Reality is no less precious if it presents itself to someone else. All are discoverers, and if we disenfranchise any, all suffer.
I knew, however, that it would cost ten times what I had available in order to build a molecular beam machine. I decided to follow a byway, rather than the highway. It is a procedure I have subsequently recommended to beginning scientists in this country, where research strategy is best modelled on that used by Wolfe at the Plains of Abraham.
Though we explore in a culturally-conditioned way, the reality we sketch is universal.
In nation after nation, democracy has taken the place of autocracy.
Today, Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights.
Scientists and scholars should constitute themselves as an international NGO of exceptional authority.
Though neglectful of their responsibility to protect science, scientists are increasingly aware of their responsibility to society.
Idealism is the highest form of reason.
Nothing is more irredeemably irrelevant than bad science.
Individual scientists like myself - and many more conspicuous - pointed to the dangers of radioactive fallout over Canada if we were to launch nuclear weapons to intercept incoming bombers.
A new sense of shared international responsibility is unmistakable in the voices of the United Nations and its agencies, and in the civil society of thousands of supra-national NGOs.
Scientia is knowledge. It is only in the popular mind that it is equated with facts.
