…
The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the…
It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
I think that science tolerates the unknown in a way that religion doesn't. My argument is not with people who search for god. My argument is with people who feel that our understanding of god is completed. And those are the people who make so much of our existence on this planet such a hell, because they really think…
• Despite plentiful opportunities for misuse, science can be the golden road out of poverty and backwardness for emerging nations. It makes national economies and the global civilization run. Many nations understand this. It is why so many graduate students in science and engineering at American graduate schools…
...science is part and parcel humility. Scientists do not seek to impose their needs and wants on Nature, but instead humbly interrogate Nature and take seriously what they find. We are aware that revered scientists have been wrong. We understand human imperfection. We insist on independent and - to the extent…
This is the light by which the working of society is to be examined. And in order to keep the study in a manageable field I will continue to choose a society in which the principle of truth rules. Therefore the society which I will examine is that formed by scientists themselves: it is the body of scientists. It may…
First, of course, comes independence, in observation and thence in thought. I once told an audience of school-children that the world would never change if they did not contradict their elders. J was chagrined to find next morning that this axiom outraged their parents. Yet it is the basis of the scientific method. A…
The society of scientists must be a democracy.® It can keep alive and grow only by a constant tension between dissent and respect; between independence from the views of Others, and tolerance for them. The crux of the ethical problem is to fuse these, the private and the public needs. Tolerance alone is not enough…