Science Quotes by Roger Ascham, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Charles Polanyi, Steve Squyres, Mehmet Murat Ildan and many others.
Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.
One can not impede scientific progress.
It is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, or ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book.
Some dreamers demand that scientists only discover things that can be used for good.
That’s really what science is just trying to figure stuff out, and I like figuring stuff out.
Mankind has one great habit, a bad habit: To create rules on behalf of God! Unless A God appears on the sky and says ‘Here are the rules,’ do not take any rule serious! Remember that in this universe, there is no port that you can take refuge apart from the reason and the science!
Surely the mitochondrion that first entered another cell was not thinking about the future benefits of cooperation and integration; it was merely trying to make its own living in a tough Darwinian world
Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics.
The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.
To mean understandings, it is sufficient honour to be numbered amongst the lowest labourers of learning; but different abilities must find different tasks. To hew stone, would have been unworthy of Palladio; and to have rambled in search of shells and flowers, had but ill suited with the capacity of Newton.
All geologic history is full of the beginning and the ends of species-of their first and last days; but it exhibits no genealogies of development.
If even in science there is no a way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters, then this must be even more so in the social sciences: truth lies in power.
You create time by joining events together. But they don’t join together; there’s no separativity.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.
Every science is a profane restatement of the preceding dogmas of the religious period
Do not try the parallels in that way: I know that way all along. I have measured that bottomless night, and all the light and all the joy of my life went out there.
Carl Sagan spoke fluently between biology and geology and astrophysics and physics. If you move fluently across those boundaries, you realize that science is everywhere; science is not something you can step around or sweep under the rug.
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
Whenever truth stands in the mind unaccompanied by the evidence upon which it depends, it cannot properly be said to be apprehended at all.
Women and egoistic artists entertain a feeling towards science that is something composed of envy and sentimentality.
When I started secondary school, it was assumed that the girls would do domestic science and the boys would do science, and I wasn’t too happy with that.
The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.
Science literacy is the artery through which the solutions of tomorrow’s problems flow.
Physical geography and geology are inseparable scientific twins.
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
It is, however, an argument of no weight to say that natural bodies are first generated or compounded out of those things into which they are at the last broken down or dissolved.
The idea of making a fault a subject of study and not an object to be merely determined has been the most important step in the course of my methods of observation. If I have obtained some new results it is to this that I owe it.
To me, mathematics, computer science, and the arts are insanely related. They’re all creative expressions.
There is no area of the world that should not be investigated by scientists. There will always remain some questions that have not been answered. In general, these are the questions that have not yet been posed.
God is the absolute truth…
Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly.
And teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night.
The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career; yet it depended on so small a circumstance as my uncle offering to drive me 30 miles to Shrewsbury, which few uncles would have done, and on such a trifle as the shape of my nose.
You must not blame us scientists for the use which war technicians have put our discoveries.
I am a professor at the computer science department, but I don’t know how to use a computer, not even for Email.
He who sees things grow from the beginning will have the best view of them.
MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.
Men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise.
Society lives by faith, and develops by science.
The history of science teaches only too plainly the lesson that no single method is absolutely to be relied upon, that sources of error lurk where they are least expected, and that they may escape the notice of the most experienced and conscientious worker.
I was a reasonably good student in college … My chief interests were scientific. When I entered college, I was devoted to out-of-doors natural history, and my ambition was to be a scientific man of the Audubon, or Wilson, or Baird, or Coues type-a man like Hart Merriam, or Frank Chapman, or Hornaday, to-day.
About two million years ago, man appeared. He has become the dominant species on the earth. All other living things, animal and plant, live by his sufferance. He is the custodian of life on earth, and in the solar system. It’s a big responsibility.
The least deviation from truth will be multiplied later.
One can’t be of an enquiring and experimental nature, and still be very sensible.
If you want to understand human beings, there are plenty of people to go to besides psychologists…. Most of these people are incapable of communicating their knowledge, but those who can communicate it are novelists. They are good novelists precisely because they are good psychologists.
It is on record that when a young aspirant asked Faraday the secret of his success as a scientific investigator, he replied, ‘The secret is comprised in three words- Work, Finish, Publish.’
Gentlemen, that is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth.
With every throb of the climatic pulse which we have felt in Central Asia,, the centre of civilisation has moved this way and that. Each throb has sent pain and decay to the lands whose day was done, life and vigour to those whose day was yet to be.
The sciences throw an inexpressible grace over our compositions, even where they are not immediately concerned; as their effects are discernible where we least expect to find them.
The law of the heart is thus the same as the law of muscular tissue generally, that the energy of contraction, however measured, is a function of the length of the muscle fibre.
The best way to learn to swim is to dive.
In true natural selection, if a body has what it takes to survive, its genes automatically survive because they are inside it. So the genes that survive tend to be, automatically, those genes that confer on bodies the qualities that assist them to survive.
The seeds of great discoveries are constantly floating around us, but they only take root in minds well-prepared to receive them.
No experimental result can ever kill a theory: any theory can be saved from counterinstances either by some auxiliary hypothesis or by a suitable reinterpretation of its terms.
No, it is a very interesting number, it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways.
National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.
[In plotting earthquake measurements] the range between the largest and smallest magnitudes seemed unmanageably large. Dr. Beno Gutenberg then made the natural suggestion to plot the amplitudes logarithmically.
No problem is so formidable that you can’t walk away from it.
The only weapon with which the unconscious patient can immediately retaliate upon the incompetent surgeon is hemorrhage.
Science doesn’t care, by and large, what the answers are. It’s only interested in getting the right answer. And journalism should be very much that way.
Where would we be without science? Sure, those boffins may have come up with occasionally handy items such as life-saving medicine, air travel and the internet, but science is also guilty of some terrible things, like eugenics and Jordan’s breasts.
Mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches; scientists understand its branches but not its roots. Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but man needs both.
Do you remember how electrical currents and ‘unseen waves’ were laughed at? The knowledge about man is still in its infancy.
Life is the twofold internal movement of composition and decomposition at once general and continuous.
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It’s an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it-and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvellous discovery and an artist making a painting.
I suggest that the best geologist is he who has seen most rocks.
We must have the real thing before we can have a science of a thing.
Jurisdictions across the U.S. are snapping up algorithms as tools to help judges make bail and bond decisions. They’re being sold as race- and gender-neutral assessments that allow judges to use science in determining whether someone will behave if released from jail pending trial.
Truth was the only daughter of Time.
Environmentally friendly cars will soon cease to be an option…they will become a necessity.
Let us advance science to create a better world for all.
