Some Poor grad student pressing on the flanks of a hamster and out comes a doctorate on the other side
Robert M. SapolskyRead
I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.
Interpretation
Science can coexist with compassion and appreciation for the arts and nature.
In this quote, Robert M. Sapolsky expresses his passion for science while acknowledging a common fear surrounding the subject. He advocates for the idea that embracing science does not exclude appreciation for compassion, beauty in the arts, or the wonders of nature; rather, science should enhance our sense of mystery and wonder about the world.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the importance of integrating arts and sciences in education.
Having been the discoverer of many splendid things, he is said to have asked his friends and relations that, after his death, they should place on his tomb a cylinder enclosing a sphere, writing on it the proportion of the containing solid to that which is contained.
Anyone who thinks science is trying to make human life easier or more pleasant is utterly mistaken.
Just as Mars - a desert planet - gives us insights into global climate change on Earth, the promise awaits for bringing back to life portions of the Red Planet through the application of Earth Science to its similar chemistry, possibly reawakening its life-bearing potential.
Traditionally, scientists have treated the laws of physics as simply 'given,' elegant mathematical relationships that were somehow imprinted on the universe at its birth, and fixed thereafter. Inquiry into the origin and nature of the laws was not regarded as a proper part of science.
... many folks take them seriously because they just 'know' that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now. In fact, a precisely opposite situation prevails: biologists have documented a veritable glut of cases for rapid and eminently measurable evolution on timescales of years and decades.
What the scientists have always found by physical experiment was an a priori orderliness of nature, or Universe always operating at an elegance level that made the discovering scientist's working hypotheses seem crude by comparison. The discovered reality made the scientists exploratory work seem relatively disorderly.
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