Jim Al-Khalili > Quotes

“... classical Arabic, being the language of the Qur'an, has not changed at all in fourteen centuries, making the writings of the early Islamic scholars as accessible today as they were then.”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“For me, I think the greatest achievements of science is to allow humanity to realize that our world is comprehensible. Through science, rational thinking, we can understand how the universe works.”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“The difference between my beliefs and having a religious faith is that I am prepared to change my views in light of new evidence, but someone of a religious faith will just stick their fingers in the ears and say: 'I'm not listening, there's nothing you can say that will make me change my mind.”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“Arabic science throughout its golden age was inextricably linked to religion; indeed, it was driven by the need of early scholars to interpret the Qur'an.”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“It is a fact of life that oversimplified accounts of the development of science are often necessary in its teaching. Most scientific progress is a messy, complex and slow process; only with the hindsight of an overall understanding of a phenomenon can a story be told pedagogically rather than chronologically. This necessitates the distilling of certain events and personalities from the melee: those who are deemed to have made the most important contributions. It is inevitable therefore that the many smaller or less important advances scattered randomly across hundreds of years of scientific history tend to be swept up like autumn leaves into neat piles, on top of which sit larger-than-life personalities credited with taking a discipline forward in a single jump. Sometimes this is perfectly valid, and one cannot deny the genius of an Aristotle, a Newton, a Darwin or an Einstein. But it often leaves behind forgotten geniuses and unsung heroes.”
― Jim Al-Khalili, The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance

“By the time of the arrival of Islam in the early seventeenth century CE, what we now call the Middle East was divided between the Persian and Byzantine empires. But with the spread of this new religion from Arabia, a powerful empire emerged, and with it a flourishing civilization and a glorious golden age.

Given how far back it stretches in time, the history of the region -- and even of Iraq itself -- is too big a canvas for me to paint. Instead, what I hope to do in this book is take on the nonetheless ambitious task of sharing with you a remarkable story; one of an age in which great geniuses pushed the frontiers of knowledge to such an extent that their work shaped civilizations to this day.”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“The trustworthiness of science comes not from certainty, but from its very openness about its uncertainty, always calling into question what we currently understand and being prepared to replace that knowledge with a deeper understanding if something better comes along. In other walks of life, this attitude might be regarded as fickle. But not in science. Scientific progress depends on scientists' unwavering commitment to the qualities of honesty and doubt.”
― Jim Al-Khalili, The World According to Physics

“I shall mention in passing just one example of a gift from the Arabs that I for one am rather grateful for: coffee -- especially as it was originally banned in Europe as a 'Muslim drink.”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“I am a cuddly atheist... I am against creationism being taught in schools because there is empirical evidence that it is a silly notion... I am passionately concerned about the rise in pseudo-science; in beliefs in alternative medicine; in creationism. The idea that somehow it is based on logic, on rational arguments, but it's not. It doesn't stand up to empirical evidence.

In the same way in medicine, alternative medicines like homeopathy or new age therapies – reiki healing – a lot of people buy into it and it grates against my rationalist view of the world. There is no evidence for it. It is deceitful. It is insidious. I feel passionately about living in a society with a rationalist view of the world.

I will be vocal on issues where religion impacts on people's lives in a way that I don't agree with – if, for instance, in faith schools some of the teaching of religion suggests the children might have homophobic views or views that are intolerant towards other belief systems...