A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers.
Science is organized knowledge.
The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.
Let Nature be your teacher
Babbage … gave the name to the [Cambridge] Analytical Society, which he stated was formed to advocate ‘the principles of pure d-ism as opposed to the dot-age of the university.’
The spirit of science is not to prejudge, but to give any honest query a fair shake.
Detest it as lewd intercourse, it can deprive you of all your leisure, your health, your rest, and the whole happiness of your life.
Having himself spent a lifetime unsuccessfully trying to prove Euclid’s postulate that parallel lines do not meet, Farkas discouraged his son JГЎnos from any further attempt.
Having himself spent a lifetime unsuccessfully trying to prove Euclid’s postulate that parallel lines do not meet, Farkas discouraged his son JГЎnos from any further attempt.
Somebody is always reflectively monkeying with some of the parts of an infinite universe – monkeying as distinct from aping.
The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa.
Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.
We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering, and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics.
The true Logic for this world is the Calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability.
Certainlie these things agree, The Priest, the Lawyer, & Death all three: Death takes both the weak and the strong. The lawyer takes from both right and wrong, And the priest from living and dead has his Fee.
The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest where all human things … have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower.
Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.
We must take the abiding spiritual values which inhere in the deep experiences of religion in all ages and give them new expression in terms of the framework which our new knowledge gives us. Science forces religion to deal with new ideas in the theoretical realm and new forces in the practical realm.
Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which man will never be able to cope.
Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go.
The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty.
All over China, parents tell their children to stop complaining and to finish their quadratic equations and trigonometric functions because there are sixty-five million American kids going to bed with no math at all.
Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.
But, in truth, the existing premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer those of Hume. The footprint on the sand — to refer to his happy illustration — does not now stand alone. Instead of one, we see many footprints, each in turn in advance of the print behind it, and on a higher level.
Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed: It is safe, and you can’t get safer than safe.
It’s a combination of science, maintenance, and general housekeeping. And then, occasionally, robotics activities or a spacewalk you might get to do.
Above, far above the prejudices and passions of men soar the laws of nature. Eternal and immutable, they are the expression of the creative power they represent what is, what must be, what otherwise could not be. Man can come to understand the: he is incapable of changing them.
Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end?
This is a mighty wonder: in the discharge from the lungs alone, which is not particularly dangerous, the patients do not despair of themselves, even although near the last. Concerning Tuberculosis.
What is a good definition? For the philosopher or the scientist, it is a definition which applies to all the objects to be defined, and applies only to them; it is that which satisfies the rules of logic. But in education it is not that; it is one that can be understood by the pupils.
The human mind has first to construct forms, independently, before we can find them in things.
The Engineer is one who, in the world of physics and applied sciences, begets new things, or adapts old things to new and better uses; above all, one who, in that field, attains new results in the best way and at lowest cost.
The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket; and the glorious uncertainty of it is of mair use to the professors than the justice of it.
A fact is like a sack which won’t stand up if it’s empty. In order that it may stand up, one has to put into it the reason and sentiment which caused it to exist.
A man would have to be an idiot to write a book of laws for an apple tree telling it to bear apples and not thorns, seeing that the apple-tree will do it naturally and far better than any laws or teaching can prescribe.
Weapons of mass destruction aren’t pulled out of a black hat like a white rabbit at a magic show. They’re produced in factories. There’s science and technology involved. They’re not produced in a hole in the ground or in a basement.
Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other’s being but how or why, no mortal may ever know.
Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over – except when they are different.
Whenever science makes a discovery, the devil grabs it while the angels are debating the best way to use it.
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
The calculus of probabilities, when confined within just limits, ought to interest, in an equal degree, the mathematician, the experimentalist, and the statesman.
Incontrovertible is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science.
Doubt everything or believe everything: these are two equally convenient strategies. With either we dispense with the need for reflection.
I have no dress except the one I wear every day. If you are going to be kind enough to give me one, please let it be practical and dark so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory.
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.
Pursue science because it is knowledge, because it broadens our horizons. There is so much more to be discovered.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Wherever modern Science has exploded a superstitious fable or even a picturesque error, she has replaced it with a grander and even more poetical truth.
In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken…”
Science is not a collection of facts; it is a process of discovery.
Computers are the central access; information processing based on a spiral network, similar to that which is the chaos of existence itself, the analysis of systems, the interlocking lokas.
It seems to me that the poet has only to perceive that which others do not perceive, to look deeper than others look. And the mathematician must do the same thing.
It is hardly possible to maintain seriously that the evil done by science is not altogether outweighed by the good. For example, if ten million lives were lost in every war, the net effect of science would still have been to increase the average length of life.
A surprising number [of novels] have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily-against which a law ought to be passed.
If two things don’t fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that’s credulity.
A cell is regarded as the true biological atom.
Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.
There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.
Physics is very muddled again at the moment; it is much too hard for me anyway, and I wish I were a movie comedian or something like that and had never heard anything about physics!
A premature attempt to explain something that thrills you will destroy your perceptivity rather than increase it, because your tendency will be to explain away rather than seek out.
If your news must be bad, tell it soberly and promptly.
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
Science is not a body of facts. Science is a state of mind. It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing on its face. It is about attacking a problem with the most manicured of claws and tearing it down into sensible, edible pieces.
Problems are the price of progress. Don’t bring me anything but trouble. Good news weakens me.
The fact remains that, if the supply of energy failed, modern civilization would come to an end as abruptly as does the music of an organ deprived of wind.
Everyone has a hidden agenda. Except me!
I just bought a Mac to help me design the next Cray.
Whenever you look at a piece of work and you think the fellow was crazy, then you want to pay some attention to that. One of you is likely to be, and you had better find out which one it is. It makes an awful lot of difference.
Invention breeds invention. No sooner is the electric telegraph devised than gutta-percha, the very material it requires, is found. The aeronaut is provided with gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants for his balloon.
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
Science sees signs; Poetry, the thing signified.
Co-author with his brother Julius Hare.
Co-author with his brother Julius Hare.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of childhood into maturity.
Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.
Chance throws peculiar conditions in everyone’s way. If we apply intelligence, patience and special vision, we are rewarded with new creative breakthroughs.
The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.
Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.
Nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in a distant country.
The two fulcra of medicine are reason and observation. Observation is the clue to guide the physician in his thinking.
Science finds it methods.
I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
In the beginning the gods did not at all reveal all things clearly to mortals, but by searching men in the course of time find them out better.
I rarely plan my research; it plans me.
Prediction is difficult, especially the future.
