(3089/898) Parsing the real world

1457) Scientists don't ask us to take their word for what is real; they refer to the verdict of observation and experiment. That is precisely what distinguishes a scientist from a shaman. Whether the experiments employ tissue paper and comb or the space telescope, they represent an open, unsecretive process that is the opposite of shamanistic black magic. It is true that at any given time some theories may have moved ahead of experiment; fortunately, scientists do exercise the creative power of the human imagination. But no theory can long be taken seriously unless ultimately tested against the verdict of nature.

Timothy Ferris
letter to the editor
New York Times Book Review (10/15/1995)
[responding to a review of George Johnson's
Fire in the Mind, written by
Stephen R.L. Clark (9/24/1995)]

1458) Bridge failures, Mr. Petroski writes (citing a landmark study from University College, London), occur in a 30-year cycle: 30 years of practice at stretching a style - cantilever, truss, box girder or suspension - to its evident, appalling limit. Hubris, complacency, grandiosity all contribute to what he calls "a climate of confidence and daring." A reader looking up at the airliners flying over our bridges cannot help wondering about those larger but fewer engines, stretched and bloated fuselages, now all flying on smaller, thinner wings.

M.R. Montgomery
"To Get To The Other Side"
New York Times Book Review (10/15/1995)
[citing from and reviewing
Henry Petroski
Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders
and the Spanning of America (1995)

1459) Nowhere is civilization so perfectly mirrored as in speech. If our knowledge of speech, or the speech itself, is not yet perfect, neither is civilization.

Mario Pei
quoted by Samuel R. Delany
as the epigram for
Babel-17 (1966)

1460) The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together. In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

Eric Hoffer
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973) [WQ]

[Note: This quote, in the form

In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists

is frequently credited to Al Rogers of GlobalSchool Net, from a speech at the CUE Annual Conference, but Rogers has said that he was quoting from Hoffer, who was extending an idea that originated with Alvin Toffler:

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.

Alvin Toffler
Future Shock (1970)]