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In the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better.

 

Michael Crichton

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Until recently, it might have seemed that we were an unhappy bit of mildew on a heavenly body whirling in space among many that have no mildew on them at all. this was something that classical science could explain. Yet, the moment it begins to appear that we are deeply connected to the entire universe, science reaches the outer limits of its powers. Because it is founded on the search for universal laws, it cannot deal with singularity, that is, with uniqueness. The universe is a unique event and a unique story, and so far we are the unique point of that story. But unique events and stories are the domain of poetry, not science. With the formulation of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, science has found itself on the border between formula and story, between science and myth. In that, however, science has paradoxically returned, in a roundabout way, to man, and offers him — in new clothing — his lost integrity. It does so by anchoring him once more in the cosmos.

 

Vaclav Havel

 

Contempt for science could perhaps depend on the fact that, science hasn’t been able to solve any of our basic problems, for example the environmental pollution or the problems with HIV and AIDS. This is the worst disease of our time, and scientists are lost. I believe that many people are disappointed with science when the answers we need are not delivered.

 

Bjorn Ulvaeus

 

I think the new science fiction, which other people apart from myself are now beginning to write, is introverted, possibly pessimistic rather than optimistic, much less certain of its own territory. There's a tremendous confidence that radiates through all modern American science fiction of the period 1930 to 1960; the certainty that science and technology can solve all problems. This is not the dominant form of science fiction now. I think science fiction is becoming something much more speculative, much less convinced about the magic of science and the moral authority of science. There's far more caution on the part of the new writers than there was.

 

J. G. Ballard

 

As for the Internet, I tend to have profound doubts about the value of this communication advance to science. I wonder if, in an era of the Internet, we can have somebody like Eugene Wigner. Eugene Wigner's genius manifested itself in his ability to concentrate for a long time on a single idea. If you are constantly beset by outside ideas, can you really get to the true heart of the matter? It's a very different way of doing science.

 

Alvin M. Weinberg

 

We’re living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics. Remember, what defined the Dark Ages wasn’t the fact that they were primitive — the Bronze Age was primitive, too. What made the Dark Ages dark was the fact that so much knowledge had been lost, that so much known to the Greeks and Romans had been forgotten by the barbarian kingdoms that followed.

 

Paul Krugman