The really important questions in human life are hardly touched upon by psychologists. Do liars come to believe their own lies? Is pleasure the same as happiness? Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved, or not to be able to love?
The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.
The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother’s milk.
A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms.
What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
Modern mathematics, that most astounding of intellectual creations, has projected the mind’s eye through infinite time and the mind’s hand into boundless space.
In the natural sciences, and particularly in chemistry, generalities must come after the detailed knowledge of each fact and not before it.
Magnetic lines of force convey a far better and purer idea than the phrase magnetic current or magnetic flood: it avoids the assumption of a current or of two currents and also of fluids or a fluid, yet conveys a full and useful pictorial idea to the mind.
Laplace would have found it child’s-play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton and himself
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
A science or an art may be said to be “useful” if its development increases, even indirectly, the material well-being and comfort of men, it promotes happiness, using that word in a crude and commonplace way.
The purpose of models is not to fit the data but to sharpen the question.
It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection.
It will be! the mass is working clearer!
Conviction gathers, truer, nearer!
The mystery which for Man in Nature lies
We dare to test, by knowledge led;
And that which she was wont to organize
We crystallize, instead.
Conviction gathers, truer, nearer!
The mystery which for Man in Nature lies
We dare to test, by knowledge led;
And that which she was wont to organize
We crystallize, instead.
There is no likelihood that man can ever tap the power of the atom
Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence.
The prodigious waste of human life occasioned by this perpetual struggle for room and food, was more than supplied by the mighty power of population, acting, in some degree, unshackled, from the constant habit of emigration.
The mass starts into a million suns; Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst, And second planets issue from the first.
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.
Some persons have contended that mathematics ought to be taught by making the illustrations obvious to the senses. Nothing can be more absurd or injurious: it ought to be our never-ceasing effort to make people think, not feel.
Beware of the problem of testing too many hypotheses; the more you torture the data, the more likely they are to confess, but confessions obtained under duress may not be admissible in the court of scientific opinion.
Music is science more than art, and it is the main code of the universe.
Think for yourself and question authority.
The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman–Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and greatest deity of all, the Virgin.
It is only certain that there is nothing certain, and that nothing is more miserable or more proud than man.
Religion divides us, while it is our human characteristics that bind us to each other.
We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.
One of the chief triumphs of modern mathematics consists in having discovered what mathematics really is.
Every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.
The history of science is a record of the transformations of contempts amd amusements.
Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.
One factor that has remained constant through all the twists and turns of the history of physical science is the decisive importance of the mathematical imagination.
Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.
I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections.
Building up arms is not a substitute for diplomacy.
And as I had my father’s kind of mind-which was also his mother’s-I learned that the mind is not sex-typed.
We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.
It is my intent to beget a good understanding between the chymists and the mechanical philosophers who have hitherto been too little acquainted with one another’s learning.
Fashion is more about feel than science.
The cutting of primeval forest and other disasters, fueled by the demands of growing human populations, are the overriding threat to biological diversity everywhere.
I see I have made my self a slave to Philosophy.
The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning but imagination.
HOMOEOPATHY, n. A school of medicine midway between Allopathy and Christian Science. To the last both the others are distinctly inferior, for Christian Science will cure imaginary diseases, and they can not.
Civilization no longer needs to open up wilderness; it needs wilderness to help open up the still largely unexplored human mind.
I don’t know all the reasons for these achievements, but I know that I love what I do and I have never wanted to rest on my laurels.
It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.
I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have a great respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution and paleontology).
The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method. You could ignore a subject; no subject is all-inclusive. But a method can plausibly be applied to anything within the field of consciousness.
The techniques have galloped ahead of the concepts. We have moved away from studying the complexity of the organism; from processes and organisation to composition.
Intellect is void of affection and sees an object as it stands in the light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact, and not as I and mine.
Every human activity, good or bad, except mathematics, must come to an end.
I do not conceive of any manifestation of culture, of science, of art, as purposes in themselves. I think the purpose of science and culture is man.
Astrology is a disease, not a science… It is a tree under the shadow of which all sorts of superstitions thrive. … Only fools and charlatans lend value to it.
It is astonishing how much the word infinitely is misused: everything is infinitely more beautiful, infinitely better, etc. The concept must have something pleasing about it, or its misuse could not have become so general.
Nature appears not to have intended that any flower should be fertilized by its own pollen.
I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.
History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man’s spiritual nature, his earliest expression of what may be called thought.
If migraine patients have a common and legitimate second complaint besides their migraines, it is that they have not been listened to by physicians. Looked at, investigated, drugged, charged, but not listened to.
Computer assisted proofs are getting better and better and computers will play a bigger and bigger role in the future.
My interest in chemistry was started by reading Robert Kennedy Duncan’s popular books while a high school student in Des Moines, Iowa, so that after some delay when it was possible for me to go to college I had definitely decided to specialize in chemistry.
Fishing has been styled ‘a contemplative man’s recreation,’ … and science is only a more contemplative man’s recreation.
The physicist’s problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist’s problem is the problem of complexity.
The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.
Mind is not simply the collection of aggregate cells inside your brain. If you are only the grey matter, then when that dies, you won’t exist any more. It’s not that easy. You exist forever.
Genius unexerted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.
The theory of relativity worked out by Mr. Einstein, which is in the domain of natural science, I believe can also be applied to the political field. Both democracy and human rights are relative concepts – and not absolute and general.
My best inorganic friend is science!
Either an ordered Universe or a medley heaped together mechanically but still an order; or can order subsist in you and disorder in the Whole! And that, too, when all things are so distinguished and yet intermingled and sympathetic.
Science is competitive, aggressive, demanding. It is also imaginative, inspiring, uplifting.
To mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. It is for my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.
The person who thought there could be any real conflict between science and religion must be either very young in science or ignorant of religion.
In science, nothing is ever 100% proven.
The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.
Scientific research was much like prospecting: you went out and you hunted, armed with your maps and instruments, but in the ened your preparations did not matter, or even your intuition. You needed your luck, and whatever benefits accrued to the diligent, through sheer, grinding hard work.
If science has no country, the scientist should have one, and ascribe to it the influence which his works may have in this world.
A research problem is not solved by apparatus; it is solved in a man’s head.
The Russian Federation and the United States of America, the two biggest nuclear powers in the world, but apart from nuclear-wise, we have a lot in common. We have huge territories, natural resources, technologies, science, education, and of course human capital.
The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.
The loveliest theories are being overthrown by these damned experiments; it’s no fun being a chemist anymore.
