Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
Interpretation
Science has been the primary driver of change in the modern world, especially during the seventeenth century.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell emphasizes the profound impact that scientific advancements have had on shaping the modern world. He points out that many of the distinguishing features of contemporary society—technology, medicine, and rational thought—are rooted in the discoveries and developments that took place during the seventeenth century, marking a pivotal shift in human understanding and capability.
In practice
In a lecture about the Renaissance, this quote highlights the importance of scientific progress.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
Let's get into talking about how autism is similar animal behavior. The thing is I don't think in a language, and animals don't think in a language. It's sensory based thinking, thinking in pictures, thinking in smells, thinking in touches. It's putting these sensory based memories into categories.
We fly to 106 kilometers. We've always had as our mission that we always wanted to fly above the Karman line because we didn't want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you're an astronaut or not.
Modern science is fast-moving, and no laboratory can exist for long with a program based on old facilities. Innovation and renewal are required to keep a laboratory on the frontiers of science.
Just as computer technology and the Internet created whole new industries and extraordinary benefits for people that extend into almost every realm of human endeavor from education to transportation to medicine, genetics will undoubtedly benefit people everywhere in ways we can't even imagine but know will surely occur.
[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right.
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