If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?
Richard PowersRead
I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.
Interpretation
Science provides a comprehensive understanding of how everything in the universe is interconnected.
In this quote, Richard Powers expresses a deep appreciation for science, suggesting that it offers a holistic perspective on the world. He implies that within the realm of scientific inquiry, individuals can see how various elements of existence relate to each other, thereby gaining a more profound understanding of life and the universe as a whole.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of education, I would quote this to emphasize the significance of science in understanding the world.
If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?
This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.
The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.
We build our technologies as a way of addressing all our anxieties and desires. They are our passions congealed into these prosthetic extensions of ourselves. And they do it in a way that reflects what we dream ourselves capable of doing.
What we can do should never by itself determine what we choose to do, yet this is the way technology tends to work.
I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.
Understanding vision and building visual systems is really understanding intelligence.
Drug company payments to doctors are a small part of a much larger strategy by Big Pharma to clean our pockets.
We have at most ten years - not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions... We are near a tipping point, a point of no return, beyond which the built in momentum and feedbacks will carry us to levels of climate change with staggering consequences for humanity and all of the residents of this planet.
One of the reasons for its success is that science has a built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition.
It appears that anything you say about the way that theory and experiment may interact is likely to be correct, and anything you say about the way that theory and experiment must interact is likely to be wrong.
The investigation of nature is an infinite pasture-ground where all may graze, and where the more bite, the longer the grass grows, the sweeter is its flavor, and the more it nourishes.
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