Consider a cow. A cow doesn’t have the problem-solving skill of a chimpanzee, which has discovered how to get termites out of the ground by putting a stick into a hole. Evolution has developed the brain’s ability to solve puzzles, and at the same time has produced in our brain a pleasure of solving problems.
Use now and then a little Exercise a quarter of an Hour before Meals, as to swing a Weight, or swing your Arms about with a small Weight in each Hand; to leap, or the like, for that stirs the Muscles of the Breast.
If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.
We can’t all be Einstein (because we don’t all play the violin). At the very least, we need a sort of street-smart science: the ability to recognize evidence, gather it, assess it, and act on it.
Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.
In Science, it is when we take some interest in the great discoverers and their lives that it becomes endurable, and only when we begin to trace the development of ideas that it becomes fascinating.
A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales…
Know, Nature’s children all divide her care, The fur that warms a monarch warmed a bear.
For many doctors the achievement of a published article is a tedious duty to be surmounted as a necessary hurdle in a medical career.
To my deep mortification my father once said to me, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”
The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.
I would teach the world that science is the best way to understand the world and that for any set of observations, there is only one correct explanation. Also, science is value-free, as it explains the world as it is. Ethical issues arise only when science is applied to technology – from medicine to industry.
Once human beings realize something can be done, they’re not satisfied until they’ve done it.
Our advanced and fashionable thinkers are, naturally, out on a wide swing of the pendulum, away from the previous swing of the pendulum…. They seem to have an un-argue-out-able position, as is the manner of sophists, but this is no guarantee that they are right.
Through seven figures come sensations for a man; there is hearing for sounds, sight for the visible, nostril for smell, tongue for pleasant or unpleasant tastes, mouth for speech, body for touch, passages outwards and inwards for hot or cold breath. Through these come knowledge or lack of it.
Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good,
And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.
And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.
The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one. Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics; that is mixed mathematics.
I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
The Dark Ages may return-the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of Science; and what might now shower immeasureable material blessings upon mankind may even bring about its total destruction. Beware! I say. Time may be short.
Referring to the discovery of atomic energy.
Referring to the discovery of atomic energy.
Chaos is not disorder. Chaos is the totality of existence. You could call it God. You could use the term, the Tao. I like chaos. It means more to us in English. Chaos is all things, wild and wonderful, connected perfectly by the life force.
There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.
There will certainly be no lack of human pioneers when we have mastered the art of flight….Let us create vessels and sails justed to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travelers, maps of the celestial bodies.
Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.
If the God of revelation is most appropriately worshipped in the temple of religion, the God of nature may be equally honored in the temple of science. Even from its lofty minarets the philosopher may summon the faithful to prayer, and the priest and sage exchange altars without the compromise of faith or knowledge.
APOTHECARY, n. The physician’s accomplice, undertaker’s benefactor and grave worm’s provider
I have made many mistakes myself; in learning the anatomy of the eye I dare say, I have spoiled a hatfull; the best surgeon, like the best general, is he who makes the fewest mistakes.
Doing an experiment is not more important than writing.
The sciences are said, and they are truly said, to have a mutual connection, that any one of them may be the better understood, for an insight into the rest.
The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science.
One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion.
The truth us that other systems of geometry are possible, yet after all, these other systems are not spaces but other methods of space measurements. There is one space only, though we may conceive of many different manifolds, which are contrivances or ideal constructions invented for the purpose of determining space.
There is a conservation of matter and of energy, there may be a conservation of life; or if not of life, of something which transcends life.
‘Snow White’ is an old fairy tale, so obviously the idea of vanity and obsession with youth is long-standing. With today’s science, people have become crazy with trying to move their face around. It’s bizarre.
Man is slightly nearer to the atom than to the star. … From his central position man can survey the grandest works of Nature with the astronomer, or the minutest works with the physicist. … [K]nowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.
So vast is art, so narrow human wit.
Religion has ever been anti-human, anti-woman, anti-life, anti-peace, anti-reason and anti-science. The god idea has been detrimental not only to humankind but to the earth. It is time now for reason, education and science to take over.
This, however, seems to be certain: the ichor, that is, the material I have mentioned that finally becomes red, exists before the heart begins to beat, but the heart exists and even beats before the blood reddens.
Great healers, people of divine realization, do not cure by chance but by exact knowledge.
It is possible for science to make the world like the Garden of Eden! Amen. But it is also possible, and sometimes it seems more probable, that science will make the world a very good imitation of hell.
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be “Seek simplicity and distrust it.”
Don’t be afraid of hard work. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Don’t let others discourage you or tell you that you can’t do it. In my day I was told women didn’t go into chemistry. I saw no reason why we couldn’t.
I know little about nature and hardly anything about men.
Although to penetrate into the intimate mysteries of nature and thence to learn the true causes of phenomena is not allowed to us, nevertheless it can happen that a certain fictive hypothesis may suffice for explaining many phenomena.
In right-angled triangles the square on the side subtending the right angle is equal to the squares on the sides containing the right angle.
From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.
I believe quite simply that the small company of the future will be as much a research organization as it is a manufacturing company.
Genius finds its own road and carries its own lamp.
It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.
Bankers regard research as most dangerous a thing that makes banking hazardous due to the rapid changes it brings about in industry.
Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.
While that amendment failed, human cloning continues to advance and the breakthrough in this unethical and morally questionable science is around the corner.
Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.
The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines. … They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know.
There is no time. There is no space. There is no condition. There is only awareness, awareness of these ideas.
Art is science made flesh.
Things that people learn purely out of curiosity can have a revolutionary effect on human affairs.
Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.
Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one’s humanity; one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, voluntarily, one slowly inters oneself.
If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?
Until I became a published writer, I remained completely ignorant of books on how to write and courses on the subject … they would have spoiled my natural style; made me observe caution; would have hedged me with rules.
Precedents are treated by powerful minds as fetters with which to bind down the weak, as reasons with which to mistify the moderately informed, and as reeds which they themselves fearlessly break through whenever new combinations and difficult emergencies demand their highest efforts.
It is sometimes easier to circumvent prevailing difficulties [in science] rather than to attack them.
This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.
Science is a mechanism, a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It’s a system for testing your thoughts against the universe, and seeing whether they match.
The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no in the endeavor of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental insights.
Like no other science, astrophysics cross-pollinate s the expertise of chemists, biologists, geologists and physicists, all to discover the past, present, and future of the cosmos-and our humble place within it.
True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.
I’ll teach you differences.
It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.
I could tell my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.
When asked … [about] an underlying quantum world, Bohr would answer, ‘There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.’
