A Special Place for Blog Lovers with a Touch of Science!

Excerpts from Feynman's book - QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985)

1. "We cannot predict whether a given photon will arrive at A or B. All we can predict is that out of 100 photons that come down, an average of 4 will be reflected by the front surface. Does this mean that physics, a science of great exactitude, has been reduced to calculating only the probability of an event, and not predicting exactly what will happen? Yes. That's a retreat, but that's the way it is: Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities. Yet science has not collapsed."

2. "With quantum physics, who needs drugs?"

1. "Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars."

2. "Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work."

3. "Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live."

1. "I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character... by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none."

2. "Nature's economy shall be the base for our own, for it is immutable, but ours is secondary. An economist without knowledge of nature is therefore like a physicist without knowledge of mathematics."

3. "When all the thoughts are concerning one thing and the person loses interest in other things, the melancholy begins."

1. This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us; to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves; to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.

2. The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.

3. There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money - and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.

4. If few can stand a long war without deterioration of soul, none can stand a long peace.

1. "Because information is so accessible and communication instantaneous, there is a diminution of focus on its significance, or even on the definition of what is significant. This dynamic may encourage policymakers to wait for an issue to arise rather than anticipate it, and to regard moments of decision as a series of isolated events rather than part of a historical continuum. When this happens, manipulation of information replaces reflection as the principal policy tool."

2. "The state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint."

Philip K. Dick is one of the most remarkable science fiction writers of the 20th century. For a period of 30 years, he produced 44 novels and more than 100 short stories. At the age of 33, he won the Hugo award for best science fiction, and later the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

His fiction explored varied philosophical and social issues such as the nature of consciousness, the essence of reality, human nature, perception, and identity, and commonly featured characters struggling against elements such as illusory environments, drug abuse, monopolistic corporations, mass manipulation, authoritarian governments, and altered states of consciousness. His books inspired many famous movies like Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (adapted twice: in 1990 and 2012), Minority Report (2002), A Scanner Darkly (2006), The Adjustment Bureau (2011), and Radio Free Albemuth (2010), Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and many more.

Enjoy his quotes below:

1. "For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened that unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking."

— Heraclitus

2. "Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power."
— Seneca

3. "The unexamined life is not worth living."
— Socrates

4. "The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else."
— Aristotle

1. "I don't think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil."

2. "You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don't know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself."

1. Aerodynamically, the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn't know it so it goes on flying anyway.

-Mary Kay Ash

2. Geologists have a saying - rocks remember.

-Neil Armstrong

3. A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

-Max Planck

4. The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

-Paul Valery

Jorge Luis Borges

1. "A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

2. "So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers."

3. "When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."

4. "Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much."

5. "A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships."

Leo Tolstoy

"Yes, love, ...but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved him. I knew that feeling of love which is the essence of the soul, for which no object is needed. And I know that blissful feeling now too. To love one's neighbours; to love one's enemies. To love everything - to Love God in all His manifestations. Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. And that was why I felt such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What happened to him? Is he alive? ...Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can shatter it. It is the very nature of the soul. And how many people I have hated in my life. And of all people none I have loved and hated more than her.... If it were only possible for me to see her once more... once, looking into those eyes to say..."
―  War and Peace

Theodor W. Adorno

1. Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

2. Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

3. Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

4. Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

5. He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.

6. Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

7. Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.

8. Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

9. Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.

10. Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

From Adler's book What Life Could Mean To You

1. "A fight with a child is always a losing fight: he can never be beaten or won to cooperation by fighting. In these struggles the weakest always carries the day. Something is demanded of him which he refuses to give; something which can never be gained by such means. An incalculable amount of tension and useless effort would be spared in this world if we realized that cooperation and love can never be won by force."

2. "These three ties, therefore, set three problems: how to find an. occupation which will enable us to survive under the limitations set by the nature of the earth; how to find a position among our fellows, so that we may cooperate and share the benefits of cooperation; how to accommodate ourselves to the fact that we live in two sexes and that the continuance and furtherance of mankind depends upon our love-life. Individual"

3. "It was only because men learned to cooperate that we could make the great discovery of the division of labor; a discovery which is the chief security for the welfare of mankind. To preserve human life would not be possible if each individual attempted to wrest a living from the earth by himself with no cooperation and no results of cooperation in the past. Through the division of labor we can use the results of many different kinds of training and organize many different abilities so that all of them contribute to the common welfare and guarantee relief from insecurity and increased opportunity for all the members of society."

The poetic genius of cinema

Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (4 April 1932 – 29 December 1986) was a Russian film director, screenwriter, and film theorist. He is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. Tarkovsky's works fathomed the depths of the human soul and are distinctive with their poetic style. His films are known for their exploration of spiritual and metaphysical themes and are noted for their slow pacing and long takes, dreamlike visual imagery, and absorption with nature, consciousness, and memory.

Under the guidance of the filmmaker Mikhail Romm, Tarkovsky studied film at Moscow's VGIK. He has produced only seven full-length feature movies but, they are all regarded as masterpieces. These are Ivan's Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), Mirror (1975), Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983), and The Sacrifice (1986). After years of creative conflict with soviet film authorities, Tarkovsky left the country in 1979 and made his final two films respectively in Italy and Sweden. In 1986, he published a book about cinema and art entitled Sculpting in Time. Sadly, he died of cancer later that year, only 54 years old.

Below you can take a look at the poetic beauty and philosophical depths of his thought.

7 quotes that will make you think twice

1. A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Max Planck

2. Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.

Niels Bohr

3. The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Thomas Huxley

4. No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

Albert Einstein

5. Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

6. You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.

Elon Musk

7. If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed.

Stephen Hawking

Tom Stoppard

"Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us."
― From The Coast of Utopia

Werner Heisenberg

1. "The uncertainty relation does not refer to the past; if the velocity of the electron is at first known and the position then exactly measured, the position for times previous to the measurement may be calculated."

2. "The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form - the one of the particles, the other of the waves - are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases."

3. "It is seen that both matter and radiation possess a remarkable duality of character, as they sometimes exhibit the properties of waves, at other times those of particles. Now, it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time - the two concepts are too different."

4. "Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves."

5. "The uncertainty principle refers to the degree of indeterminateness in the possible present knowledge of the simultaneous values of various quantities with which the quantum theory deals; it does not restrict, for example, the exactness of a position measurement alone or a velocity measurement alone."

5 quotes from Michel Foucault

"People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does."

"I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know where it will end."

"What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something that is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?" 

"I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me."

"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."

The wisdom of the epic sci-fi fantasy book Dune

1. "The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience." - Frank Herbert, 'Dune'.

2. "Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic."

3. "The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future."

4. "It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult."