Jacob Bronowski
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Jacob Bronowski
Jacob Bronowskiwas a British mathematician, historian of science, theatre author, poet and inventor. Of Polish-Jewish origin, he is best remembered as the presenter and writer of the 1973 BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man, and the accompanying book...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth1 September 1908
writing unique men
There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B. F. Skinner.
echoes choices males
The preoccupation with the choice of a mate both by male and female I regard as a continuing echo of the major selective force by which we have evolved.
sex ignorance race
By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science.
mistake thinking creative
It is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual
respect men environment
Nature has not fitted man to any specific environment.
notebook facts leafs
Knowledge is not a loose leaf notebook of facts.
betrayal philosophy war
There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts--obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts.
discovery statistics ability
The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike.
dream real simple
Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides.
kings powerful hero
The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better. You see it in his science. You see it in the magnificence with which he carves and builds, the loving care, the gaiety, the effrontery. The monuments are supposed to commemorate kings and religions, heroes, dogmas, but in the end the man they commemorate is the builder.
ascent tribute knows
Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.
metaphor symbols
The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry
running simple law
It is often said that the progression from simple to complex runs counter to the normal statistics of chance that are formalized in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Strictly speaking, we could avoid this criticism simply by insisting that the Second Law does not apply to living systems in the environment in which we find them. For the Second Law applies only when there is no overall flow of energy into or out of a system, whereas all living systems are sustained by a net inflow of energy.
mind independence doe
Dissent is the mark of freedom, as originality is the mark of independence of mind. … No one can be a scientist … if he does not have independence of observation and of thought.