Will our Philosophy to later Life
Seem but a crudeness of the planet’s youth,
Our Wisdom but a parasite of Truth?
Seem but a crudeness of the planet’s youth,
Our Wisdom but a parasite of Truth?
There is no logical staircase running from the physics of 10-28 cm. to the physics of 1028 light-years.
This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.
You must not talk about ‘ain’t and can’t’ when you speak of this great wonderful world round you, of which the wisest man knows only the very smallest corner, and is, as the great Sir Isaac Newton said, only a child picking up pebbles on the shore of a boundless ocean.
The great problem of today is, how to subject all physical phenomena to dynamical laws. With all the experimental devices, and all the mathematical appliances of this generation, the human mind has been baffled in its attempts to construct a universal science of physics.
Rota’s personality is compatible with mine.
Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all – that has been my religion.
Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science – in all of biology.
The more we split and pulverise matter artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity.
I don’t join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn’t have the arrogance to lecture some mother who hopes to see her dying child in Heaven – that’s none of my business, ultimately. I won’t lecture her on the philosophy of science.
Opinions are very dangerous, because they aren’t based on scientific studies.
All life is linked together in such a way that no part of the chain is unimportant. Frequently, upon the action of some of these minute beings depends the material success or failure of a great commonwealth.
Whoever, in the pursuit of science, seeks after immediate practical utility, may generally rest assured that he will seek in vain.
It is not his possession of knowledge, of irrefutable truth, that makes the man of science, but his persistent and recklessly critical quest for truth.
All experience is an arch, to build upon.
What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
I was in the middle of filming Season 3 of ‘Grace and Frankie.’ Then the writing process for ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ was happening at the exact same time. And then the pre-production for ‘Fatherless’ was happening at the exact same time as well.
Mathematics is an obscure field, an abstruse science, complicated and exact; yet so many have attained perfection in it that we might conclude almost anyone who seriously applied himself would achieve a measure of success.
We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or a mollusk, and isolated it-which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation.
Attempt the end and never stand to doubt;
Nothing’s so hard, but search will find it out.
Nothing’s so hard, but search will find it out.
All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.
The educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one.
I was interviewed on the Israeli radio for five minutes and I said that more than 2000 years ago, Euclid proved that there are infinitely many primes.В Immediately the host interrupted me and asked, ‘Are there still infinitely many primes?’
The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it would.
If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.
The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.
When the physicists ask us for the solution of a problem, it is not drudgery that they impose on us, on the contrary, it is us who owe them thanks.
Moral certainty is intellectual immorality
The scientific method of examining facts is not peculiar to one class of phenomena and to one class of workers; it is applicable to social as well as to physical problems, and we must carefully guard ourselves against supposing that the scientific frame of mind is a peculiarity of the professional scientist.
This ability to incorporate the past gives the sharpest diagnostic tool, if one asks whether a body of knowledge is a science or not. Do present practitioners have to go back to an original work of the past? Or has it been incorporated? … Science is cumulative, and embodies its past.
That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.
If patterns of ones and zeros were ‘like’ patterns of human lives and death, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?
At a given instant everything the surgeon knows suddenly becomes important to the solution of the problem. You can’t do it an hour later, or tomorrow. Nor can you go to the library and look it up.
Today, education does not give you the wisdom and the understanding; it only indoctrinates you to believe something. So the mind knows very less but accepts so many things; it may be science, it may be technology, it may be anything.
Dogbert gazing at night sky No matter how bad the day is, the stars are always there. Dilbert Actually, many of them burned out years ago, but their light is just now reaching earth. DogbertThank you for shattering my comfortable misconception. DilbertIt’s the miracle of science.
Nothing is accidental in the universe – this is one of my Laws of Physics – except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.
In science there are no ‘depths’; there is surface everywhere.
In ‘Packing for Mars,’ I tried to convey the importance of getting young people interested in science.
After reading a paper by a young theoretical scientist, Pauli, shaking his head sadly, commented:
That is not even wrong.
That is not even wrong.
We are intelligent atoms. We are intelligent organic structures. We can change who we are. We can heal ourselves. With genetic engineering, we are considering changing the physiological structure of the body.
I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.
For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes-as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.
We may observe in some of the abrupt grounds we meet with, sections of great masses of strata, where it is as easy to read the history of the sea, as it is to read the history of Man in the archives of any nation.
All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA.
The future belongs to Science. More and more she will control the destinies of the nations. Already she has them in her crucible and on her balances.
I also maintain that clear knowledge of natural science must be acquired, in the first instance, through mastery of medicine alone.
Eratosthenes declares that it is no longer necessary to inquire as to the cause of the overflow of the Nile, since we know definitely that men have come to the sources of the Nile and have observed the rains there.
Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.
There is only one thing worse than coming home from the lab to a sink full of dirty dishes, and that is not going to the lab at all!
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
At Tencent, we may be businessmen, but we are still chasing our IT, our science. We are still striving to create something really cool, trying to create things we couldn’t even imagine without our new technologies. I am still clinging to this enthusiasm.
Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.
For we are all sprung from earth and water
We are doing everything we can to protect the food supply. And I can tell you that we’re making decisions based upon sound science and good public policy, given the circumstances that we are now in.
Looking closer can make something beautiful
Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
For one person who is blessed with the power of invention, many will always be found who have the capacity of applying principles.
The world was full of locked doors, and he had to get his hand on every key.
Increased knowledge of heredity means increased power of control over the living thing, and as we come to understand more and more the architecture of the plant or animal we realize what can and what cannot be done towards modification or improvement.
Beneath multiple specific and individual distinctions, beneath innumerable and incessant transformations, at the bottom of the circular evolution without beginning or end, there hides a law, a unique nature participated in by all beings, in which this common participation produces a ground of common harmony.
As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it.
The real goal of physics is to come up with an equation that could explain the universe but still be small enough to fit on a T-shirt
True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant.
The text-book is rare that stimulates its reader to ask, Why is this so? Or, How does this connect with what has been read elsewhere?
The chief end of science is to make things clear, the educative aim is to foster the inquisitive spirit.
… the scientist would maintain that knowledge in of itself is wholly good, and that there should be and are methods of dealing with misuses of knowledge by the ruffian or the bully other than by suppressing the knowledge.
Every time we get slapped down, we can say, Thank you Mother Nature, because it means we’re about to learn something important.
It is a most gratifying sign of the rapid progress of our time that our best text-books become antiquated so quickly.
Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing.
My internal and external life depend so much on the work of others that I must make an extreme effort to give as much as I receive.
