“I believe that most of us have false beliefs about our own nature, and our identity over time, and that, when we see the truth, we ought to change some of our beliefs about what we have reason to do.”
― Reasons and Persons
― Reasons and Persons
“[E]ven laws of Nature are not absolutely certain. There may be new circumstances never before examined – inside black holes, say, or within the electron, or close to the speed of light – where even our vaunted laws of Nature break down and, however valid they may be in ordinary circumstances, need correction.”
― The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
― The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
“Consider this claim: as I walk along, time – as measured by my wristwatch or my ageing process – slows down. Also, I shrink in the direction of motion. Also, I get more massive. Who has ever witnessed such a thing? It's easy to dismiss it out of hand. Here's another: matter and antimatter are all the time, throughout the universe, being created from nothing. Here's a third: once in a very great while, your car will spontaneously ooze through the brick wall of your garage and be found the next morning on the street. They're all absurd! But the first is a statement of special relativity, and the other two are consequences of quantum mechanics (vacuum fluctuations and barrier tunnelling, they're called). Like it or not, that's the way the world is. If you insist it's ridiculous, you'll be forever closed to some of the major findings on the rules that govern the Universe.”
― The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
― The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
“We live in a complex age where many of the problems we face can, whatever their origins, only have solutions that involve a deep understanding of science and technology.”
― The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
― The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
“No physicist started out impatient with common-sense notions, eager to replace them with some mathematical abstraction that could be understood only by rarified theoretical physics. Instead, they began, as we all do, with comfortable, standard, common-sense notions. The trouble is that Nature does not comply. If we no longer insist on our notions of how Nature ought to behave, but instead stand before Nature with an open and receptive mind, we find that common sense often doesn't work. Why not? Because our notions, both hereditary and learned, of how Nature works were forged in the millions of years our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. In this case common sense is a faithless guide because no hunter-gatherer's life ever depended on understanding time-variable electric and magnetic fields. There were no evolutionary penalties for ignorance of Maxwell's equations. In our time it's different.”
― The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
― The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
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Users of Less Wrong, a community blog dedicated to refining the art of human rationality.
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