Taboo Quotes (6 quotes)
After all, we scientific workers … like women, are the victims of fashion: at one time we wear dissociated ions, at another electrons; and we are always loth to don rational clothing; some fixed belief we must have manufactured for us: we are high or low church, of this or that degree of nonconformity, according to the school in which we are brought up—but the agnostic is always rare of us and of late years the critic has been taboo.
'The Thirst of Salted Water or the Ions Overboard', Science Progress (1909), 3, 643.
Can it be that all great scientists of the past were really playing a game, a game in which the rules are written not by man but by God? . . . When we play we do not ask why we are playing—we just play. Play serves no moral code except that strange code which for some unknown reason, imposes itself on the play. . . . You will search in vain through scientific literature for hints of motivation. And as for the strange moral code observed by scientists, what could be stranger than an abstract regard for truth in a world which is full of concealment, deception, and taboos…? . . . In submitting to your consideration the idea that the human is at its best when playing, I am myself playing, and that makes me feel that what I am saying may have in it an element of truth.
From Lecture (28 Nov 1957) in the Queen’s University, Belfast, 'Is the Study of its History a Brake on the Progress of Science', printed in Hermethena (1958), 19, 40-41.
Civilized people can talk about anything. For them no subject is taboo…. In civilized societies there will be no intellectual bogeys at sight of which great grown-up babies are expected to hide their eyes
In Civilization: An Essay (1928), 138.
Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
…...
It is perhaps difficult for a modern student of Physics to realize the basic taboo of the past period (before 1956) … it was unthinkable that anyone would question the validity of symmetries under “space inversion,” “charge conjugation” and “time reversal.” It would have been almost sacrilegious to do experiments to test such unholy thoughts.
In paper presented to the International Conference on the History of Original Ideas and Basic Discoveries, Erice, Sicily (27 Jul-4 Aug 1994), 'Parity Violation' collected in Harvey B. Newman, Thomas Ypsilantis History of Original Ideas and Basic Discoveries in Particle Physics (1996), 381.
Under pressure from the computer, the question of mind in relation to machine is becoming a central cultural preoccupation. It is becoming for us what sex was to the Victorians—threat and obsession, taboo and fascination.
In The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984), 313.
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) -- 
