Jacob Bronowski - Creation Quotes

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Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.

Jacob Bronowski
Christopher Columbus discovered the West Indies, and Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. We do not call their achievements creations because they are not personal enough. The West Indies were there all the time; and as for the telephone, we feel that Bell's ingenious thought was somehow not fundamental. The groundwork was there, and if not Bell then someone else would have stumbled on the telephone almost as accidentally as on the West Indies.

Jacob Bronowski
The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science. I have used three words to describe these far - reaching changes : discovery, invention and creation. There are contexts in which one of these words is more appropriate than the others.

Jacob Bronowski
The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations — more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.

Jacob Bronowski
A fact is discovered, a theory is invented; is any theory ever deep enough for it to be truly called a creation? Most scientists would answer: no! Science, they would say, engages only part of the mind - the rational intellect - but creation must engage the whole mind. Science demands none of that ground swell of emotion, none of the rich bottom of personality, which fills out the work of art...

Jacob Bronowski
The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance; it holds its inheritance as a new creation which its future actions will unfold.

Jacob Bronowski
Science is the creation of concepts and their exploration in the facts. It has no other test of the concept than its empirical truth to fact.

Jacob Bronowski