Our mind is so fortunately equipped, that it brings us the most important bases for our thoughts without our having the least knowledge of this work of elaboration. Only the results of it become unconscious.
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.
The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.
The mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. … [Whereas] the physicist’s reality, whatever it may be, has few or none of the attributes which common sense ascribes instinctively to reality. A chair may be a collection of whirling electrons.
I have divers times endeavoured to see and to know, what parts the Blood consists of; and at length I have observ’d, taking some Blood out of my own hand, that it consists of small round globuls driven through a Crystalline humidity or water.
Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.
One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories.
Science has but one fashion-to lose nothing once gained.
From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It’s not a miracle; we just decided to go.
The intellectuals’ chief cause of anguish are one another’s works.
The extreme possibilities are the most illuminating.
So what is true for life itself is no less true for the universe: knowing where you came from is no less important than knowing where you are going.
Political science without biography is a form of taxidermy.
Those who think ‘Science is Measurement’ should search Darwin’s works for numbers and equations.
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.
The creative life was the only one for a serious man.
The city of Hiroshima stands as more than a monument to massive death and destruction. It stands as a living testament to the necessity for progress toward nuclear disarmament.
The most humble research scientist in the Department of Agriculture is at this time contributing more to this country than the most useful member of Congress.
If the Earth is the size of a pea in New York, then the Sun is a beachball 50m away, Pluto is 4km away, and the next nearest star is in Tokyo. Now shrink Pluto’s orbit into a coffee cup; then our Milky Way Galaxy fills North America.
[An artist] will sooner and with more certainty, establish the character of skeletons, than the most learned anatomist, whose eye has not been accustomed to seize on every peculiarity.
Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.
I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms that we can’t conceive. And there could, of course, be forms of intelligence beyond human capacity-beyond as much as we are beyond a chimpanzee.
There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.
The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith.
All the conditions of happiness are realized in the life of the man of science.
Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian.
It may be unpopular and out-of-date to say-but I do not think that a scientific result which gives us a better understanding of the world and makes it more harmonious in our eyes should be held in lower esteem than, say, an invention which reduces the cost of paving roads, or improves household plumbing.
Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
Raising children is a creative endeavor, an art rather than a science.
We may fondly imagine that we are impartial seekers after truth, but with a few exceptions, to which I know that I do not belong, we are influenced-and sometimes strongly-by our personal bias; and we give our best thoughts to those ideas which we have to defend.
Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?
Unfortunately what is little recognized is that the most worthwhile scientific books are those in which the author clearly indicates what he does not know; for an author most hurts his readers by concealing difficulties.
I never could make out what those damned dots meant.
Humanity has experienced many revolutionary changes over the course of history: revolutions in agriculture, in science, industrial production, as well as numerous political revolutions. But these have all been limited to the external aspects of our individual and collective lives.
LEAD, n. A heavy blue-gray metal much used … as a counterpoise to an argument of such weight that it turns the scale of debate the wrong way. An interesting fact in the chemistry of international controversy is that at the point of contact of two patriotisms lead is precipitated in great quantities.
Pure earth does not petrify, because the predominance of dryness over [i.e. in] the earth endows it not with coherence but rather with crumbliness. In general, stone is formed in two ways only (a) through the hardening of clay, and (b) by the congelation [of waters].
The credulous … advance the authority of hearsay in place of reasons for possible success or facts that can be demonstrated.
It would seem that more than function itself, simplicity is the deciding factor in the aesthetic equation. One might call the process beauty through function and simplification.
It is not a simple life to be a single cell, although I have no right to say so, having been a single cell so long ago myself that I have no memory at all of that stage of my life.
Certainly he who can digest a second or third fluxion need not, methinks, be squeamish about any point in divinity.
The brain is a three pound mass you can hold in your hand that can conceive of a universe a hundred billion light-years across.
The statistician cannot excuse himself from the duty of getting his head clear on the principles of scientific inference, but equally no other thinking man can avoid a like obligation.
And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence
When the moon is ninety degrees away from the sun it sees but half the earth illuminated (the western half). For the other (the eastern half) is enveloped in night. Hence the moon itself is illuminated less brightly from the earth, and as a result its secondary light appears fainter to us.
Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.
I love having my hands in the dirt. It is never a science and always an art. There are no rules. And if it comes down to me versus that weed I’m trying to pull out of the ground that doesn’t want to come out? I know I’ll win.
Discovery should come as an adventure rather than as the result of a logical process of thought. Sharp, prolonged thinking is necessary that we may keep on the chosen road but it does not itself necessarily lead to discovery. The investigator must be ready and on the spot when the light comes from whatever direction.
Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature.
Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. Put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, when you leave.
Next to the word ‘Nature,’ ‘the Great Chain of Being’ was the sacred phrase of the eighteenth century, playing a part somewhat analogous to that of the blessed word ‘evolution’ in the late nineteenth.
The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.
I’m not so interested any more in how a great deal of science fiction goes. It goes into things like Star Wars and Star Trek which all go excellent in their own way.
The existence of a first cause of the universe is a necessity of thought … Amid the mysteries which become more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty that we are over in the presence of an Infinite, Eternal Energy from which all things proceed.
All these primary impulses, not easily described in words, are the springs of man’s actions.
Men are rather beholden … generally to chance or anything else, than to logic, for the invention of arts and sciences.
The scientist finds his reward in what Henri Poincare calls the joy of comprehension, and not in the possibility of application to which any discovery may lead.
We may, perhaps, imagine that the creation was finished long ago. But that would be quite wrong. It continues still more magnificently, and at the highest levels of the world.
When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?
He that in ye mine of knowledge deepest diggeth, hath, like every other miner, ye least breathing time, and must sometimes at least come to terr. alt. for air.
If there ever was a misnomer, it is “exact science.” Science has always been full of mistakes. The present day is no exception. And our mistakes are good mistakes; they require a genius to correct. Of course, we do not see our own mistakes.
In short, the greatest contribution to real security that science can make is through the extension of the scientific method to the social sciences and a solution of the problem of complete avoidance of war.
Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.
I studied political science and international relations, so I never considered myself an artist.
I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex.
Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
This means that to entrust to science – or to deliberate control according to scientific principles – more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.
Science ignores the spiritual realm because it is not amenable to scientific analysis. As importantly, the predictive success of Newtonian theory, emphasizing the primacy of a physical Universe, made the existence of spirit and God an extraneous hypothesis that offered no explanatory principles needed by science.
Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.
I’m sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It’s just been too intelligent to come here.
Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist’s position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.
