science

  1. Outstanding book. Contains lots of personal stories from Feynman’s life. I like how open he was describing all the experience, without being afraid of judgments.

    Few random lessons:

    • people outside of the company overestimate what is going on inside
    • you have no responsibility for the world
    • you have no responsibility to match exptectations of other people, those expectations are not yours
    • stay curious
    • teaching is important activity to still contribute something even if you can’t invent/create new things at the moment
    • have different hobbies

    I was also suprised how open he was about his personal life. Some stories I found strange and a bit inappropriate for our times, but I definitely admire openess.

     Richard P. Feynman Ralph Leighton
  2. Tiny pocket book. I love those on topics I don’t know much about. But unfortunately this type of book didn’t teach me much. One year after reading it I can’t recall anything.
    Carlo Rovelli
  3. … capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest.
    Neil Postman
  4. Bacon is the first to claim that the principle end of scientific work was to advance the “happiness of mankind”. He continually criticized his predecessors for failing to understand that the real, legitimate, and only goal of the sciences is the “endowment of human life with new inventions and riches”.
    Neil Postman
  5. “In Defense of Poetry”, he (Editor: Perry Shelley) made the arguments that explained why Reason itself was insufficient to produce humane progress. Indeed, when science and technology claim to provide ethical imperatives, we are lead into moral catastrophe… It is only through love, tenderness, and beauty, he wrote, that the mind is made receptive to the moral decency, and poetry is the means by which love, tenderness, and beat are best cultivated. It is the poetic imagination, not scientific accomplishment, that is the engine of moral progress… Thus, the “heaven city” that the eighteenth-century rationalists dreamed of is not reachable through reason alone… Progress is the business of the heart, not the intellect.
    Neil Postman
  6. Technology, as Paul Goodman once remarked, is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science; which suggests that advise that comes from people who have little or no philosophical perspective is likely to be arid if not dangerous.
    Neil Postman
  7. Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
    Pope John Paul II
  8. What was the meaning of the statement that “America will be destroyed by fire, England by fire and water, and Russia by a falling piece of the moon?”. After that, an era of reborn humanity was to follow, the reconciliation of religion and science and the triumph of one universal Church.
    Czesław Miłosz