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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1f3672f | Rather than try to conform, he made a point of being different, dressing and carrying himself as a dandy. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| ac87c48 | No scientist before Leonardo had methodically shown how birds stay aloft. Most had simply embellished on Aristotle, who mistakenly thought that birds were supported by air the way ships were by water.12 Leonardo realized that keeping aloft in air requires fundamentally different dynamics than doing so in water, because birds are heavier than air and are thus subject to being pulled down by gravity. The first two folios of his Codex on the F.. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| 28c36e5 | See how the wings, striking against the air, sustain the heavy eagle in the thin air on high," he noted, then added, "As much force is exerted by the object against the air as by the air against the object."16 Two hundred years later, Newton would state a refined version of this as his third law of motion: "To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction." | Walter Isaacson | ||
| 7094932 | Another analogy he made was comparing the way that light, sound, magnetism, and the percussion reverberations caused by a hammer blow all disseminate in a radiating pattern, often in waves. In one of his notebooks he made a column of small drawings showing how each force field spreads. He even illustrated what happened when each type of wave hits a small hole in the wall; prefiguring the studies done by Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens al.. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| 0bff186 | When birds are descending near the ground and the head is below the tail, they lower the tail, which is spread wide open, and take short strokes with the wings; consequently, the head is raised above the tail, and the speed is checked so that the bird can alight on the ground without a shock."9 Ever notice all that?" | Walter Isaacson | ||
| 1b45987 | Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| c0154b9 | I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| 6fdcbe0 | Its leading thinkers embraced a Renaissance humanism that put its faith in the dignity of the individual and in the aspiration to find happiness on this earth through knowledge. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| e720470 | You may discover in the patterns on the wall a resemblance to various landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and hills in varied arrangement; or again you may see battles and figures in action; or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of objects, which you could turn into complete and well-drawn forms. The effect produced by these mottled walls is like that of the sound of bells, in which.. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| 45dd53a | Early in April 1933, the German government passed a law declaring that Jews (defined as anyone with a Jewish grandparent) could not hold an official position, including at the Academy or at the universities. Among those forced to flee were fourteen Nobel laureates and twenty-six of the sixty professors of theoretical physics in the country. Fittingly, such refugees from fascism who left Germany or the other countries it came to dominate--Ei.. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| ecb57f6 | Suddenly Einstein jumped up. "What are you doing?" he demanded. "Are you boiling the liver in water?" Mrs. Frank allowed that was indeed what she was doing. "The boiling-point of water is too low," Einstein declared. "You must use a substance with a higher boiling-point such as butter or fat." From then on, Mrs. Frank referred to the necessity of frying liver as "Einstein's theory." | Walter Isaacson | ||
| bd4b091 | The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn't love him--the United States government," Einstein said." | Walter Isaacson | ||
| 437ee27 | Einstein was not used to self-righting political systems. Nor did he fully appreciate how resilient America's democracy and its nurturing of individual liberty could be. So for a while his disdain deepened. But he was saved from serious despair by his wry detachment and his sense of humor. He was not destined to die a bitter man. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| 25a2aad | He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| bf40d3e | The attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people, | Walter Isaacson | ||
| 1e9b7b6 | Blink your eye and look at it again. That which you see was not there at first, and that which was there is no more. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| 5ce475b | The glory of being an artist, he realized, was that reality should inform but not constrain. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| 461900b | His unstoppable curiosity triumphed, and Leonardo went into the cave. There he discovered, embedded in the wall, a fossil whale. "Oh mighty and once-living instrument of nature," he wrote, "your vast strength was to no avail."26 Some scholars have assumed that he was describing a fantasy hike or riffing on some verses by Seneca. But his notebook page and those surrounding it are filled with descriptions of layers of fossil shells, and many .. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| ddd144f | His scientific understanding of optics thus enhanced the three-dimensional illusion of the painting.8 | Walter Isaacson | ||
| 6124771 | Leonardo's willingness to question and then abandon the enticing analogy between the circulation of water on the earth and the circulation of blood in the human body shows his curiosity and ability to be open-minded. Throughout his life, he was brilliant at discerning patterns and abstracting from them a framework that could be applied across disciplines. His geology studies show an even greater talent: not letting these patterns blind him... | Walter Isaacson | ||
| c84d7f9 | Brunelleschi's successor as a theorist of linear perspective was another of the towering Renaissance polymaths, Leon Battista Alberti (1404 -1472), who refined many of Brunelleschi's experiments and extended his discoveries about perspective. An artist, architect, engineer, and writer, Alberti was like Leonardo in many ways: both were illegitimate sons of prosperous fathers, athletic and good-looking, never-married, and fascinated by everyt.. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| 04f360f | Having outgrown its Manhattan headquarters, most of Bell Labs moved to two hundred rolling acres in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Mervin Kelly and his colleagues wanted their new home to feel like an academic campus, but without the segregation of various disciplines into different buildings. They knew that creativity came through chance encounters. "All buildings have been connected so as to avoid fixed geographical delineation between departme.. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| 74e29c0 | It's like Michael Cunningham says in The Hours: Happiness is believing that you're gonna be happy. It's hope. | Caroline Kepnes | ||
