1. Zitate
  2. Autoren
  3. John Horgan

John Horgan Zitate

John Horgan ist ein US-amerikanischer Wissenschaftsjournalist und Publizist. Sein bekanntestes Werk ist das 1996 erschienene und in 13 Sprachen übersetzte Buch „An den Grenzen des Wissens“, in welchem er seine Auffassung darlegt, dass der Fortschritt der Wissenschaft – insbesondere derjenige der Grundlagenforschung – aufgrund sozialer, ökonomischer, physikalischer und kognitiver Beschränkungen begrenzt sei und das Zeitalter der wissenschaftlichen Entdeckungen zu Ende sei. Im Forbes Media Guide wurde er 1994 als einer der einflussreichsten Journalisten der USA aufgeführt. Wikipedia  

✵ 1953
John Horgan Foto
John Horgan: 14   Zitate 0   Gefällt mir

John Horgan: Zitate auf Englisch

“Newton's version of gravity violates common sense. How can one thing tug at another across vast spans of space? …Newton's formalism nonetheless provided an astonishingly accurate means of calculating the orbits of planets; it was too effective to deny.”

Help us translate this quote
John Horgan (journalist)

Quelle: The End of Science (1996), p. 66

“Of course, the apparent disarray could have stemmed entirely from my own ignorance. But when I revealed my impression of confusion and dissonance to one of the attendees, he reassured me that my perception was accurate. “It’s a mess,” he said of the conference (and, by implication, the whole business of interpreting quantum mechanics). The problem, he noted, arose because, for the most part, the different interpretations of quantum mechanics cannot be empirically distinguished from one another; philosophers and physicists favor one interpretation over another for aesthetic and philosophical—that is, subjective—reasons.”

Help us translate this quote
John Horgan (journalist)

Quelle: The End of Science (1996), p. 88

“Physicists do not believe quantum mechanics because it explains the world, but because it predicts the outcome of experiments with almost miraculous accuracy. Theorists kept predicting new particles and other phenomena, and experiments kept bearing out those predictions.”

Help us translate this quote
John Horgan (journalist)

Quelle: The End of Science (1996), p. 70

“Science has only existed for a few hundred years, and its most spectacular achievements have occurred within the last century. Viewed from a historical perspective, the modern era of rapid scientific and technological progress appears to be not a permanent feature of reality, but an abberation, a fluke, a product of a singular convergence of social, intellectual, and political factors.”

Help us translate this quote
John Horgan (journalist)

Quelle: The End of Science (1996), p. 14

“Of the three great skeptics I interviewed, Popper was the first to make his mark. His philosophy stemmed from his effort to distinguish pseudoscience, such as Marxism or astrology or Freudian psychology, from genuine science, such as Einstein's theory of relativity. The latter, Popper decided, was testable; it made predictions about the world that could be empirically checked. The logical positivists had said as much. But Popper denied the positivist assertion that scientists can prove a theory through induction, or repeated empirical tests or observations. One never knows if one's observations have been sufficient; the next observation might contradict all that preceded it. Observations can never prove a theory but can only disprove, or falsify it. Popper often bragged that he had "killed" logical positivism with this argument.”

Help us translate this quote
John Horgan (journalist)

Quelle: The End of Science (1996), p. 27

“Einstein had drawn attention to nonlocality in 1935 in an effort to show that quantum mechanics must be flawed. …Einstein proposed a thought experiment—now called the EPR experiment—involving two particles that spring from a common source and fly in opposite directions.
According to the standard model of quantum mechanics, neither particle has a definite position or momentum before it is measured; but by measuring the momentum of one particle, the physicist instantaneously forces the other particle to assume a fixed position… Deriding this effect as "spooky action at a distance," Einstein argued that it violated both common sense and his own theory of special relativity, which prohibits the propagation of effects faster than the speed of light; quantum mechanics must therefore be an incomplete theory. In 1980, however, a group of French physicists carried out a version of the EPR experiment and showed that it did indeed give rise to spooky action.”

Help us translate this quote
John Horgan (journalist)

The reason that the experiment does not violate special relativity is that one cannot exploit nonlocality to transmit information.
Quelle: The End of Science (1996), p. 83

“In Theories of Everything… John Barrow argued that Gödel's incompleteness theorem undermines the very notion of a complete theory of nature. Gödel established that any moderately complex system of axioms inevitably raises questions that cannot be answered about the axioms. The implication is that any theory will always have loose ends. Barrow also pointed out that a unified theory of particle physics would not really be a theory of everything, but only a theory of all particles and forces. The theory would have little or nothing to say about phenomena that make our lives meaningful, such as love or beauty.”

