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Mon 30 Jun, 2014 02:25 am
Does 'Richard, if ever you fall on hard times . . .' mean "'Richard, if ever you fall on hard times when you receive the notice that you have won the Templeton Prize (larger than Nobel Prize)"?'
Context:
Dyson could easily refute the implication of these quotations
from his Templeton acceptance speech, if only he would explain
clearly what evidence he finds to believe in God, in something more
than just the Einsteinian sense which, as I explained in Chapter 1,
we can all trivially subscribe to. If I understand Horgan's point, it
is that Templeton's money corrupts science. I am sure Freeman
Dyson is way above being corrupted. But his acceptance speech is
still unfortunate if it seems to set an example to others. The
Templeton Prize is two orders of magnitude larger than the induce-
ments offered to the journalists at Cambridge, having been
explicitly set up to be larger than the Nobel Prize. In Faustian vein,
my friend the philosopher Daniel Dennett once joked to me,
'Richard, if ever you fall on hard times . . .'
@oristarA,
Well, well, this thread abandoned.
Thank you for coming.