science-history

And who could really say what the future evolution of the sun would be like? Nobody had actually watched a star follow through its ten-billion-year evolutionary cycle, from birth to death; every theory was inferred from humankind's mayfly-like snapshot perception of the stars that happened to be scattered through the universe today.

Whatever the hell is going on here, science still works. I can figure it out.

"Computers were built in the late 1940s because mathematicians like John von Neumann thought that if you had a computer—a machine to handle a lot of variables simultaneously—you would be able to predict the weather. Weather would finally fall to human understanding. And men believed that dream for the next forty years. They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That's been a cherished scientific belief since Newton." "And?" "Chaos theory throws it right out the window. It says that you can never predict certain phenomena at all. You can never predict the weather more than a few days away. All the money that has been spent on long-range forecasting—about half a billion dollars in the last few decades—is money wasted. It's a fool's errand. It's as pointless as trying to turn lead into gold. We look back at the alchemists and laugh at what they were trying to do, but future generations will laugh at us the same way. We've tried the impossible—and spent a lot of money doing it. Because in fact there are great categories of phenomena that are inherently unpredictable." "Chaos says that?" "Yes, and it is astonishing how few people care to hear it," Malcolm said. "I gave all this information to Hammond long before he broke ground on this place. You're going to engineer a bunch of prehistoric animals and set them on an island? Fine. A lovely dream. Charming. But it won't go as planned. It is inherently unpredictable, just as the weather is."

"You know what's wrong with scientific power?" Malcolm said. "It's a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are. It never fails."

In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."

If we understand Nature, there is a prospect of controlling it or at least mitigating the harm it may bring. In this sense, science brought hope.

It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.

The stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional, compared to the stories told by literature. Only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read.

The engineers were able to achieve transmission speeds of up to 1,300 bits per second with the device, which they called a modulator-demodulator—a mouthful that they quickly shortened to "modem."

System/360 would popularize such terms as "byte," along with the convention of encoding data eight bits at a time.

The ancient flint spearhead was manufactured in minutes by a single person, who relied on the advice and help of a few intimate friends. The production of a modern nuclear warhead requires the cooperation of millions of strangers all over the world – from the workers who mine the uranium ore in the depths of the earth to theoretical physicists who write long mathematical formulas to describe the interactions of subatomic particles.

"And so it has come about that the American view of the history of nuclear physics has prevailed."6 Is that true? Well, the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, celebrating the American century in his 1997 inaugural address, proclaimed, "Along the way, Americans split the atom." No one, to my knowledge, rose to contradict that proof that the winners write the history.