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...
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.
religious writing science
A good simulation, be it a religious myth or scientific theory, gives us a sense of mastery over experience. To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it one's own. But with this appropriation comes the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion.
science moral helping
Science cannot resolve moral conflicts, but it can help to more accurately frame the debates about those conflicts.
commitment science reason
I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science.
science organization religion
The visible world is the invisible organization of energy.
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.
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.