We are in a tech-heavy society, plunging headlong into an unknown future. Science fiction is what allows you to stand back and analyze the impact of that and put it in context of how it affects people.
In the future, airplanes will be flown by a dog and a pilot. And the dog’s job will be to make sure that if the pilot tries to touch any of the buttons, the dog bites him.
I thought it must be pure science fiction. But when I checked it out I found a lot of magazine articles that actually supported the theory behind the book which was incredible. That’s when I decided to acquire the rights of the book and everything went from there.
Give me the third best technology. The second best won’t be ready in time. The best will never be ready.
To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.
The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.
I had fallen in love with a young man… and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis… Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have been saved. It reinforced in my mind the importance of scientific discovery…
Symmetry, as wide or as narrow as you may define its meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has tried to comprehend and create order, beauty and perfection.
In those parts of the world where learning and science has prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.
And finally, no matter how good the science gets, there are problems that inevitably depend on judgement, on art, on a feel for financial markets.
Business should be like religion and science; it should know neither love nor hate.
Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.
I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it.
We affirm the neutrality of Science … Science is of no country. … But if Science has no country, the scientist must keep in mind all that may work towards the glory of his country. In every great scientist will be found a great patriot.
It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few of them for boundless admiration, attributing superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate, and the contrast between the popular estimate of my powers and achievements and the reality is simply grotesque.
Whereas all humans have approximately the same life expectancy the life expectancy of stars varies as much as from that of a butterfly to that of an elephant.
The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus; it enables us to appreciate with exactness that which accurate minds feel with a sort of instinct for which of times they are unable to account.
There are many worlds and many systems of Universes existing all at the same time, all of them perishable.
A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it.
Two erroneous impressions … seem to be current among certain groups of uninformed persons. The first is that religion today stands for mediaeval theology; the second that science is materialistic and irreligious.
What the use of P [the significance level] implies, therefore, is that a hypothesis that may be true may be rejected because it has not predicted observable results that have not occurred.
Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist, nor what sort of form they may have; there are many reasons why knowledge on this subject is not possible, owing to the lack of evidence and the shortness of human life.
Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it.
If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Since my mother is the type that’s called schizophrenogenic in the literature-she’s the one who makes crazy people, crazy children-I was awfully curious to find out why I didn’t go insane.
I decided that life rationally considered seemed pointless and futile, but it is still interesting in a variety of ways, including the study of science. So why not carry on, following the path of scientific hedonism? Besides, I did not have the courage for the more rational procedure of suicide.
This is a collaboration between a complex analyst, a dynamical system expert, and an arithmetical algebraic geometer. It sounds like a joke, a complex analyst, a dynamical system expert, and an arithmetical algebraic geometer walk into a bar.
The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.
RAILROAD, n. The chief of many mechanical devices enabling us to get away from where we are to where we are no better off. For this purpose the railroad is held in highest favor by the optimist, for it permits him to make the transit with great expedition.
The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.
I’m concentrating on staying healthy, having peace, being happy, remembering what is important, taking in nature and animals, spending time reading, trying to understand the universe, where science and the spiritual meet.
The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.
In many spheres of human endeavor, from science to business to education to economic policy, good decisions depend on good measurement.
A catalyst is a substance which alters the velocity of a chemical reaction without appearing in the final products.
Nature is as it is because this is the only possible nature consistent with itself.
All things are from water and all things are resolved into water.
Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.
In place of science, the Eskimo has only magic to bridge the gap between what he can understand and what is not known. Without magic, his life would be one long panic.
MESMERISM, n. Hypnotism before it wore good clothes, kept a carriage and asked Incredulity to dinner.
Why does man regret, even though he may endeavour to banish any such regret, that he has followed the one natural impulse, rather than the other; and why does he further feel that he ought to regret his conduct? Man in this respect differs profoundly from the lower animals.
There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.
Since science’s competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.
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.
I believe in an immortal soul. Science has proved that nothing disintegrates into nothingness. Life and soul, therefore, cannot disintegrate into nothingness, and so are immortal.
Do you realize we’ve got 250 million years of coal? But coal has got environmental hazards to it, but there’s-I’m convinced, and I know that we-technology can be developed so we can have zero-emissions coal-fired electricity plants.
I like to learn. That’s an art and a science.
There were taken apples, and … closed up in wax. … After a month’s space, the apple inclosed in was was as green and fresh as the first putting in, and the kernals continued white. The cause is, for that all exclusion of open air, which is ever predatory, maintaineth the body in its first freshness and moisture.
Never mistake motion for action.
Science is the most intimate school of resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly most insignificant of facts.
Apparently there are three levels of brain activity. Level 1 is the lowest level – the amount of concentration required to, say, delete emails or serve in congress.
Science ever has been, and ever must be, the safeguard of religion.
The sheer volume of evidence for survival after death is so immense that to ignore it is like standing at the foot of Mount Everest and insisting that you cannot see the mountain.
It becomes the urgent duty of mathematicians, therefore, to meditate about the essence of mathematics, its motivations and goals and the ideas that must bind divergent interests together.
Genius is nourished from within and without.
Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.
Marxists are more right than wrong when they argue that the problems scientists take up,. the way they go about solving them, and even the solutions they arc inclined to accept, arc conditioned by the intellectual, social, and economic environments in which they live and work.
Averages … seduce us away from minute observation.
The greatest Inventions were produced in Times of Ignorance; as the Use of the Compass, Gunpowder, and Printing; and by the dullest Nation, as the Germans.
Science arose from poetry… when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.
I was a political science student.
I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without any purpose – which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.
All the fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to answer the question, “What are light quanta?” Of course today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself.
It is easier to understand mankind in general than any individual man.
Life and business are rather simple after all-to make a success of either, you’ve got to hang on to the knack of putting yourself into the other person’s place.
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
As I review the nature of the creative drive in the inventive scientists that have been around me, as well as in myself, I find the first event is an urge to make a significant intellectual contribution that can be tangible embodied in a product or process.
The greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.
Without the discovery of uniformities there can be no concepts, no classifications, no formulations, no principles, no laws; and without these no science can exist.
I believe my theory of relativity to be true. But it will only be proved for certain in 1981, when I am dead.
Personally I think there is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us, and that one day man will release and control its almost infinite power. We cannot prevent him from doing so and can only hope that he will not use it exclusively in blowing up his next door neighbour. (1936)
What is algebra exactly; is it those three-cornered things?
Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth’s surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them. There is no possibility of escaping from this conclusion.
Touch a scientist and you touch a child.
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
USA Today has come out with a new survey – apparently, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population.
