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
errors progress exploration
Progress is the exploration of our own error.
discovery order giving
The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.
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.
science men talking
It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another if a man is a scientist, like me, he'll always say Publish and be damned.
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.
science men imagination
It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination; because without that, man and beliefs and science will perish together.
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.
philosophy two giving
All those formal systems, in mathematics and physics and the philosophy of science, which claim to give foundations for certain truth are surely mistaken. I am tempted to say that we do not look for truth, but for knowledge. But I dislike this form of words, for two reasons. First of all, we do look for truth, however we define it, it is what we find that is knowledge. And second, what we fail to find is not truth, but certainty; the nature of truth is exactly the knowledge that we do find.
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