| 84733c6 | There is only one way to respect the substance of any purported God-given moral edict: consider it conscientiously in the full light of reason, using all the evidence at our command. No God that was pleased by displays of unreasoning love would be worthy of worship. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 4ed1613 | I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound--if I can remember any of the damn things. --Dorothy Parker | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 2eea17c | We have all heard the forlorn refrain "Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!" This phrase has come to stand for the rueful reflection of an idiot, a sign of stupidity, but in fact we should appreciate it as a pillar of wisdom. Any being, any agent, who can truly say, "Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!" is standing on the threshold of brilliance. We" | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| c5bcce3 | It is worth recalling that it took brave pioneers many years to overcome the powerful taboo against the dissection of human cadavers during the early years of modern medicine. And we should note that, notwithstanding the outrage and revulsion with which the idea of dissection was then received, overcoming that tradition has not led to the feared collapse of morality and decency. We live in an era in which human corpses are still treated wit.. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 261c9ff | Anything that is usefully and voluminously predictable from the intentional stance is, by definition, an intentional system, and as we shall see, many fascinating and complicated things that don't have brains or eyes or ears or hands, and hence really don't have minds, are nevertheless intentional systems. Folk psychology's basic trick, that is to say, has some bonus applications outside the world of human interactions. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| ebe0989 | Our manifest image, unlike the daisy's ontology or Umwelt, really is manifest, really is subjective in a strong sense. It's the world we live in, the world according to us. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 2666355 | Some philosophical research projects -- or problematics, to speak with the more literary types -- are rather like working out the truths of chess. A set of mutually agreed-upon rules are presupposed -- and seldom discussed -- and the implications of those rules are worked out, articulated, debated, refined. So far, so good. Chess is a deep and important human artifact, about which much of value has been written. But some philosophical resea.. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| b66bb79 | normalnoto polozhenie na neshchata za vsiaka zhivo s'shchestvo, koeto se razmnozhava, e takova, che pri vsiako pokolenie se razhda po-mnogobroino potomstvo, otkolkoto e v'zmozhno da se v'zproizvede. Inache kazano, nozh't pochti vinagi e oprian do kokala. Poznat primer za deistvieto na praviloto na Maltus e razmnozhavaneto na populatsiia ot drozhdi v parche testo ili grozdov sok. Blagodarenie na izobilieto ot zakhari i drugi khranitelni vesh.. | дрожди Малтус популационна-експлозия | Daniel C. Dennett | |
| f3832ea | In this section I have tried to demonstrate that Darwinian thinking does live up to its billing as universal acid: it turns the whole traditional world upside down, challenging the top-down image of designs flowing from that genius of geniuses, the Intelligent Designer, and replacing it with the bubble-up image of mindless, motiveless cyclical processes churning out ever-more robust combinations until they start replicating on their own, sp.. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| fcc572a | Some people would much prefer the infinite regress of mysteries, apparently, but in this day and age the cost is prohibitive: you have to get yourself deceived. You can either deceive yourself or let others do the dirty work, but there is no intellectually defensible way of rebuilding the mighty barriers to comprehension that Darwin smashed. (p.25) | delusion infinite-regress religion | Daniel C. Dennett | |
| 789c05c | If I burst into a house and yell to all assembled, "Put on the kettle!" I have uttered an imperative English sentence, but some will probably infer that I would like to have a cup of tea or other hot beverage, while another may further surmise that I feel myself at home here, and may in fact be the occupant of this house. Yet another person present, a monoglot Hungarian, may infer only that I speak English, and so does whomever I am address.. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| b464605 | As Dawkins goes on to say (p. 316), "The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity." This is one of the key strengths of Darwin's idea, and the key weakness of the alternatives. In fact, I once argued, it is unlikely that any other theory could have this strength:" | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 59c9350 | T]he idea of treating Mind as an effect rather than as a First Cause is too revolutionary for some-an "awful stretcher" that their own minds cannot acommodate comfortably. This is as true today as it was in 1860, and it has always been as true of some of evolution's best friends as of its foes. For instance, the physicist Paul Davies, in his recent book , proclaims that the reflective power of human minds can be "no trivial detail, no mino.. | evolution natural-selection purpose | Daniel C. Dennett | |
| 47eee43 | Ignorance is a necessary condition for many excellent things. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 5923f95 | We can now expose perhaps the most common misunderstanding of Darwinism: the idea that Darwin showed that evolution by natural selection is a procedure for producing Us. Ever since Darwin proposed his theory, people have often misguidedly tried to interpret it as showing that we are the destination, the goal, the point of all that winnowing and competition, and our arrival on the scene was guaranteed by the mere holding of the tournament. T.. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| ba66f59 | Ancestor worship must be an appealing idea to those who are about to become ancestors. --Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 4282b8f | Asked by a student for an example of infectious cultural junk that is hard to eradicate, I replied, "Well, it's like, when, like, you use a phrase which, like, isn't really, like, doing any serious work, but, like you go on, like, using it." To which the student replied, "I, like, understand the point, but I wanted, like, an example." | mind | Daniel C. Dennett | |
| dc7b3f9 | But unless dualism or vitalism is true (in which case you have some extra, secret ingredient in you), you are made of robots--or what comes to the same thing, a collection of trillions of macromolecular machines. And all of these are ultimately descended from the original macros. So something made of robots can exhibit genuine consciousness, or genuine intentionality, because you do if anything does. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| b836031 | Take, for instance, the possible fat man in that doorway; and, again, the possible bald man in that doorway. Are they the same possible man, or two possible men? How do we decide? How many possible men are there in that doorway? Are there more possible thin ones than fat ones? How many of them are alike? Or would their being alike make them one? Are no two possible things alike? Is this the same as saying that it is impossible for two thing.. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| dc08302 | Science cannot promise eternal truths; only the elimination of false hypotheses and the establishment of what is currently the most likely explanation of an aspect of reality | David Filkin | ||
| 5c2d596 | A.W. Tozer captured these ideas very well when he wrote: Here is my view: God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil. When he chooses to do evil, he does not thereby countervail the sovereign will of God but fulfills it, inasmuch as the eternal decree decided not which choice the man should make but that he should b.. | John C Lennox |