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John D. Barrow on Science

1952–2020 England

← All quotes by John D. Barrow

5 quotes

Life, like science and art, is a theory about the world: a theory that in our case takes bodily form.

The Artful Universe (1995)

Atomism began life as a philosophical idea that would fail virtually every contemporary test of what should be regarded as 'scientific'; yet, eventually, it became the cornerstone of physical science.

Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation (1991)

Mathematics became an experimental subject. Individuals could follow previously intractable problems by simply watching what happened when they were programmed into a personal computer.

Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science (2008)

In general, the shorter the possible representation... the less random... On this view we recognize science to be the search for algorithmic compressions.

New Theories of Everything (2007)

Scanning the past millennia of human achievement reveals just how much has been achieved during the last three hundred years since Newton set in motion the effective mathematization of Nature. We found that the world is curiously adapted to a simple mathematical description. It is enigma enough that the world is described by mathematics; but by simple mathematics, of the sort that a few years energetic study now produces familiarity with, this is an enigma within an enigma.

New Theories of Everything (2007)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: John D. Barrow (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.