The scientists who attack mainstream religion, rather than striving for peaceful coexistence with it, damage science, and also weaken the fight against fundamentalism.
Martin ReesRead
The challenge of global warming should stimulate a whole raft of manifestly benign innovations - for conserving energy and generating it by 'clean' means (biofuels, innovative renewables, carbon sequestration, and nuclear fusion).
Interpretation
What this quote means
Global warming should drive the development of positive, innovative solutions for energy conservation and production.
In this quote, Martin Rees highlights the critical opportunity presented by the challenge of global warming. Instead of viewing it solely as a peril, he emphasizes the potential for humanity to innovate and create environmentally friendly technologies that can help conserve energy and produce clean energy sources such as biofuels, renewable energy, carbon sequestration, and advancements in nuclear fusion. This perspective encourages a proactive approach to environmental issues, suggesting that they can spark beneficial advancements rather than be solely seen as obstacles.
Themes
Global WarmingInnovationClean EnergyEnvironmentSustainability
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about renewable energy at a conference, one could use this quote to inspire innovation in the face of climate change.
More from Martin Rees
All quotes βLet me say that I don't see any conflict between science and religion. I go to church as many other scientists do. I share with most religious people a sense of mystery and wonder at the universe and I want to participate in religious ritual and practices because they're something that all humans can share.
Martin ReesRead
It's becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics.
Martin ReesRead
In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it.
Martin ReesRead
Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity.
Martin ReesRead
It is astonishing that human brains, which evolved to cope with the everyday world, have been able to grasp the counterintuitive mysteries of the cosmos and the quantum.
Martin ReesRead
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The universe and the Laws of Physics seem to have been specifically designed for us. If any one of about 40 physical qualities had more than slightly different values, life as we know it could not exist: Either atoms would not be stable, or they wouldn't combine into molecules, or the stars wouldn't form heavier elements, or the universe would collapse before life could develop, and so on...
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One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together.
Francis CrickRead