"Physicists, we have a sort of arrogance... which has harmed us a lot. ...We forget that we're in a bubble and ...that there's actually a science of how you persuade people ...of how to communicate, and other people have studied that at great length. ...he average person who works making cigarette ads is much more scientific about the way they get their message out than the average physicist. ...t comes not from stupidity ...but from arrogance ...We're not going to stoop so low that we're going to be scientific about how we communicate... about how we advocate. We have to get off our high horses... If you get invaded by Hitler's army, you shouldn't just say... "Tanks are immoral, we're going to fight them with swords." We have to be scientific also about standing up for ourselves and our ideas... A second mistake... spending much more time infighting within our community of physicists, or... having one science pitted against another... for a few more tax dollars... losing sight of the fact that there's a tiny trickle of money that flows to all of the sciences combined... compared to... generic fruits of... corporate lobbying and random waste... So, get out of our bubble again. If we look at the big picture, it's kind of pathetic... that you have physicists, biologists, chemists, who together have built up most of the wealth of the world, and managed to be so incredibly navel-gazing and busy with infighting, and old-fashioned in how they communicate, that they have to come begging for money, and people don't listen to them."
React to this quote
More by Max Tegmark
See allResonant Thoughts
"If you want to earn good name, you must go of greed and comparison. If you see idle men in need of help, don't make them pay court to you, rather get some work out of them. If it will please the masse…"
Explore Further
Related Quotes
"Although in various other academic fields and area studies, such as race science, postcolonial scholarship …"
— Edwin Bryant"In science fiction, we dream. In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities, which are so far out of…"
— Ray Bradbury"The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor."
— Herbert Marcuse"In the first place there isn’t a distinguished anthropologist in the world but what you’ll find one equally…"
— Robert A. Heinlein"But a class of structures fraught with much greater evils exist in great abundance throughout the country—n…"
— William John Macquorn Rankine"As far as I could discover, the notion that a play could succeed without any further help from the actor th…"
— Herbert Beerbohm Tree

