magicpotion

Humans beings tend to prefer inferences to impersonal descriptions, because they are more dynamic and emotional. We turn the sun and the moon into gods long before we dispassionately record their motion. The reason the scientific method is so disquieting to many laymen is that it holds to descriptions first, to inferences, if any, next. It keeps its orders clear.

—Stuart Chase, (1888-1985) American engineer, economist, and author of The Tyranny of Words (via mymindtank)

(via mymindtank)

The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.

— Denis Diderot, Pensées Philosophiques

Doubt is the origin of wisdom.

—Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

(Source: philphys)

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

—Bertrand Russell (via philphys)

We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world - its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and not be afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.

—Bertrand Russell (via usakeh)

(via contemplatingmadness)

When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only: What are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts.

—Bertrand Russell (via quotesandthat)

(via theweirdthewonderful)

I should make it my object to teach thinking, not orthodoxy, or even heterodoxy. And I should absolutely never sacrifice intellect to the fancied interest of morals.

—Bertrand Russell, On Education Especially in Early Childhood (via philphys)

Science can only state what is, not what should be.

— Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years

(Source: scinerds, via theweirdthewonderful)

We are part of the Universe; Its fate is our fate; we live in it and it lives in us. How can anything be more important, relevant and useful than understanding its workings?

—Brian Cox  (via rayax)

(Source: lookingforether)

How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?

—Albert Einstein

Mathematics, which reaches down to our deepest intuitions and outward toward the nature of the universe—mathematics, which explains the atoms as well as the stars in their courses, and lets us see into the ways that rivers and arteries branch. For mathematics itself is the study of connections: how things ideally must and, in fact, do sort together—beyond, around, and within us. It doesn’t just help us balance our checkbooks; it leads us to see the balances hidden in the tumble of events, the shapes of those quiet symmetries behind the random clatter of things. And at the same time, we come to savor it, like music, wholly for itself. Applied or pure, mathematics gives whoever enjoys it a matchless self-confidence, along with a sense of partaking in truths that follow neither from persuasion nor faith but stand foursquare on their own.

—Robert Kaplan (via daisyblue)

(via contemplatingmadness)

Mathematics is the abstract key which turns the lock of the physical world.

—John Polkinhorne (via contemplatingmadness)

These days, mathematics books tend to be awash with symbols, but mathematical notation no more is mathematics than musical notation is music. A page of sheet music represents a piece of music; the music itself is what you get when the notes on the page are sung or performed on a musical instrument. It is in its performance that the music comes alive and becomes part of our experience; the music exists not on the printed page, but in our minds. The same is true for mathematics; the symbols on a page are just a representation of the mathematics. When read by a competent performer (in this case, someone trained in mathematics), the symbols on the printed page come alive—the mathematics lives and breathes in the mind of the reader like some abstract symphony.

—Keith Devlin, The Language of Mathematics: Making the Invisible Visible

(Source: contemplatingmadness)