Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Margaret Wertheim

Quote by Margaret Wertheim

“Simple DNA gradually morphed and evolved, so that you had the coming into being of ever more complex and diverse creatures, until one day you wake up and find there are peacocks and giraffes. Nature is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a DNA code, and ours is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a crochet code.”

Quote by Margaret Wertheim

Author

Margaret Wertheim
Margaret Wertheim

Margaret Wertheim is a writer born in 1958. She is known for her interdisciplinary works in the fields of science, art, and philosophy, particularly for her writings on mathematics and physics. more

You May Also Like

“I have an abiding interest in how ordinary people produce knowledge, and what it means for individuals to know the world. I thought I'd be a theoretical physicist because I love physicists' views of the world - I find general relativity and quantum theory thrilling - but I have always felt uneasy with the idea of an Ultimate Truth. One of the functions of science is to help us instrumentally; it helps us to build things like microchips and GPS satellites. But another function of science in the modern world is to help us feel "at home in the universe".”

“Science is not just for an elite few. Science's vision of the universe is becoming increasingly inaccessible. That doesn't mean it's wrong. On some levels, general relativity is right, because we have to take its calculations into account to produce accurate GPS systems. Instrumentally, it's correct to something like twenty decimal places. But epistemologically and psychologically, it is not available to most of our population.”

“When you're in a room with twenty people who've all got the True Theory of the universe, it's difficult to know what to do. And the paradox is that so much important science is now being done by huge teams. With Higgs boson, for example, it's estimated there were around ten thousand scientists and engineers involved in building the machines that made this discovery possible.”

“Almost all major scientific projects today are huge collaborations, yet we still have this public obsession with the idea of the individual scientific genius. One of my goals as a science communicator is to celebrate the collaborative dimensions of science, which I think will be critical for facing the ecological and resource challenges ahead. In a sense, we are all corals now.”

“You can't really get the full joy out of life unless you really go for it. You just have to go into it and stay under some kind of hope or illusion that it's going to work. But as you get older, or the more experiences you have, or whatever it is that tells you how this stuff works, you also know that if you go all the way into it, there's the risk of losing everything but you don't have a choice.”