I am totally against, for example, bishops in the House of Lords. Why should someone of a particular religious faith have some preferential treatment over anyone else? This notion that the Church of England is the official religion of the country is utterly outmoded now.”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“In fact, for a period stretching over seven hundred years, the international language of science was Arabic. For this was the language of the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, and thus the official language of the vast Islamic Empire that, by the early eighth century CE, stretched from India to Spain.”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“Many historians regard him [Offa] as the most powerful Anglo-Saxon king before Alfred the Great. In the 780s he extended his power over most of Southern England. One of the most remarkable extantfrom King Offa's reign is a gold coin that is kept in the British Museum. On one side, it carries the inscription Offa Rex (Offa the King). But, turn it over and you are in for a surprise, for in badly copied Arabic are the words La Illaha Illa Allah ('There is no god but Allah alone'). This coin is a copy of an Abbasid dinarfrom the reign of Al-Mansur, dating to 773, and was most probably used by Anglo-Saxon traders. It would have been known even in Anglo-Saxon England that Islamic gold dinars were the most important coinage in the world at that time and Offa's coin looked enough like the original that it would have been readily accepted abroad.”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“Perhaps death represents the severing of the living organism's connection with the orderly quantum realm, leaving it powerless to resist the randomizing forces of thermodynamics.”
― Jim Al-Khalili, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“For the early scholars of Islam, there would have been no conflict between religion and science. The early thinkers were quite clear abou their mission: the Qur'an required them to study alsamawat wal'arth (the skies and the earth) to find proof of their faith. The prophet himself had besought this discipline to seek knowledge 'from the cradle to the grave', no matter how far that search took them, for 'he who travels in search of knowledge, travels along Allah's path to paradise”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“One cannot, therefore, understand Arabic science without considering the extent to which Islam influenced scientific and philosophical thought. Arabic science was, throughout its golden age, inextricably linked to religion. Clearly, the scientific revolution of the Abbasids would not have taken place if it were not for Islam, incontrast to the spread of Christianity over the preceding centuries, which had nothink like the same effect in stimulation and encouraging original scientific thinking.”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“Two of the most famous Baghdadi scholars, the philosopher Al-Kindi and the mathematician Al-Khawarizmi, were certainly the most influential in transmitting Hindu numerals to the Muslim world. Both wrote books on the subject during al-Ma'mun's reign, and it was their work that was translated into Latin and transmitted to the West, thus introducing Europeans to the decimal system, which was known in the Middle Ages only as Arabic numerals. But it would be many centuries before it was widely accepted in Europe. One reason for this was sociological: decimal numbers were considered for a long time as symbols of the evil Muslim foe.”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“It is not surprising that Ibn Sina is a national icon in Iran today, and one can find countless schools and hospitals named after him in many countries around the world. Indeed, his legacy stretches even further, for there is an 'Avicenna' crater on the moon, and in 1980 every member country of Unesco celebrated the thousand-year anniversary of Ibn Sina's birth. As a philosopher he is referred to as the Aristotle of Islam; as a physician he is known as the Galen of Islam.”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“His (Islamic astronomer al-Farghani) legacy also endures through the Italian writer and poet Dante (1265-1321), who derived most of the astronomical knowledge he included in his DIVINE COMEDY from the writings of al-Farghani (whom he referred to by his Latin name, Alfraganus).”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“for we have been deprived of all the people of knowledge save for a group, small in number, with many troubles, whose concern in life is to snatch the opportunity, when time is asleep, to devote themselves meanwhile to the investigation and perfection of a science; for the majority of people who imitate philosophers confuse the true with the false, and they do nothing but deceive and pretend knowledge, and they do not use what they know of the sciences except for base and material purposes; and if they see a certain person seeking for the right and preferring the truth, doing his best to refute the false and untrue and leaving aside hypocrisy and deceit, they make a fool of him and mock him.”
― Jim Al-Khalili, The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance

“By thinking about what we don't yet know, we can think about how we can best find out. It is the many questions we have asked over the course of our human history that have given us an ever-more-accurate picture of the world we know and love.”
― Jim Al-Khalili, The World According to Physics

“Careful observation and a questioning attitude to findings are central to the scientific method of investigation, which underpins physics and all the sciences.”
― Jim Al-Khalili, The Physics Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained

“I suspect that if aliens did come to Earth, it would be as researchers: biologists, anthropologists, linguists, keen to understand the peculiar workings of life on Earth, to meet humanity and learn of our art, music, culture, languages, philosophies and religions.”
― Jim Al-Khalili, Aliens: The World's Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

“the domain of quantum world is so astonishingly strange that it even makes tales of alien abductions sound perfectly reasonable”
― Jim Al-Khalili, Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics

“As the son of a Protestant Christian mother and a Shia Muslim father, I have nevertheless ended up without a religious bone in my body.”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“... the site still radiated a powerful aura that whispered of past glories too ancient for me to comprehend.”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“In 2016, Hillary Clinton even made it an election pledge to investigate the government’s involvement in UFOs,7”
― Jim Al-Khalili, Aliens - Science Asks: Is There Anyone Out There?

