1849) What is truly troubling about the "cultural" or "critical" study of science as it tends to be carried out in universities today is what is troubling about postmodernism in general. By teaching that the distinction between true and false is one more repressive human fiction, postmodernism promotes contempt for the truth and undermines the virtues of intellectual integrity. Those who have never performed an experiment or mastered an equation can, therefore, enjoy a sneering superiority based on the alleged insight that science is a form of literary invention distinguished primarily by its outsized social cachet.

Peter Berkowitz
"Science Fiction" in
The New Republic (7/1/1996)

[discussing Sokal's article "Transgressing the Boundaries:
Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum Gravity", in the journal Social Text
(Spring/Summer 1996), and his description of the hoax in
"A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies"
in the journal Lingua Franca (May 1996)]

1850) I never met [Theodore J.] Kaczynski [the Unabomber] [...] [b]ut in the blaze of publicity after his arraignment, I recognized where I'd seen him before: in the movies. In Hollywood, scientists star in dramas of destruction. In their quest for power, they bring trouble on us all. If convicted, Kaczynski will be perfect - he'll get top billing in the celluloid pantheon of scientists becoming monsters, replacing Vincent Price plotting murders in his laboratory or Dr. Strangelove wheeling through the War Room. He will become the apotheosis of the stereotype, the archetype of the scientist, run amok.

I don't want him as the governing image of scientists in popular imagination. If I get to pick an embodiment, it will be in the likeness of the numberless people who have extended my leisure time and life expectancy with their intelligent work, people exemplified by Paul Ehrlich or Marie Curie but never by the gaunt face of Theodore J. Kaczynski.

Anne Eisenberg
"Among the Papers in Kacyzinski's Cabin"
Scientific American (6/1996)

1851) [S]cience is an attempt [...] to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1996)
quoted by Joe Nickell in
"A Bright Light" [review] in
Scientific American (6/1996)

1852) Evidently the New Science, similarly to the New Math, has developed a New Scientific Method which requires no empirical evidence or rational argumentation, and of course the demand for coherence, logic, or "truth" is simply our old Eurocentric historical imperialist baggage being unjustly rammed down the throats of the innocents.

Zenon M. Feszczak
posted on [AMB] (6/13/1996)

1853) Clarke's Law of Revolutionary Ideas

Every revolutionary idea – in science, politics, art, or whatever – seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases:

1. "It's completely impossible – don't waste my time";


2. "It's possible, but it's not worth doing";


3. "I said it was a good idea all along."

Arthur C. Clarke
The Promise of Space (1968)

[Note: In The Quote Verifier [QV], Ralph Keyes gives this similar quote:

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.

Although frequently attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer, no trace of it in his writing has been found. Keyes concludes that it probably came from Louis Agassiz, perhaps elaborating on an earlier thought by Schopenhauer. Others who have had similiar quotes attributed to them, aside from Clarke, are Michel de Montaigne, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Huxley, William James, Elbert Hubbard, J.B.S. Haldane and Charles Kettering.

Clarke's Laws - First Law: 110, 111, 751, 752; Second Law: 753; Third Law: 109, 647, 754, 755, 1013, 1057, 1402]

1854) Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

Alan Turing
quoted by John D. Barrow in
Theories of Everything (1991)