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Philip Pullman
(19 Oct 1946 - )
English author who is best known for his young-adult fantasy series, His Dark Materials.
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Science Quotes by Philip Pullman (7 quotes)
At Gabriel College there was a very holy object on the high altar of the Oratory, covered with a black velvet cloth... At the height of the invocation the Intercessor lifted the cloth to reveal in the dimness a glass dome inside which there was something too distant to see, until he pulled a string attached to a shutter above, letting a ray of sunlight through to strike the dome exactly. Then it became clear: a little thing like a weathervane, with four sails black on one side and white on the other, began to whirl around as the light struck it. It illustrated a moral lesson, the Intercessor explained, for the black of ignorance fled from the light, whereas the wisdom of white rushed to embrace it.
[Alluding to Crookes's radiometer.]
[Alluding to Crookes's radiometer.]
— Philip Pullman
Northern Lights (2001), 149.
D’you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons l became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.
— Philip Pullman
Spoken by character Dr. Malone in His Dark Materials Omnibus (2012), 370.
Gradually, at various points in our childhoods, we discover different forms of conviction. There’s the rock-hard certainty of personal experience (“I put my finger in the fire and it hurt,”), which is probably the earliest kind we learn. Then there’s the logically convincing, which we probably come to first through maths, in the context of Pythagoras’s theorem or something similar, and which, if we first encounter it at exactly the right moment, bursts on our minds like sunrise with the whole universe playing a great chord of C Major.
— Philip Pullman
In short essay, 'Dawkins, Fairy Tales, and Evidence', 2.
I couldn’t help picturing [the Steady State universe] as a sort of 1950s advertisement, with a pipe-smoking father sitting comfortably in his living room, next to the radiogram, with a wife knitting submissively in the background, and a small boy playing with Meccano on the carpet. The father would remove his pipe and twinkle knowledgeably as he said “Of course, I’m with Steady State Insurance,” and a caption underneath would say “You Know Where You Are With a STEADY STATE Policy.”
— Philip Pullman
In short essay, 'The Origin of the Universe,' 1-2. Written after hearing Stephen Hawking’s lecture (2006) at Oxford, about the origin of the universe.
It [imagination] is a form of seeing.
— Philip Pullman
In His Dark Materials, Book 3: The Amber Spyglass (1995, 2003), 494.
It’s only through honesty and courage that science can work at all. The Ptolemaic understanding of the solar system was undermined and corrected by the constant pressure of more and more honest reporting.
— Philip Pullman
In essay, 'The Origin of the Universe,' 6. Written after hearing Stephen Hawking's lecture (2006) at Oxford, about the origin of the universe.
Think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.
— Philip Pullman
In The Golden Compass (1995, 2001), 372-373.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
