Pointer Quotes (6 quotes)
A teacher … is never a giver of "truth”; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that the student must discover for himself. … For example, a skillful teacher might spur his student’s growth by confronting him with certain frustrations. A good teacher is a catalyst.
In 'Liberate Yourself From Classical Karate', Black Belt (Sep 1971), 27.
Adventure is the point where you toss your life on the scales of chance and wait for the pointer to stop.
First Contact (1945)
Do these models give a pointer to God? The steady-state universe, the Hawking model... and the infinitely oscillating model decidedly do not. One might almost regard them as models manufactured for a Society of Atheists.
'From Entropy to God', in K. Martinas, L. Ropolyi and P. Szegedi (eds.) Thermodynamics: History and Philosophy: Facts, Trends, Debates (1991), 386.
Never mind what two tons refers to. What is it? How has it entered in so definite a way into our exprerience? Two tons is the reading of the pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing machine. Let us pass on. … And so we see that the poetry fades out of the problem, and by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left only with pointer readings.
From Gifford Lecture, Edinburgh, (1927), 'Pointer Readings', collected in The Nature of the Physical World (1928), 252.
Take the living human brain endowed with mind and thought. …. The physicist brings his tools and commences systematic exploration. All that he discovers is a collection of atoms and electrons and fields of force arranged in space and time, apparently similar to those found in inorganic objects. He may trace other physical characteristics, energy, temperature, entropy. None of these is identical with thought. … How can this collection of ordinary atoms be a thinking machine? … The Victorian physicist felt that he knew just what he was talking about when he used such terms as matter and atoms. … But now we realize that science has nothing to say as to the intrinsic nature of the atom. The physical atom is, like everything else in physics, a schedule of pointer readings.
From a Gifford Lecture, University of Edinburgh (1927), published in 'Pointer Readings: Limits of Physical Knowledge', The Nature of the Physical World (1929), 258-259.
The whole subject-matter of exact science consists of pointer readings and similar indications.
From Gifford Lecture, Edinburgh, (1927), 'The New Quantum Theory', collected in The Nature of the Physical World (1928), 219.
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) -- 
