Francis Crick Quotes

Susan Blackmore: Filozofların rolünden bahsettin, sence filozofların bundaki yeri ne veya bu noktada bugüne kadar nasıl bir rol oynadılar?

Francis Crick: Filozoflarla alakalı bir sürü espri yapılır, burada onları yapmayacağım. İşin özü, filozoflar güzel sorular sorsalar da cevapları gösterecek teknikten yoksunlar. O nedenle tartışmalarına çok da rağbet etmemek lazım. Nasıl bir ilerleme katettiklerini sorarak da cevaplayabiliriz bu soruyu. Örneğin atomun mahiyeti gibi, zamanında felsefi addedilen birçok sorun artık fiziğin bir parçası haline geldi. Bazıları, filozofların esas amacının, çözülemeyen sorunlarla uğraşmak olduğunu öne sürse de, sorunlar nihayetinde çözüme ulaşıyor ve bu da bilimsel bir yolla gerçekleşiyor. Bir filozofun bir sorunu çözmede başarıya ulaştığı kaç tane örnek var diye soracak olursanız, bildiğim kadarıyla hiçbir örnek yok.
Temelde filozofların kullandıkları esas teknik, düşünce deneyidir ve burada sonsuz tartışmalar yürütebilirsiniz. Mesela John Searle'ün Çince odasını ele alalım. Bence burada da aynı dezavantajlar söz konusu. Bu düşünce deneyine göre, yalnızca sentaks işini görebilen bir sistemin semantik işini görmesi mümkün değildir. Bunu söylediğinde artık ileri doğru atılacak bir adım kalmıyor ve zaten herhangi bir şekilde kanıtlamış da olmuyorsun. Bunun tek istisnası iki örnektir ki o da normalde filozof olarak addedilmeyen, filozoflar gibi de düşünmeyen ama eşitlikler ve görsel imgeler üzerinden düşünen biri tarafından, yani Einstein tarafından gerçekleştirildi.

Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.

Only gradually did I realize that this lack of qualification could be an advantage. By the time most scientists have reached age thirty they are trapped by their own expertise. They have invested so much effort in one particular field that it is often extremely difficult, at that time in their careers, to make a radical change. I, on the other hand, knew nothing, except for a basic training in somewhat old-fashioned physics and mathematics and an ability to turn my hand to new things. I

The hallmark of a successful theory is that it predicts correctly facts that were not known when the theory was presented, or, better still, which were then known incorrectly. A good theory should have at least two characteristics: it should be in sharp contrast to at least one alternative idea and it should make predictions which are testable.

The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.

A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong.

It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clicks into place. One immediately sees how many previously puzzling facts are neatly explained by the new hypothesis. One could kick oneself for not having the idea earlier, it now seems so obvious. Yet before, everything was in a fog.

Philosophers have been especially concerned with the problem of consciousness—for example, how to explain the redness of red or the painfulness of pain. This is a very thorny issue. The problem springs from the fact that the redness of red that I perceive so vividly cannot be precisely communicated to another human being, at least in the ordinary course of events. If you cannot describe the properties of a thing unambiguously, you are likely to have some difficulty trying to explain these properties in reductionist terms.

A person's mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them.

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth's surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against. Perhaps in the future we may know enough to make a considered guess, but at the present time we can only say that we cannot decide whether the origin of life on earth was an extremely unlikely event or almost a certainty — or any possibility in between these two extremes.

I had discovered the gossip test — what you are really interested in is what you gossip about.

There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it.

Our brains have evolved mainly to deal with our body and its interactions with the world it senses to be around us. Is this world real? This is a venerable philosophical issue and I do not wish to be embroiled in the finely honed squabbles to which it has led. I merely state my own working hypothesis: that there is indeed an outside world, and that it is largely independent of our observing it. We can never fully know this outside world, but we can obtain approximate information about some aspects of its properties by using our senses and our brain.

"The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he'll fight and die for it."

[As quoted in The New Yorker, April 25, 2011]

It took over twenty-five years for our model of DNA to go from being only rather plausible, to being very plausible (as a result of the detailed work on DNA fibers), and from there to being virtually certainly correct. Even then it was correct only in outline, not in