14 quotes
When a view attains wide popularity and seems obviously beyond question, its decline has usually begun or will begin very soon.
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Nothing is more surprising than the surprises of history, and nothing more untrustworthy than the uncritical extrapolation of the tendencies of the recent past.
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Theory confronts experiment, and both sides are a mixture of obscurity and clarity.
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
No one is so brilliant that he can afford to neglect what history can teach him.
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Atomism originally stood for iconoclasm, impiety, and atheism, because the Greek atomists conceived a universe under the reign of chance.
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Discontinuity of its linguistic and logical terms is for the conscious analytical intellect psychologically and logically prior to notions of continuity.
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Did ever the history of the intellect so little conceal so much?
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
A clue to the future must lie in the past... every scientist, and everyone with intellectual curiosity, can learn something useful from a brief study of the history of atomism.
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
There are good reasons to expect... a return to a concreteness of basic ideas, to simpler fundamentals easily understood, to principles that will bring exact science closer to the human perspective.
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
No scientist has yet provided an acceptable definition of "mind" or "mental" that reveals the character of "unconscious mental processes," and no physicist a lucid definition of "elementary particles" that shows how they can appear or disappear, and why there are so many.
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Every scientific generation, measured by its most vocal members, exaggerates the historical importance of its own members. ...there is a perpetual temptation to study the latest and to neglect the past.
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
The material particle or the conscious mind—has been discovered not to be sufficiently unchanging to be treated as a thing in isolation... but more often to be the opposite: a changing system in a changing environment.
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
The most productive novelties often spring, in thought as in biological evolution, from more primitive and simpler forms, rather than from differentiated ones which, through their elaboration, have become too specialized to be adaptable to new tasks.
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
There is no doubt of the need for an up-to-date, balanced, and comprehensive work on the history of atomism, drawing ideas, mathematics, and experiment together into a single story. When available, it should become required reading for all students of the exact sciences.
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)