In the 18th century James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people - the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same.

Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century.

It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered from observations science had made that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.

It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover from observations science has made that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on.

The birth of science as we know it arguably began with Isaac Newton's formulation of the laws of gravitation and motion. It is no exaggeration to say that physics was reborn in the early 20th-century with the twin revolutions of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.

I'm really convinced that our descendants a century or two from now will look back at us with the same pity that we have toward the people in the field of science two centuries ago.

The most exciting thing in the twentieth century is science.

Pure phenomenology claims to be the science of pure phenomena. This concept of the phenomenon which was developed under various names as early as the eighteenth century without being clarified is what we shall have to deal with first of all.

Drill everything mine everything roll back regulations tweak the science expedite permits. Sound familiar? The Republicans offer up more 19th-Century solutions to our 21st-Century energy problems.

In the post-enlightenment Europe of the 19th century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial anti-Semitism based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day - the 'scientific study of race' and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel.