Quote

On any Tuesday morning, if asked, a good working scientist will tell you with some self-satisfaction that the affairs of his field are nicely in order, that things are finally looking clear and making sense, and all is well. But come back again on another Tuesday, and the roof may have just fallen in on his life's work.

Lewis Thomas

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Lewis Thomas
Age: 80 †
Born: 1913
Born: November 25
Died: 1993
Died: December 3
Medical Writer
Naturalist
Physician
Poet
Writer
Flushing
Long Island
Self
Tell
Fields
Roof
Work
Another
Asked
Affairs
Order
Morning
Fallen
Good
May
Looking
Affair
Things
Back
Clear
Satisfaction
Life
Wells
Working
Scientist
Nicely
Come
Making
Field
Tuesday
Well
Sense
Finally
Skepticism

More quotes by Lewis Thomas

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If we have learned anything at all in this century, it is that all new technologies will be put to use, sooner or later, for better or worse, as it is in our nature to do.
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A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun's position, argue about the best location for the next swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway.
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We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still.
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The human mind is not meant to be governed, certainly not by any book of rules yet written it is supposed to run itself, and we are obliged to follow it along, trying to keep up with it as best we can.
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We still think of human disease as the work of an organized, modernized kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the most visible and centrally placed of our adversaries. We assume that they must somehow relish what they do.
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I do not understand modern physics at all, but my colleagues who know a lot about the physics of very small things, like the particles in atoms, or very large things, like the universe, seem to be running into one queerness after another, from puzzle to puzzle.
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We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.
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We need science, more and better science, not for its technology, not for leisure, not even for health or longevity, but for the hope of wisdom which our kind of culture must acquire for its survival.
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If we are to be destroyed we will do it ourselves by warfare with thermonuclear weaponry.
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We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.
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It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.
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There's really no such thing as the agony of dying. I'm quite sure that pain is shut off at the moment of death. You see, something happens when the body knows it's about to go. Peptide hormones are released by cells in the hypothalamus and pituitary gland. Endorphins. They attach themselves to the cells responsible for feeling pain.
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Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look - quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, 'red in tooth and claw.' That came about because people misread Darwin's 'survival of the fittest.'
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We're as clever as we think we are, but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We're at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time - there's no reason why we can't do it in other endeavors.
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Cats - a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists . . . least human of all creatures.
Lewis Thomas
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Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.
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It is a distortion, with something profoundly disloyal about it, to picture the human being as a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing, watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces.
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The body of science is not, as it is sometimes thought, a huge coherent mass of facts, neatly arranged in sequence, each one attached to the next by a logical string. In truth, whenever we discover a new fact it involves the elimination of old ones. We are always, as it turns out, fundamentally in error.
Lewis Thomas
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Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.
Lewis Thomas
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I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known.
Lewis Thomas