Help us translate this quote
John Horgan (journalist)

Quelle: The End of Science (1996), p. 66

“Kuhn's recognition that science might cease—leaving us with what Charles Sanders Peirce had defined as the "truth" about nature—made it even more imperative for Kuhn than for Popper to challenge science's authority, to deny that science can ever arrive at absolute truth. "The one thing I think you shouldn't say is that now we've found out what the world is really like," Kuhn said. "Because that's not what I think the game is about."”

Help us translate this quote
John Horgan (journalist)

Quelle: The End of Science (1996), Ch. 2 : The End of Philosophy

“I had barely sat down when he began to tell me… that science writers were "ignoramuses" and a "terrible breed" who invariably got things wrong: only scientists were really qualified to present their work to the masses. As time went on, I felt less offended, since it became clear that Gell-Mann held most of his scientific colleagues in contempt as well.”

Help us translate this quote
John Horgan (journalist)

Quelle: The End of Science (1996), p. 212

“Our descendants will learn much more about nature, and they will invent gadgets even cooler than smart phones. But their scientific version of reality will resemble ours, for two reasons: First, ours… is in many respects true; most new knowledge will merely extend and fill in our current maps of reality rather than forcing radical revisions. Second, some major remaining mysteries—Where did the universe come from? How did life begin? How, exactly, does a chunk of meat make a mind?—might be unsolvable.”

Help us translate this quote
John Horgan (journalist)

“In the early 1990s, I came to suspect that the quest for a unified theory is religious rather than scientific. Physicists want to show that all things came from one thing: a force, or essence, or membrane wriggling in eleven dimensions, or something that manifests perfect mathematical symmetry. In their search for this primordial symmetry, however, physicists have gone off the deep end, postulating particles and energies and dimensions whose existence can never be experimentally verified.”

Help us translate this quote
John Horgan (journalist)

(2002 wager, 18 year duration) [Bet 12 (John Horgan vs. Michio Kaku), longbets.org, http://longbets.org/12/]

“Between sessions at a physics conference, I asked a number of attendees: Who is the smartest physicist of them all? …the name mentioned most often was Witten's. He seemed to evoke a special kind of awe, as though he belonged to a category unto himself. He is often likened to Einstein; one colleague reached even further back for a comparison, suggesting that Witten possessed the greatest mathematical mind since Newton.”

Help us translate this quote
John Horgan (journalist)

Quelle: The End of Science (1996), p. 60

“Feyerabend's Dadaesque rhetoric concealed a deadly serious point: the human compulsion to find absolute truths, however noble, too often culminates in tyranny. Feyerabend attacked science not because he truly believed that it had no more claim to truth than did astrology. Quite the contrary. Feyerabend attacked science because he recognized—and he was horrified by—its power, its potential to stamp out the diversity of human thought and culture. He objected to scientific certainty for moral and political, rather than for epistemological, reasons.”

Help us translate this quote
John Horgan (journalist)

Quelle: The End of Science (1996), p. 48

“One of the things that makes Gell-Mann so insufferable is that he is almost always right.”

Help us translate this quote
John Horgan (journalist)

Quelle: The End of Science (1996), p. 215

Ähnliche Autoren

Pier Paolo Pasolini Foto
Pier Paolo Pasolini 2
italienischer Filmregisseur, Publizist und Dichter
Henry Louis Mencken Foto
Henry Louis Mencken 34
US-amerikanischer Publizist und Schriftsteller
Helen Rowland Foto
Helen Rowland 1
US-amerikanische Journalistin
Kurt Vonnegut Foto
Kurt Vonnegut 4
US-amerikanischer Schriftsteller
Isidor Isaac Rabi Foto
Isidor Isaac Rabi 1
US-amerikanischer Physiker
Samuel Beckett Foto
Samuel Beckett 66
irischer Schriftsteller, Literaturnobelpreisträger
Allen Ginsberg Foto
Allen Ginsberg 10
US-amerikanischer Dichter
Truman Capote Foto
Truman Capote 74
US-amerikanischer Schriftsteller
Ernst Jünger Foto
Ernst Jünger 542
deutscher Schriftsteller und Publizist
Henry Miller Foto
Henry Miller 11
US-amerikanischer Schriftsteller und Maler