Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science. Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal. In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings. The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms. As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss. The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. The mathematics is not there till we put it there. Science arose from poetry--when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends. The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos. Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist. You see, antiquated ideas of kindness and generosity are simply bugs that must be programmed out of our world. And these cold, unfeeling machines will show us the way. Theories should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but superme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture. Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.