If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you open to my ideas
John CleeseRead
Sci-fi has never really been my bag. But I do believe in a lot of weird things these days, such as synchronicity. Quantum physics suggests it's possible, so why not?
Interpretation
The speaker expresses a belief in unusual phenomena, connecting them to quantum physics and synchronicity.
John Cleese reflects on his ambivalence towards science fiction while acknowledging his openness to believing in unconventional ideas. He highlights synchronicity—meaningful coincidences—and relates it to quantum physics, suggesting that if science allows for such oddities, then it's reasonable to entertain them. This quote bridges the gap between skepticism and wonder, inviting a broader view of reality influenced by scientific principles.
In practice
During a discussion about the intersection of science and fantasy.
If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you open to my ideas
Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.
If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time to be considering alternative strategies.
In Britain, girls seem to be either bright or attractive. In America, that's not the case. They're both.
I used to desire many, many things, but now I have just one desire, and that's to get rid of all my other desires.
When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy.
Someday someone will write a pathology of experimental physics and bring to light all those swindles which subvert our reason, beguile our judgement and, what is worse, stand in the way of any practical progress. The phenomena must be freed once and for all from their grim torture chamber of empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism; they must be brought before the jury of man's common sense.
The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections.
There does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There are science and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit of the tree which bears it.
We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldnt want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.
Forging differs from hoaxing, inasmuch as in the later the deceit is intended to last for a time, and then be discovered, to the ridicule of those who have credited it; whereas the forger is one who, wishing to acquire a reputation for science, records observations which he has never made.
A mathematician's work is mostly a tangle of guesswork, analogy, wishful thinking and frustration, and proof, far from being the core of discovery, is more often than not a way of making sure that our minds are not playing tricks.
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