Robin Ince

Curiosity, in particular scientific curiosity, is dangerous to the powerful. Power often rests on certainties, and the scientific method encourages active doubt.

If you want to feel frighteningly alone in the universe, sit on a railway-station platform in midwinter, waiting for a train that increasingly looks as if it will never come, and read Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.’ And then he doubles down on that with: ‘It is meaningless that we are born, it is meaningless that we die.’* These are the sorts of aphorisms that would lose you your job in the fortune-cookie factory.

Professor Brian Cox is very fond of the words of John Updike: ‘Astronomy is what we have now instead of theology. The terrors are less, but the comforts are nil.’