Robin Ince

Curiosity, in particular scientific curiosity, is dangerous to the powerful. Power often rests on certainties, and the scientific method encourages active doubt.

If you want to feel frighteningly alone in the universe, sit on a railway-station platform in midwinter, waiting for a train that increasingly looks as if it will never come, and read Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.’ And then he doubles down on that with: ‘It is meaningless that we are born, it is meaningless that we die.’* These are the sorts of aphorisms that would lose you your job in the fortune-cookie factory.

Professor Brian Cox is very fond of the words of John Updike: ‘Astronomy is what we have now instead of theology. The terrors are less, but the comforts are nil.’

A scientist’s pessimistic realism is often the most coherent and quotable way of accessing their work, but after the humdrum, after the ‘cold and indifferent’, comes a big BUT…

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire

He tells me about the Caledonian Antisyzygies (which is now your new best Scrabble word, as long as someone already has ‘ant’ on the board. A long shot, I know). This is the presence of two polarities within an individual. Richard feels as if he is both an atheist and a theist, in a state of disjunction living on a boundary.

One of Richard’s favourite poems is ‘The More Loving One’ by W. H. Auden, from which he takes that the universe is without purpose or agency, but that it is where we discovered love.

Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.
GEORGE CARLIN

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
ALBERT EINSTEIN

for a democracy to be a democracy, it is vital to have access to information and the ability to understand what it means.