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August 31 - September 13, 2021
Science is something like a third cousin of common sense twice removed.
Science is not about building a body of known ‘facts’. It is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good.
Because the gods, of course, existed. Ponder wouldn’t even attempt to deny it. He just didn’t believe in them.
It was easy to respect an invisible god. It was the ones that turned up everywhere, often drunk, that put people off.
‘Not exactly, sir,’ said Ponder, employing the phrase in its traditional sense of ‘absolutely wrong’.
"Up to a point, Lord Copper."
‘Yes, sir,’ Ponder disagreed.
fast. The digital orrery was developed by Jack Wisdom’s research group,
They were confusing ‘I can’t see a way for this to happen’ with ‘There is no way for this to happen.’
‘Good enough for physics,’ said Ridcully.
‘As far as I can see from this,’ interrupted the Senior Wrangler, who’d been reading HEX’S write-out on the more complex physics of the Project, ‘if you were travelling in a cart at the speed of light, and threw a ball ahead of you …’ he turned over the page, read on silently for a moment, creased his brows, turned the page over to see if any enlightenment was to be found on the other side, and went on ‘… your twin brother would … be fifty years older than you when you got home … I think.’
Captive imaginations do breed quite effectively, because they are protected from the terrible predator known as Thought.
About a thousand meteoroids bigger than a football hit Earth’s atmosphere each day, together with countless millions of smaller ones.
How often do we expect to see such a big one? About once every hundred million years.
Every year, we sweep up about 80,000 tones (tonnes) of it.
Velikovsky,
wasn’t very wrong in principle. Only in every single detail.
two or three times per day the Earth is illuminated by an intense burst of gamma-rays coming from somewhere out in space.
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