“Thus, human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of the kind that could not have happened in the past...Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.” YearsHumansKindPastEnergyHuman BeingsMillionsEnvironmentHappenedRocksCenturyOceanClimate ChangeScalesExperimentsAtmosphereCarbonLarge Scale Author:Roger Revelle
“Good theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billions of years in which our brains have survivied; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.” YearsMindIdeasDifferentThreeGrowthBrainWeekChildhoodCenturyTheoryMonthsBillionsScalesFleeting Author:Marvin Minsky
“Hoyle's enduring insights into stars, nucleosynthesis, and the large-scale universe rank among the greatest achievements of 20th-century astrophysics. Moreover, his theories were unfailingly stimulating, even when they proved transient.” UniverseStarsCenturyTheoryAchievementEndureInsightScales20th CenturyTransientLarge ScaleAstrophysicsGreatest Achievement Author:Fred Hoyle
“During the 20th century, we came to understand that the essence of all substances - their colour, texture, hardness and so forth - is set by their structure, on scales far smaller even than a microscope can see. Everything on Earth is made of atoms, which are, especially in living things, combined together in intricate molecular assemblages.” MadeEarthTogetherCenturyEssenceStructureScalesSubstanceColourAtoms20th CenturyLiving ThingsTextureIntricateMicroscopesHardnessAssemblage Author:Martin Rees
“In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.” FirstsHumansArtEndsWould BeHalfCenturyCivilizationDisasterScalesHolocaust20th CenturyUnimaginable Author:Ian Mcewan
“Isaac Watts, of course, is a hymn writer in the tradition of Congregationalism who lived in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. He is very interesting and important because he was also a metaphysician. He knew a great deal about what was, for him, contemporary science. He was very much influenced by Isaac Newton, for example. There are planets and meteors and so on showing up in his hymns very often. But, again, the scale of his religious imagination corresponds to a very generously scaled scientific imagination.” ImportantCoursesImaginationReligiousInterestingDealsCenturyExamplePlanetsTraditionScalesContemporaryVery InterestingNewtonHymnsShowing UpIsaacMeteors Author:Marilynne Robinson
“Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the neccessary steadfastness and determination... Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.” GivingLongMillionsCenturyDeterminationScalesIdeologyThanksJustificationTwentieth CenturySteadfastness Author:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“If the present tax rates had been in effect from the beginning of our century, many who are millionaires today would live under more modest circumstances. But all those new branches of industry which supply the masses with articles unheard of before, would operate, if at all, on a much smaller scale, and their products would be beyond the reach of the common man.” IfsMenWould BeTodayCommonEffectsCenturyProductsIndustryCircumstancesTaxesMassRateScalesBranchesArticlesModestMillionaireCommon ManUnheard Book:Planning for freedom, and sixteen other essays and addresses Source: Planning for freedom, and sixteen other essays and addresses
“Most 20th century academic physicists, and academia as a whole, simply did not want to touch the subject of consciousness. We have seen psychology grow up, and we've seen the development of neurophysiology and other much more sophisticated science, but only in the recent years have the tools of quantum mechanics been applied to anything representing human scale size.” WantYearsHumansWholeGrowsConsciousnessGrowing UpPsychologySubjectsCenturyDevelopmentToolsSizeScalesAcademicQuantumSophisticated20th CenturyMechanicPhysicistRepresentingQuantum MechanicsAcademia Author:Edgar Mitchell
“The kind of precision manufacturing epitomized in the armories, while it was important, was only a small share of the economy until quite late in the century. Large-scale natural resource development and processing was the name of the game.” KindImportantGamesNamesNaturalEconomyShareCenturyDevelopmentLateResourcesScalesManufacturingPrecisionNatural ResourcesProcessingLarge Scale Author:Charles R. Morris
“No specific technology. My guess is that it was the instinct always to go to maximum scale. Great Britain kept much more of a small shop mindset well into the twentieth century, for instance.” WellsTechnologyCenturyInstinctMindsetScalesInstanceBritainShopsMaximumTwentieth CenturyGreat Britain Author:Charles R. Morris