Heinz Pagels Quotes

26 Sourced Quotes

I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science.

Heinz Pagels
It is unlikely that we will ever see a star being born. Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the very young, but never their actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event. Stars are born inside thick clouds of dust and gas in the spiral arms of the galaxy, so thick that visible light cannot penetrate them.

Heinz Pagels
Science cannot resolve moral conflicts, but it can help to more accurately frame the debates about those conflicts.

Heinz Pagels
A theory can't be right if it can't also be wrong.

Heinz Pagels
I suppose my mind had been ruined for philosophy by studying too much physics, with its simple (some would say naive) pragmatism.

Heinz Pagels
The only touchstone for empirical truth is experiment and observation.

Heinz Pagels
As I realized what the abstract mathematics of quantum theory was actually saying, the world became a very strange place indeed. I became uncomfortable. I would like to share that discomfort with you.

Heinz Pagels
Perhaps our thinking exemplifies a selective system. First lots of random scattered ideas compete for survival. Then comes the selection for what works best —one idea dominates, and this is followed by its amplification. Perhaps the moral [...] is that you never learn anything unless you are willing to take a risk and tolerate a little randomness in your life.

Heinz Pagels
A good simulation, be it a religious myth or scientific theory, gives us a sense of mastery over experience. To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it one's own. But with this appropriation comes the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion.

Heinz Pagels
While we can prove that almost all numbers in the continuum are random, we cannot prove that any specific number is indeed random.

Heinz Pagels
Possession of a program with unique analytic capabilities puts a scientist in as much of a priveleged position to make new discoveries as the possession of a powerful telescope.

Heinz Pagels
I solve problems, rarely through a rationally deductive process. Instead I value a free association of ideas, a jumble of three or four ideas bouncing around in my mind. As the urge for resolution increases, the bouncing around stops and I settle on just one idea or strategy.

Heinz Pagels
Science has explored the microcosmos and the macrocosmos; we have a good sense of the lay of the land. The great unexplored frontier is complexity.

Heinz Pagels
Science is not the enemy of humanity but one of the deepest expressions of the human desire to realize that vision of infinite knowledge. Science shows us that the visible world is neither matter nor spirit; the visible world is the invisible organization of energy.

Heinz Pagels
Instead of finding an absolute universal law at the bottom of existence, they [scientists] may find an endless regress of laws, or even worse, total confusion and lawlessness — an outlaw universe.

Heinz Pagels
The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration.

Heinz Pagels
The fact that the universe is governed by simple natural laws is remarkable, profound and on the face of it absurd. How can the vast variety in nature, the multitude of things and processes all be subject to a few simple, universal laws?

Heinz Pagels
The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.

Heinz Pagels
Theoretical and experimental physicists are now studying nothing at all—the vacuum. But that nothingness contains all of being.

Heinz Pagels
My own view is that although we do not yet know the fundamental physical laws, when and if we find them the possibility of life in a universe governed by those laws will be written into them. The existence of life in the universe is not a selective principle acting upon the laws of nature; rather it is a consequence of them.

Heinz Pagels