The essential fact which emerges.. Is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.
Freeman John Dyson
It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.
humor human problems deep
Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
technology gifts life arts gift mother god
The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.
technology history civilization
science systems cybernetics
It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true
science
Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.
dreams science science-fiction
A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.
science inspirational intellectual
We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.
creativity thought education adolescence testing
You must log in to post a comment.
There are no comments yet.