17 quotes
Life is a partial, continuous, progressive, multiform and conditionally interactive self-realization of the potentialities of atomic electron states.
The progress in science has been anything but uniform in time and place.
Science in History (1954)
Hogben's Science for the Citizen would be an admirable text-book for such teaching.
The Social Function of Science (1939)
It would be as one-sided to assess the effects of science on society as of society on science.
Science in History (1954)
But if capitalism had built up science as a productive force, the very character of the new mode of production was serving to make capitalism itself unnecessary.
Marx and Science (1959)
The present aristocracy of western culture, at the very moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country.
The world, the flesh & the devil (1969)
The problem of the re-organization of science will not be solved by administrative or financial changes. It will also be necessary to reorganise in a most comprehensive way the whole apparatus of scientific communication.
The Social Function of Science (1939)
The problem [of specialization] is essentially that of communications to an army in action. After a rapid advance communications become disorganized, and there is a temporary halting until they are again in working order.
The world, the flesh & the devil (1969)
If science were communism, was it also not possible that communism could itself become a science?
The psychology of a complex mind must differ almost as much from that of a simple, mechanized mind as its psychology would from ours; because something that must underlie and perhaps be even greater than sex is involved.
The world, the flesh & the devil (1969)
As the scene of life would be more the cold emptiness of space than the warm, dense atmosphere of planets, the advantage of containing no organic material at all, so as to be independent of both these conditions, would be increasingly felt.
The world, the flesh & the devil (1969)
The paradoxes of wave and particle, it must make the world inside the atom and the wide spaces of the universe equally intelligible. It must have a different dimension from all previous world views, and include in itself an explanation of development and the origin of new things.
[The goal of efficiency was] a system in which all relevant information would be available to each research worker in an amplitude proportional to its degree of relevance.
The Social Function of Science (1939)
[S]cience has so changed its nature over... human history that no definition could be made to fit.
Science in History (1954)
One of the questions on which clarity of thinking is now most necessary is that of the relation between the methods of science and of Marxist philosophy. Although much has already been written on the subject, yet there is still an enormous amount of confusion and contradictory statement.
The theme which constantly recurs is the complex interaction between techniques, science, and philosophy. Science stands as a middle term between the established and transmitted practice of men who work for a living, and the pattern of ideas and traditions which assure the continuity of society and the rights and privileges of the classes that make it up.
Science in History (1954)
In my own field, x-ray crystallography, we used to work out the structure of minerals by various dodges which we never bothered to write down, we just used them. Then Linus Pauling came along to the laboratory, saw what we were doing and wrote out what we now call Pauling's Rules. We had all been using Pauling's Rules for about three or four years before Pauling told us what the rules were.