Word: hoffman
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...Buttenweiser University Professor Stanley H. Hoffman, though, the info-tech revolution has yet to come...
Jacqueline A. Brown, his assistant, still takes letters in shorthand while Hoffman dictates. And she types the manuscripts that he writes in long hand...
...HOFFMAN: Don't save a seat for me quite yet, John. Take the human mind. I agree that we are not close to an understanding of consciousness, despite the efforts of some of the best minds in science. And perhaps you're even right that we may never understand it. But what is the evidence for your position? You've criticized scientists for having faith--a dirty word in the scientific lexicon--that our era of explosive progress will continue unabated. Isn't it at least as much a leap to think that the progress will abruptly end--particularly since...
...HOFFMAN: Yes, but who is to say that all these scientific theories won't ultimately be replaced by ones with greater explanatory power? Galileo and Newton thought their laws of motion were the cat's pajamas, explaining everything under the sun and many things beyond, but 2 1/2 centuries later a Swiss patent clerk toppled their notions of space and time. Obviously, Galileo and Newton did not foresee what Einstein found. I think it's ahistorical to assert that in the future there will never be an Einstein of, say, the mind who will be able to pull together...
...HOFFMAN: Of course, I accept that science has limits--and may even be up against them in some fields. But I believe there is still room for science, even on its grandest scale, that awe-inspiring discoveries will continue to be made over this millennium. The mathematician Ronald Graham once said, "Our brains have evolved to get us out of the rain, find where the berries are and keep us from getting killed. Our brains did not evolve to help us grasp really large numbers or to look at things in a hundred thousand dimensions." Sounds reasonable, except when...