Wednesday 17 December 2014

collection of interesting articles/ quotes

In politics, democracy is the most famous Greek idea that has come down to us.  It is closely followed by Science (Scientia= Knowledge originally).  This  most profitable area in human activity is generally reckoned to have  begun at Ionia,  the western fringe of Asia Minor (Modern Turkey) and the islands of the coast.  According to Erwin Schrodinger there are three main reasons why science began there.[Erwin Schroedinger, was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist who developed a number of fundamental results in the field of quantum theory, which formed the basis of wave mechanics: ]  First the region did not belong to a powerful State, which are usually hostile to free thinking.   Second, Ionians were a sea faring people, interposed between east and west, with strong trading links.  Mercantile exchange is always the principal force in the exchange of ideas,  which often stem from the solving of practical problems- navigation, means of transport,  water supply, handicrafts techniques. Third,  the area was not “priest- ridden”:  there was not , as  in Babylon and Egypt a hereditary,  privileged, priestly caste with a vested interest in the status quo.


What is reality?
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                   In other words reality is a lifeless piece of machinery, in which everything that occurs is the outcome of inert, material atoms moving according to their nature.  “No mind and no divinity intrude  into this world….There is no room for purpose or freedom”  (Atomists-Greece 2000 BC)


Evaluation

When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advances to the state of science, whatever the matter may be.
-Lord Kelvin (1824-1907)
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One could not be a successful scientist without relasing that in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and the mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull but also just stupid.
-James Watson

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