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.
In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
We're at a point in history were we have to become a part of the neighborhood of inhabited planets, like a neighborhood of a community, which we have not even acknowledged that that community exists up until this point.
At the last dim horizon, we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be oppressed.
Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.
The great mathematician fully, almost ruthlessly, exploits the domain of permissible reasoning and skirts the impermissible. That his recklessness does not lead him into a morass of contradictions is a miracle in itself: certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin's process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.
Is not Fire a Body heated so hot as to emit Light copiously? For what else is a red hot Iron than Fire? And what else is a burning Coal than red hot Wood?
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