This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
In the philosophy of Democritus the atoms are eternal and indestructible units of matter, they can never be transformed into each other. With regard to this question modern physics takes a definite stand against the materialism of Democritus and for Plato and the Pythagoreans. The elementary particles are certainly not eternal and indestructible units of matter; they can actually be transformed into each other. As a matter of fact, if two such particles, moving through space with a very high kinetic energy, collide, then many new elementary particles may be created from the available energy and the old particles may have disappeared in the collision. Such events have been frequently observed and offer the best proof that all particles are made of the same substance: energy. But the resemblance of the modern views to those of Plato and the Pythagoreans can be carried somewhat further. The elementary particles in Plato's Timaeus are finally not substance but mathematical forms. All things are numbers is a sentence attributed to Pythagoras. The only mathematical forms available at that time were such geometric forms as the regular solids or the triangles which form their surface. In modern quantum theory there can be no doubt that the elementary particles will finally also be mathematical forms but of a much more complicated nature. The Greek philosophers thought of static forms and found them in the regular solids. Modern science, however, has from its beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries started from the dynamic problem. The constant element in physics since Newton is not a configuration or a geometrical form, but a dynamic law. The equation of motion holds at all times, it is in this sense eternal, whereas the geometrical forms, like the orbits, are changing. Therefore, the mathematical forms that represent the elementary particles will be solutions of some eternal law of motion for matter. This is a problem which has not yet been solved.
Consciousness | Doubt | Famous | History | Life | Life | Reality | Relationship | Thinking | Truth | Trial |
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
The concepts of classical physics are just a refinement of the concepts of daily life and are an essential part of the language which forms the basis of all natural science. Our actual situation in science is such that we do use the classical concepts for the description of the experiments, and it was the problem of quantum theory to find theoretical interpretation of the experiments on this basis. There is no use in discussing what could be done if we were other beings than we are. At this point we have to realize, as von Weizsacker has put it, that `Nature is earlier than man, but man is earlier than natural science.’
Behavior | Knowledge | Mathematics | Reality |
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
The smallest particles of matter were said [by Plato] to be right-angled triangles which, after combining in pairs ... joined together into the regular bodies of solid geometry; cubes, tetrahedrons, octahedrons and icosahedrons. These four bodies were said to be the building blocks of the four elements, earth, fire, air and water ... [The] whole thing seemed to be wild speculation. ... Even so, I was enthralled by the idea that the smallest particles of matter must reduce to some mathematical form ... The most important result of it all, perhaps, was the conviction that, in order to interpret the material world we need to know something about its smallest parts. [Recalling how as a teenager at school, he found Plato's Timaeus to be a memorable poetic and beautiful view of atoms.]
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
Quantum theory can give us an indication of the probability that the alpha-particle will leave the nucleus in unit time, but it cannot predict at what precise point in time the emission will occur, for this is uncertain in principle.
Knowledge | Mathematics | Means | Reality | Old |
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
The atom of modern physics can only be symbolized by a partial differential equation in an abstract multidimensional space.
Reality |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit.
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
What statesmanship! What vision! What power! We have known nothing like it since my ancestor, Peter the Great, broke a window into Europe by overrunning the Baltic states in the 18th Century. Stalin has made Russia great again!
Dirty | Instinct | Knowledge | Mystery | Reality | Soul | Spirit |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
The Hiss Case has turned my wife and me into old people - not a disagreeable condition. But we who used to plan in terms of decades, now find a year, two years, the utmost span of time we can take in.
Defiance | Distinguish | Good | Laughter | Mind | Power | Reality | Smile | Understanding | Will | World | Crisis |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
To those for whom the intellect alone has force, such a witness has little or no force. It bewilders and exasperates them. It challenges them to suppose that there is something greater about man than his ability to add and subtract. It submits that that something is the soul. Plain men understood the witness easily. It speaks directly to their condition. For it is peculiarly the Christian witness. They still hear it, whenever it truly reaches their ears, the ring of those glad tidings that once stirred mankind with an immense hope. For it frees them from the trap of irreversible Fate at the point at which it whispers to them that each soul is individually responsible to God, that it has only to assert that responsibility, and out of man’s weakness will come strength, out of his corruption incorruption, out of his evil good, and out of what is false invulnerable truth.
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
Fantasy, if it's really convincing, can't become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time. In this new dimension, whatever it is, nothing corrodes or gets run down at the heel or gets to look ridiculous like, say, the celluloid collar or the bustle.
Reality |
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
Whatever we accomplish is due to the combined effort. The organization must be with you or you don't get it done... In my organization there is respect for every individual, and we all have a keen respect for the public.
Imagination | Important | Mind | Reality | Spirit |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, that mystic baffling wonder.
Some people understand the charity of our Lord and are saved by it; others, relying on this mercy and kindness, continue in their sins, thinking that it may be theirs whenever they wish. But this is not so, for then they are too late and are taken in their sins before they expect it, and so damn themselves.
Giving | God | Heart | Man | People | Reality | Will | Woman | World | God |
After we have done our best work and vigorously pursued our most passionate modes of reading, the text—and the God featured in the text— remain inscrutable and undomesticated. Partly the reason for that inscrutability and lack of domestication is that the text in its final form is complex and pluralistic, hosting a variety of traditioning and interpreting voices that become normative traditions. More than that, however, the inscrutability and lack of domestication in the text are a consequences of the God attested in these pages who is Holy Other.
All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action; all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that delays are dangerous, and that the sluggish man — the man who roasteth not that which he took in hunting — will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it. And in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.
We still believe, or many of us do, what the Exodus first taught, or what it has commonly been taken to teach, about the meaning and possibility of politics and about its proper form: — first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt; — second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land; — and third, that “the way to the land is through the wilderness.” There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.”
Entertainment | Reality | Old |
Anyone who thinks that carrying out some limited observance that he learned earlier on and who looks no further ahead who remains content with this will largely halt his own spiritual development... a noble and skilled apprentice who makes no further progress at all must be either dull-witted or perverse.