"It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it." -- Jacob Bronowski
Jacob Bronowski (18 January 1908 — 22 August 1974) was a Polish-Jewish British mathematician, biologist, historian of science, theatre author, poet and inventor. He is best remembered as the presenter and writer of the 1973 BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man, and the accompanying book.
"Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.""Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions. And what his work showed is that when the answers are simple too, then you can hear God thinking.""Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.""Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.""It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.""Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.""Man is unique not because he does science, and his is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.""Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.""No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.""Power is the by-product of understanding.""Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.""That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.""The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.""The most wonderful discovery made by scientists is science itself.""The values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and injustice, good and evil, means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.""The wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men.""The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.""The world is full of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.""The world is made up of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.""To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.""We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.""We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.""You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life."
Jacob Bronowski was born in ?ód?, Congress Poland, Russian Empire, in 1908. His family moved to Germany during the First World War, and then to England in 1920. Although, according to Bronowski, he knew only two English words on arriving in Great Britain, he gained admission to the Central Foundation Boys' School in London and went on to study at the University of Cambridge.
As a mathematics student at Jesus College, Cambridge, Bronowski co-edited ... with William Empson ... the literary periodical Experiment, which first appeared in 1928. Bronowski would pursue this sort of dual activity, in both the mathematical and literary worlds, throughout his professional life. He was also a strong chess player, earning a half-blue while at Cambridge and composing numerous chess problems for the British Chess Magazine between 1926 and 1970. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1935, writing a dissertation in algebraic geometry. From 1934 to 1942 he taught mathematics at the University College of Hull. For a time in the 1930s he lived near Laura Riding and Robert Graves in Majorca.
During the Second World War Bronowski worked in operations research, and afterward became Director of Research for the National Coal Board in the UK. Following his experiences as an official observer of the after-effects of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings, he turned to biology, as did his friend Leo Szilard and many other physicists of that time, to better understand the nature of violence. Bronowski was an associate director of the Salk Institute from 1964.
Jacob Bronowski married Rita Coblentz in 1941.Lisa Jardine Obituary: Rita Bronowski [Coblentz,] The Guardian, 22 September 2010 The couple had four children, all daughters, the eldest being the British academic Lisa Jardine and another being the filmmaker Judith Bronowski.
In 1950, Bronowski was given the Taung child's fossilized skull and asked to try, using his statistical skills, to combine a measure of the size of the skull's teeth with their shape in order to discriminate them from the teeth of apes. Work on this turned his interests towards the human biology of humanity's intellectual products.
In 1967 Bronowski delivered the six Silliman Memorial Lectures at Yale University and chose as his subject the role of imagination and symbolic language in the progress of scientific knowledge. Transcripts of the lectures were published posthumously in 1978 as The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination and remain in print.
He first became familiar to the British public through appearances on the BBC television version of The Brains Trust in the late 1950s, but is better known for his thirteen part series The Ascent of Man (1973) about the history of human beings throughb scientific endeavour. This project was intended to parallel art historian Kenneth Clark's earlier "personal view" series Civilisation (1969) which had covered cultural history. During the making of The Ascent of Man, Bronowski was interviewed by the popular British chat show host Michael Parkinson who once recounted that Bronowski's description of a visit to Auschwitz ... he had lost many family members during the Nazi era ... was described by Parkinson as one of his most memorable interviews.
Jacob Bronowski died in 1974 of a heart attack in East Hampton, NY a year after The Ascent of Man was completed, and was buried in the western side of London's Highgate Cemetery, near the entrance.
