Jacob Bronowski
Jacob Bronowski
Jacob Bronowskiwas a British mathematician, historian of science, theatre author, poet and inventor. Of Polish-Jewish origin, he is best remembered as the presenter and writer of the 1973 BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man, and the accompanying book...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth1 September 1908
mistake thinking creative
It is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual
unity
All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses.
original-thought humans originals
One original thought is worth the sum total of human knowledge, because it advances the sum total of human knowledge by that one original thought.
notebook facts leafs
Knowledge is not a loose leaf notebook of facts.
power magic opposition
The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.
art creation art-is
Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
inspirational cutting hands
The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
doors tragedy scientist
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.
thinking shadow our-actions
Beyond all our actions stands the larger shadow: How are we to choose between what we have been taught to think right and something else which manifestly succeeds?
art science thinking
I set out to show that there exists single creative activity,which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences.It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind.
discovery order giving
The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.
running simple law
It is often said that the progression from simple to complex runs counter to the normal statistics of chance that are formalized in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Strictly speaking, we could avoid this criticism simply by insisting that the Second Law does not apply to living systems in the environment in which we find them. For the Second Law applies only when there is no overall flow of energy into or out of a system, whereas all living systems are sustained by a net inflow of energy.
acceptance thinking rejection
Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.
art age art-and-science
Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science.