And I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into – into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions about, Are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us.W. Daniel Hillis: On the Computer and the BrainFrom 'The Ascent Of Man'
I do not feel diminished by my kinship to Turing's machine.Stuart Kauffmann: On The Origin of LifeFrom 'The Pattern in the Stone'
In crafting the living world, selection has always acted on systems that exhibit spontaneous order. If I am right, this underlying order, further honed by selection, augurs a new place for us - expected, rather than vastly improbable, at home in the universe in a newly understood way.Frank Lambert: On EntropyFrom the preface to 'At Home in the Universe'.
Entropy is not disorder. Entropy is not a measure of disorder or chaos. Entropy is not a driving force. Energy's diffusion, dissipation, or dispersion in a final state compared to an initial state is the driving force in chemistry. Entropy is the index of that dispersal within a system and between the system and its surroundingsPierre Simon Laplace: On GodFrom "Disorder - A Cracked Crutch For Supporting Entropy Discussions", available at http://www.entropysite.com/cracked_crutch.html. Originally published in: J. Chem. Educ. 2002 79 187-192.
Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis.Karl Popper: On the existence of physical reality
The central issue here is realism. That is to say, the reality of the physical world we live in: the fact that this world exists independently of ourselves; that it existed before life existed, acording to our best hypotheses; and that it will continue to exist, for all we know, long after we have all been swept away.Bertrand Russell: On Plato's RepublicI have argued in favour of realism in various places. My arguments are partly rational, partly ad hominem, and partly even ethical. It seems to me that the attack on realism, although intellectually interesting and important, is quite unacceptable, especially after two world wars and the real suffering - avoidable suffering - that was wantonly produced by them; and that any argument against realism which is based on modern atomic theory - on quantum mechanics - ought to be silenced by the memory of the reality of the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (I say this in full admiration for the modern atomic theory and quantum mechanics, and of the scientists who have worked and who are now working in this field.)
Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics, Unwin Hyman, Preface 1982.
The problem of finding a collection of 'wise' men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one. That is the ultimate reason for democracy.Bertrand Russell: On Plato's Theory of IdeasA History of Western Philosophy, Unwin Paperbacks, 1989, page 124.
Any attempt to divide the world into portions, of which one is more 'real' than the other, is doomed to failure.Bertrand Russell: On the Approach to Art, Science, Literature and PhilosophyA History of Western Philosophy, Unwin Paperbacks, 1989, page 144.
For my part, I have found that, when I wish to write a book on some subject, I must first soak myself in detail, until all the separate parts of the subject-matter are familiar; then, some day, if I am fortunate, I perceive the whole with all its parts duly interrelated.Bertrand Russell: On the use of reason by thirteenth century Christian philosophers to argue with those who did not accept the validity of the Christian revelationA History of Western Philosophy, Unwin Paperbacks, 1989, page 138.
In the long run, the appeal to reason was perhaps a mistake, but in the thirteenth century it seemed highly successful.Harold Urey: On his expectations for the Miller-Urey experimentA History of Western Philosophy, Taylor and Francis e-Library edition, 2004, Kindle location 5874.
Beilstein.Günter Wächtershäuser: On SoupsThis was Urey's response when asked what he expected to get from the experiment his student, Stanley Miller, was conducting on pre-biotic chemical synthesis in a reducing atmosphere. He was referring to the one hundred plus volume compendium begun by Friedrich Beilstein, "Beilsteins Handbuch der Organische Chemie", which describes all the organic compounds that have been synthesised. This quote is from Wiils and Bada's "The Spark of Life".
You can have a soup of anything.During a conversation at the 'Conditions for the emergence of life' conference at the Royal Society in London in 2006, in which I outlined the SimSoup model, and mentioned that the name SimSoup was not intended to suggest only a soup of large molecules as in heterotrophic theories of the Origin of Life; it could also be used to model small molecule theories such as that of Prof. Wächtershäuser