“I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question—such as,
What do you mean by mass? or acceleration, which is the scientific
equivalent of saying, Can you read?—not more than one in ten of the
highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language.
So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the
cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into
it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.”
C P Snow, The Two Cultures
“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs
of gas atoms. Nothing is ‘mere’. I too see the stars on a desert night,
and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens
stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can
catch one million year old light; a vast pattern of which I am a part . . ..
What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm
to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvellous
is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets
of the present not speak of it?”
Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics,
Volume I
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