Mordechai Ben-Ari

1948– · Israeli computer scientist

Topics: science, software engineering, simplicity, mathematics

• The scientific point of view is that such claims of postmodernism are a travesty that comes from mixing ideology and politics with science.

  — Mordechai Ben-Ari

• Just because people doing science are embedded in a particular social and cultural milieu, it doesn’t follow that science is not universal.

  — Mordechai Ben-Ari

• The statement “I don’t see how X could have evolved” simply means that you cannot see how X evolved, not that X could not have evolved.

  — Mordechai Ben-Ari

• Concise and coherent is not the same as “simple and obvious.

  — Mordechai Ben-Ari

• Unfortunately, the universe does not come with an instructor’s manual and technical support is as hard to get as it is for some software packages.

  — Mordechai Ben-Ari

• We can define a fact as an observation backed up by such a preponderance of evidence that no useful purpose would be served by doubting it.

  — Mordechai Ben-Ari

• It is clear today that modern science developed when people stopped debating metaphysical questions about the world and instead concerned themselves with the discovery of laws that were primarily mathematical.

  — Mordechai Ben-Ari

• Imaginary numbers are not imaginary and the theory of complex numbers is no more complex than the theory of real numbers. Complex numbers are as intuitive for an electronics engineer as -100 is for the average person with an overdrawn bank account.

  — Mordechai Ben-Ari