Science Says by Rob Kaplan

Author:Rob Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ereads.com
Published: 2001-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

7 Good and Evil, Life and Death

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.

Isaac Asimov, “How Easy to See the Future,” Natural History, April 1975

Now we are all sons of bitches.

Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge, on the first atomic bomb test, July 16, 1945, in The Decision to Drop the Bomb by Len Giovanitti and Fred Freed (1965) [See Thomas Farrell and J. Robert Oppenheimer]

The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

General Omar Bradley, in a speech in Boston, Massachusetts, November 10, 1948

Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research not only intellectually but also morally…the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physics to pursue. They may lead us—to put it in extreme terms—to the Buddha or to the bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take.

Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (1982)

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Noam Chomsky, in a television interview, in Listener, April 6, 1978

It would be impossible, it would be against the scientific spirit.…Physicists should always publish their researches completely. If our discovery has a commercial future that is a circumstance from which we should not profit. If radium is to be used in the treatment of disease, it is impossible for us to take advantage of that.

Marie Curie, in a discussion with her husband, Pierre, about the patenting of radium, in Marie Curie by Eve Curie (1939)

Science through its physical technological consequences is now determining the relations which human beings, severally and in groups, sustain to one another. If it is incapable of developing moral techniques which will also determine those relations, the split in modern culture goes so deep that not only democracy but all civilized values are doomed.

John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (1939)

Natural science has outstripped moral and political science. That is too bad; but it is a fact, and the fact does not disappear because we close our eyes to it.

John Foster Dulles, War or Peace (1950)

Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.

Albert Einstein, in a letter to Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh-Omnes’ widow, February 25, 1926

Morality is of the highest importance—but for us, not for God.

Albert Einstein, in a letter to a banker in Colorado, August 1927, in Albert Einstein, the Human Side by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman (1979)

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves—such an ethical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty.…The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.

Albert Einstein, “What I Believe,” Forum and Century, 1930

Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth.

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