The Child Is Not A Prisoner Of

By The Worldly Standards Of Public Life, All Scholars In Their Work Are Of Course Oddly Virtuous. They Do Not Make Wild Claims, They Do Not Cheat, They Do Not Try To Persuade At Any Cost, They Appeal Neither To Prejudice Nor To Authority . . .

We Are A Scientific Civilization. That Means A Civilization In Which Knowledge And Its Integrity Are Crucial. Science Is Only A Latin Word For Knowledge ... Knowledge Is Our Destiny.

Progress Is The Exploration Of Our Own Error. Evolution Is A Consolidation Of What Have Always Begun As Errors. And Errors Are Of Two Kinds: Errors That Turn Out To Be True And Errors That Turn Out To Be False (which Are Most Of Them). But They Both Have The Same Character Of Being An Imaginative Speculation. I Say All This Because I Want Very Much To Talk About The Human Side Of Discovery And Progress, And It Seems To Me Terribly Important To Say This In An Age In Which Most Non-scientists Are Feeling A Kind Of Loss Of Nerve.

The Air In A Man's Lungs 10,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 Atoms, So That Sooner Or Later Every One Of Us Breathes An Atom That Has Been Breathed Before By Anyone You Can Think Of Who Has Ever Lived - Michelangelo Or George Washington Or Moses.

The Men Who Made The Industrial Revolution Are Usually Pictured As Hardfaced Businessmen With No Other Motive Than Self-interest. That Is Certainly Wrong. For One Thing, Many Of Them Were Inventors Who Had Come Into Business That Way.