Omni: "What about Cosmology? Dirac's suggestion that the fundamental constants change with time, or the idea that physical law was different at the instant of the Big Bang?"
Feynman: "That would open up a lot of questions. So far, physics has tried to find laws and constants without asking where they came from, but we may be approaching the point where we'll be forced to consider history."
Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Cambridge: Persus/Helix, 1999), p. 199.
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"History if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed. That image has previously been drawn, even by scientists themselves, mainly from the study of finished scientific achievements as these are recorded in the classics and, more recently, in the textbooks from whcih each new scientific generation learns to practice its trade. Inevitably, however, the aim of such books is persuasive and pedagogic; a concept of science drawn from them is no more likely to fit the enterprise that produced them than an image of a national culture drawn from a tourist brochure or a language text. This essay attempts to show that we have been misled by them in fundamental ways. Its aim is a sketch of the quite different concept of science that can emerge from the historical record of the research activity itself."
Thomas S. Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," ed. 2. (University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 1.
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