Heinz Pagels Quotes & Sayings

The words are strung together, with their own special grammar-the laws of quantum theory-to form sentences, which are molecules. Soon we have books, entire libraries, made out of molecular "sentences." The universe is like a library in which the words are atoms. Just look at what has been written with these hundred words! Our own bodies are books in that library, specified by the organization of molecules-but the universe and literature are organizations of identical, interchangeable objects; they are information systems. — Heinz Pagels

As I continued to fall into the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness. — Heinz Pagels

The great unexplored frontier is complexity ... I am convinced that the nations and people that master the new science of Complexity will become the economic, cultural, and political superpowers of the next century. — Heinz Pagels

While we can prove that almost all numbers in the continuum are random, we cannot prove that any specific number is indeed random. — Heinz Pagels

Science has explored the microcosmos and the macrocosmos; we have a good sense of the lay of the land. The great unexplored frontier is complexity. — Heinz Pagels

Science is expanding, and with it our vision of the universe. although this new and constantly changing view may not always give us comfort, it does have the virtue of truth according to our most effective resources for acquiring knowledge. No philosophy, moral outlook, or religion can be inconsistent with the findings of science and hope to endure among educated people. — Heinz Pagels

Possession of a program with unique analytic capabilities puts a scientist in as much of a priveleged position to make new discoveries as the possession of a powerful telescope. — Heinz Pagels

A good simulation, be it a religious myth or scientific theory, gives us a sense of mastery over experience. To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it one's own. But with this appropriation comes the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion. — Heinz Pagels

Our capacity for fulfillment can come only through faith and feelings. But our capacity for survival must come from reason and knowledge. — Heinz Pagels

It is unlikely that we will ever see a star being born. Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the very young, but never their actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event. Stars are born inside thick clouds of dust and gas in the spiral arms of the galaxy, so thick that visible light cannot penetrate them. — Heinz Pagels

Theoretical and experimental physicists are now studying nothing at all-the vacuum. But that nothingness contains all of being. — Heinz Pagels

There was emptiness more profound than the void between the stars, for which there was no here and there and before and after, and yet out of that void the entire plenum of existence sprang forth. — Heinz Pagels

The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration. — Heinz Pagels

What is the universe? Is it a great 3D movie in which we are the unwilling actors? Is it a cosmic joke, a giant computer, a work of art by a Supreme Being or simply an experiment? The problem in trying to understand the universe is that we have nothing to compare it to. — Heinz Pagels

The visible world is the invisible organization of energy. — Heinz Pagels

Information is just signs and numbers, while knowledge involves their meaning. What we want is knowledge, but what we get is information. — Heinz Pagels