The Mentat Must be a Generalist

Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: "There's ...

 Observation Reconstructs the Real

A scientific observation is always a committed observation; it confirms or denies one's preconceptions; one's first ideas, one's plan of observation; it shows by demonstration; it structures the phenomena; it transcends what is close at hand; it reconstructs the real after having reconstructed its representation.

 Reading Nature is Like Interpreting the Bible

An experiment in nature, like a text in the Bible, is capable of different interpretations, according to the preconceptions of the interpreter.

 Technology Manufactures Social Change

The main thing, it seems to me, is to remember that technology manufactures not gadgets, but social change. Once the first tool was picked up and used, that was the end of cyclical anything. The tool made a new world, the next one changed that world, the one after that changed it again, and so on. Each time the change was permanent. Using the tool changes the user permanently, whether we like it or not. Once when I was in Moscow talking to academician Petrov, I said, “Why don’t you buy Am...

 Tolerance for Ambiguity

I have a tolerance for ambiguity. It's clear to me that there's some questions that humans don't have the answers to and what arrogance to imagine we have answers to all questions. Science is sometimes, I know, attacked for supposed arogance, but I think it's the most humble occupation and discipline around. Because, instead of trying to impose our preconceptions, our predispositions on the Universe, we are open before the Universe to see what the Universe has to offer. Science is in the busi...

 Natural Laws are Universal

...the order of the Universe is not an assumption; it's an observed fact. We detect the light from distant quasars only because the laws of electromagnetism are the same ten billion light years away as here. The spectra of those quasars are recognizable only because the same chemical elements are present there as here, and because the same laws of quantum mechanics apply. The motion of galaxies around one another follows familiar Newtonian gravity. Gravitational lenses and binary pulsar spin-...