Author: Jay Hosking

Cites

• Erwin Chargaff (1)
  • IN: Three Years with the Rat (2016) Fiction, NULL
    EPIGRAPH: Now one could say, at the risk of some superficiality, that there exist principally two types of scientists. The ones, and they are rare, wish to understand the world, to know nature; the others, much more frequent, wish to explain it. The first are searching for truth, often with the knowledge that they will not attain it; the second strive for plausibility, for the achievement of an intellectually consistent, and hence successful, view of the world. To the first nature reveals itself in lyrical intensity; to the others in logical clarity, and they are the masters of the world... It is almost an intrinsic part of our concept of science that we never know enough. At all times one could almost say that we can explain it all, but understand only very little. ... That the end sacrifices the means has for more than a hundred years been the credo of the sciences; in actual fact, it is the means that have diabolized the end.
    FROM: "A Grammar of Biology", Voices in the Labyrinth, (1977), Book, Austria/Hungary