Heinz Pagels
Heinz Pagels
Heinz Rudolf Pagelswas an American physicist, an adjunct professor of physics at Rockefeller University, the executive director and chief executive officer of the New York Academy of Sciences, and president of the International League for Human Rights. He is best known to the general public for his popular science books The Cosmic Code, Perfect Symmetry, and The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity...
numbers prove continuum
While we can prove that almost all numbers in the continuum are random, we cannot prove that any specific number is indeed random.
people simplicity progress
The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration.
feelings survival reason
Our capacity for fulfillment can come only through faith and feelings. But our capacity for survival must come from reason and knowledge.
stars fall dark
As I continued to fall into the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness.
stars animal light
It is unlikely that we will ever see a star being born. Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the very young, but never their actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event. Stars are born inside thick clouds of dust and gas in the spiral arms of the galaxy, so thick that visible light cannot penetrate them.
powerful unique discovery
Possession of a program with unique analytic capabilities puts a scientist in as much of a priveleged position to make new discoveries as the possession of a powerful telescope.
shows
Science shows us what exists but not what to do about it.
stars animal secret
Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the young but never the actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event.
vacuums study theory
Theoretical and experimental physicists are now studying nothing at all-the vacuum. But that nothingness contains all of being.
science land complexity
Science has explored the microcosmos and the macrocosmos; we have a good sense of the lay of the land. The great unexplored frontier is complexity.
book law organization
The words are strung together, with their own special grammar-the laws of quantum theory-to form sentences, which are molecules. Soon we have books, entire libraries, made out of molecular "sentences." The universe is like a library in which the words are atoms. Just look at what has been written with these hundred words! Our own bodies are books in that library, specified by the organization of molecules-but the universe and literature are organizations of identical, interchangeable objects; they are information systems.
stars profound void
There was emptiness more profound than the void between the stars, for which there was no here and there and before and after, and yet out of that void the entire plenum of existence sprang forth.
art adventure order
We surely stand at the threshold of a great adventure of the human spiritó a new synthesis of knowledge, a potential integration of art and science, a deeper grasp of human psychology, a deepening of the symbolic representations of our existence and feelings as given in religion and culture, the formation of an international order based on cooperation and nonviolent competition. It seems not too much to hope for these things.
numbers want information
Information is just signs and numbers, while knowledge involves their meaning. What we want is knowledge, but what we get is information.