#science

"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."

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“So with each advance in understanding come new questions. So we need to be very humble. We shouldn't have hubris and think that we can understand everything. But history tells us that there is good reason to believe that we will continue making fantastic progress in the years ahead.”

“hat I had been missing... and what Feynman realized: physics is the ultimate intellectual adventure, the quest to understand the deepest mysteries of our Universe. ...t makes us see more clearly, adding to the beauty and wonder of the world ...he lens of physics adds more beauty to the world ...”

“It depends... on what you measure outrageousness in... If what you mean is that something is more extravagant if it... involves somehow having more particles, or reality being bigger... then sure. But... maybe the kind of simplicity that we should value with Occam's razor is rather that the math is simple. The equations are simple.”

“I... ended up at the, focusing on environmental issues. I wanted to... make our planet a better place, and felt that the main problem... that we didn't properly use... technology... I... was intrigued by... creating economic incentives that aligned... egoism with the common good. ...I soon grew disillusioned, concluding that economics was... intellectual prostitution... rewarded for saying what the powers that be wanted to hear. ...he book that changed everything: ...hat did Feynman see that I missed in high school? ...I sat down with... ... and started reading, "If... all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed... " ...I read on ...I felt like I was having a religious experience I finally got it!”

“Eratosthenes... knew that the Sun was straight overhead in... Syene at noon on the summer solstice, but that it was 7.2 degrees south of straight overhead in, located 794 kilometers farther north. He concluded... 794 kilometers corresponded to 7.2 degrees out of the 360 degrees... around Earth's circumference, so that the circumference must be... 39,700 km...”

“If I get a parking ticket, there is always a parallel universe where I didn't. On the other hand, there is yet another universe where my car was stolen.”