“During the first decade of the century, Rutherford was able to show that the Earth’s crust had to be billions of years old. He did this by measuring the amount of helium trapped inside rock samples, in which tiny amounts of uranium ore had slowly been emitting alpha particles ever since the rocks had been formed. Each alpha particle would be trapped by the rock and would quickly acquire a couple of electrons to become a helium atom. Such simple yet irrefutable proof one hundred years ago that our planet had to be more than a billion years old is something which those who subscribe to the notion of creationism are unable to challenge with any credibility.”
― Jim Al-Khalili, Quantum: A Guide For The Perplexed

“Scattered particles can be realigned to reveal their hidden quantum depths, but only in special circumstances and usually only very briefly. For example, we saw how scattered spinning hydrogen nuclei in our body can be lined up to generate a coherent MRI signal from the quantum property of spin – but only by applying a very strong magnetic field provided by a big, powerful magnet, and only for as long as that magnetic force is maintained: as soon as the magnetic field is switched off, the particles become randomly aligned again by all the molecular jostling, and the quantum signal becomes scattered and undetectable.”
― Jim Al-Khalili, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“All atomic nuclei are composed of two types of particles: protons and their electrically neutral partners, neutrons. If a nucleus has too many of one type or the other, then the rules of quantum mechanics dictate that the balance has to be redressed and those excess particles will change into the other form: protons will become neutrons, or neutrons protons, via a process called beta-decay. This is precisely what happens when two protons come together: a composite of two protons cannot exist and one of them will beta-decay into a neutron. The remaining proton and the newly transformed neutron can then bind together to form an object called a deuteron (the nucleus of an atom of the heavy hydrogen isotopefn3 called deuterium), after which further nuclear reactions enable the building of the more complex nuclei of other elements heavier than hydrogen, from helium (with two protons and either one or two neutrons) through to carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so on. The key point is that the deuteron owes its existence to its ability to exist in two states simultaneously, by virtue of quantum superposition. This is because the proton and neutron can stick together in two different ways that are distinguished by how they spin. We will see later how this concept of ‘quantum spin’ is actually very different from the familiar spin of a big object, such as a tennis ball; but for now we will go with our classical intuition of a spinning particle and imagine both the proton and the neutron spinning together within the deuteron in a carefully choreographed combination of a slow, intimate waltz and a faster jive. It was discovered back in the late 1930s that within the deuteron these two particles are not dancing together in either one or the other of these two states, but in both states at the same time – they are in a blur of waltz and jive simultaneously – and it is this that enables them to bind together.fn4 An obvious response to this statement is: ‘How do we know?’ Surely, atomic nuclei are far too small to be seen, so might it not be more reasonable to assume that there is something missing in our understanding of nuclear forces? The answer is no, for it has been confirmed in many laboratories over and over again that if the proton and neutron were performing the equivalent of either a quantum waltz or a quantum jive, then the nuclear ‘glue’ between them would not be quite strong enough to bind them together; it is only when these two states are superimposed on top of each other – the two realities existing at the same time – that the binding force is strong enough. Think of the two superposed realities as a little like mixing two coloured paints, blue and yellow, to make a combined resultant colour, green. Although you know the green is made up of the two primary constituent colours, it is neither one nor the other. And different ratios of blue and yellow will make different shades of green. Likewise, the deuteron binds when the proton and neutron are mostly locked in a waltz, with just a tiny amount of jive thrown in. So”
― Jim Al-Khalili, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“Some people turn to religion or some other ideology or belief system
to find answers to life’s mysteries. But for me, there is no substitute for
the careful hypothesising, testing, and deducing of facts about the world
that are the hallmark of the scientific method. The understanding we
have gained through science—and physics in particular—of how the
world is made up and how it works is, in my view, not just one of many
equally valid ways of reaching the ‘truth’ about reality. It is the only
reliable way we have.”
― Jim Al-Khalili, The World According to Physics

“The true beauty of physics, for me, is found not only in abstract
equations or in surprising experimental results, but in the deep
underlying principles that govern the way the world is.”
― Jim Al-Khalili, The World According to Physics