Jacob Bronowski
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
book school men
Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.
mean illumination light
The values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and injustice, good and evil, means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.
power understanding products
Power is the by-product of understanding.
fate men revolution
Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.
errors progress exploration
Progress is the exploration of our own error.
helping problem theory
A theory in its day helps to solve the problems of the day.
men ascent brilliant
I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.
men intuition muscles
Mass, time , magnetic moment, the unconscious: we have grown up with these symbolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told that man had once to create them for himself. He had indeed, and he has: for mass is not an intuition in the muscle, and time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.
way social method
There is a social injunction implied in the positivist and analyst methods. This social axiom is that :;:;:;:;:;:; We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so.
errors enough subtle
Nature is more subtle, more deeply intertwined and more strangely integrated than any of our pictures of her than any of our errors. It is not merely that our pictures are not full enough; each of our pictures in the end turns out to be so basically mistaken that the marvel is that it worked at all.
reality portraits appearance
The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things.
spring lying home
The force that makes the winter grow Its feathered hexagons of snow , and drives the bee to match at home Their calculated honeycomb, Is abacus and rose combined. An icy sweetness fills my mind , A sense that under thing and wing Lies, taut yet living , coiled, the spring .
science ruins shame
Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.
art believe personality
The private motives of scientists are not the trend of science. The trend of science is made by the needs of society: navigation before the eighteenth century, manufacture thereafter; and in our age I believe the liberation of personality. Whatever the part which scientists like to act, or for that matter which painters like to dress, science shares the aims of our society just as art does.