Knowledge and Freedom

KNOWLEDGE AND FREEDOM

Knowledge protects, ignorance endangers

This page, dealing with two of the most important concepts that a responsible scientist has to ponder upon, namely Knowledge and Freedom, has a funny story. The original page is now here - because it was not "liked" by some of my collegues at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of Wroclaw. So I replaced it with what is here. But after I realized that, being a scientist, I can not agree with illogical restrictions of freedom of expressing my personal views - I removed this and other files from its original home place. So, here they are....

Bertrand Russel as quoted in: Chomsky, Noam (1972c) Problems of Knowledge and Freedom. London: Pantheon. :

"... all moral culture springs solely and immediately from the inner life of the soul, and can only be stimulated in human nature, and never produced by external and artificial contrivances....

Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instructions and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but still remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness."

"Meantime, the world in which we exist has other aims. But it will pass away, burned up in the fire of its hot passions: and from its ashes will spring a new and younger world, full of fresh hope, with the light of morning in its eyes."

Bertrand Russel in: The Science to Save Us from Science

"But all who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things: That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequatly fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire these things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can be refuted by science: Mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign to seeing others also happy.

Whether science can continue, and whether, while it continue, it can do more good than harm, depends upon the capacity of mankind to learn this simple lesson. Perhaps it is necessary that all should learn it, but it must be learned by all who have great power, and among those some still have a long way to go.

See also my"Physics of the Mysterious"

To My - no longer existing - Home Page

the link was : http://www.ift.uni.wroc.pl/~ajad/homepage.htm

Last modified on: June 27, 2005.