John Charles Polanyi
John Charles Polanyi
John Charles Polanyi, PC CC FRSC OOnt FRSis a Hungarian-Canadian chemist who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for his research in chemical kinetics. Polanyi was educated at the University of Manchester, and did postdoctoral research at the National Research Council in Canada and Princeton University in New Jersey. Polanyi's first academic appointment was at the University of Toronto, and he remains there as of 2014. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Polanyi has received numerous other awards, including...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth23 January 1929
CountryCanada
Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression.
Today, Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights.
Idealism is the highest form of reason.
Our assessment of socio-economic worth is largely a sham. We scientists should not lend ourselves to it - though we routinely do. We should, instead, insist on applying the criterion of quality.
Scientists and scholars should constitute themselves as an international NGO of exceptional authority.
Nothing is more irredeemably irrelevant than bad science.
When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves. Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.
The respect for human rights, essential if we are to use technology wisely, is not something alien that must be grafted onto science. On the contrary, it is integral to science, as also to scholarship in general.
Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow.
I knew, however, that it would cost ten times what I had available in order to build a molecular beam machine. I decided to follow a byway, rather than the highway. It is a procedure I have subsequently recommended to beginning scientists in this country, where research strategy is best modelled on that used by Wolfe at the Plains of Abraham.
It takes a trained and discerning researcher to keep the goal in sight, and to detect evidence of the creeping progress toward it.
Individual scientists like myself - and many more conspicuous - pointed to the dangers of radioactive fallout over Canada if we were to launch nuclear weapons to intercept incoming bombers.
At the heart of science lies discovery which involves a change in worldview. Discovery in science is possible only in societies which accord their citizens the freedom to pursue the truth where it may lead and which therefore have respect for different paths to that truth.
What makes the Universal Declaration an epochal document is first of all its global impetus and secondly the breadth of its claims, a commitment to a new social contract, binding on all the Governments of the world.