But it is just this characteristic of simplicity in the laws of nature hitherto discovered which it would be fallacious to generalize, for it is obvious that simplicity has been a part cause of their discovery, and can, therefore, give no ground for the supposition that other undiscovered laws are equally simple.
If you’ve read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can’t help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I’ve gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.
[Newton’s calculations] entered the marrow of what we know without knowing how we know it.
Science of happiness lies in our understanding. The secrets of happiness lie in our capacity to expand our heart.
Everything in nature goes by law, and not by luck.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
I have no knowledge other than that gained through my own eyes.
A successful society is characterized by a rising living standard for its population, increasing investment in factories and basic infrastructure, and the generation of additional surplus, which is invested in generating new discoveries in science and technology.
I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are IMPOSSIBLE.
The financial crisis just made the hole deeper, which is why our stimulus needs to be both big and smart, both financially and educationally stimulating. It needs to be able to produce not only more shovel-ready jobs and shovel-ready workers, but more Google-ready jobs and Windows-ready and knowledge-ready workers.
I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure that people gain a selective advantage from believing in things they can’t prove.
All we know of the truth is that the absolute truth, such as it is, is beyond our reach.
FROG, n. A reptile with edible legs
As for the search for truth, I know from my own painful searching, with its many blind alleys, how hard it is to take a reliable step, be it ever so small, towards the understanding of that which is truly significant.
It can be said with complete confidence that any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not enough that a problem should be “interesting”.
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
Great discoveries are made accidentally less often than the populace likes to think. Commenting on how an accident led to the discovery of X-rays.
Science boasts of the distance of its stars; of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak. But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned. Always the Kingdom of Heaven is “At Hand.”
It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to the enterprise, thought, and perception of an individual.
At each stage…entirely new laws, concepts and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one.
History is, in its essentials, the science of change. It knows and it teaches that it is impossible to find two events that are ever exactly alike, because the conditions from which they spring are never identical.
I don’t think it’s the highest priority. I don’t think we should ignore it, either, just generally I think as conservatives we should embrace innovation, embrace technology, embrace science. … Sometimes I sense that we pull back from the embrace of these things. We shouldn’t.
I propose to put forward an apology for mathematics; and I may be told that it needs none, since there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy.
[Referring to Fourier’s mathematical theory of the conduction of heat] … Fourier’s great mathematical poem.
Each species may have had its origin in a single pair, or individual, where an individual was sufficient, and species may have been created in succession at such times and in such places as to enable them to multiply and endure for an appointed period, and occupy an appointed space on the globe.
In the ’70s and ’80s there was an attempt in K-12 to teach science through art or art through science. The challenge today is how do you build the ethos of art and design into the academy of science.
Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
There seems no limit to research, for as been truly said, the more the sphere of knowledge grows, the larger becomes the surface of contact with the unknown.
The method of political science is the interpretation of life; its instrument is insight, a nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.
All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.
If one were not animated with the desire to discover laws, they would escape the most enlightened attention.
Creationists make it sound as though a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
A busy life is a wasted life.
Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious.
An organized product of nature is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
Mathematics is the key and door to the sciences.
Method means that arrangement of subject matter which makes it most effective in use. Never is method something outside of the material.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Those who incline to very strictly utilitarian views may perhaps feel that the peculiar powers of the Analytical Engine bear upon questions of abstract and speculative science rather than upon those involving everyday and ordinary human interests.
Universe is blind; it cannot see us; we must find a way to show ourselves to it and science is the way to open the eyes of the universe!
The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes.
The landlady of a boarding-house is a parallelogram – that is, an oblong angular figure, which cannot be described, but which is equal to anything
Modern science is necessarily a double-edged tool, a tool that cuts both ways. … There is no doubt that a Zeppelin is a wonderful thing; but that did not prevent it from becoming a horrible thing.
In the seventeenth century, the science of medicine had not wholly cut asunder from astrology and necromancy; and the trusting Christian still believed in some occult influences, chiefly planetary, which governed not only his crops but his health and life.
Enormous numbers of people are taken in, or at least beguiled and fascinated, by what seems to me to be unbelievable hocum, and relatively few are concerned with or thrilled by the astounding-yet true-facts of science, as put forth in the pages of, say, Scientific American.
The hand is where the mind meets the world.
Science is prediction, not explanation.
Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics
Hypotheses like professors, when they are seen not to work any longer in the laboratory, should disappear.
A day is a miniature eternity.
For every one billion particles of antimatter there were one billion and one particles of matter. And when the mutual annihilation was complete, one billionth remained – and that’s our present universe.
So Einstein was wrong when he said, “God does not play dice.” Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen.
Mathematics is less related to accounting than it is to philosophy.
New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.
Science without conscience is the death of the soul.
Meteorology has ever been an apple of contention, as if the violent commotions of the atmosphere induced a sympathetic effect on the minds of those who have attempted to study them.
Mathematics is the summit of human thinking. It has all the creativity and imagination that you can find in all kinds of art, but unlike art-charlatans and all kinds of quacks will not succeed there.
People challenge my nerd cred all the time. I just show them the photo of me winning my middle-school science fair, wearing my Casio calculator watch and eyeglasses so big they look like they can see the future.
Let us be well assured of the Matter of Fact, before we trouble our selves with enquiring into the Cause. It is true, that this Method is too slow for the greatest part of Mankind, who run naturally to the Cause, and pass over the Truth of the Matter of Fact.
It cannot be that axioms established by argumentation should avail for the discovery of new works, since the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument. But axioms duly and orderly formed from particulars easily discover the way to new particulars, and thus render sciences active.
George Stigler Nobel laureate and a leader of Chicago School was asked why there were no Nobel Prizes awarded in the other social sciences, sociology, psychology, history, etc. “Don’t worry”, Stigler said, “they have already have a Nobel Prize in …Literature”
[Among the books he chooses, a statesman] ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse.
Is the very mechanism for the universe to come into being meaningless or unworkable or both unless the universe is guaranteed to produce life, consciousness and observership somewhere and for some little time in its history-to-be?
Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.
The prediction of nuclear winter is drawn not, of course, from any direct experience with the consequences of global nuclear war, but rather from an investigation of the governing physics.
The future is uncertain… but this uncertainty is at the very heart of human creativity.
A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
The constitution of the universe is total natural law. ‘Natural law,’ we say from the field of science. ‘Will of God,’ we say from the field of religion. It’s the same thing.
This world was once a fluid haze of light, Till toward the centre set the starry tides, And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast The planets: then the monster, then the man.
Go beyond science, into the region of metaphysics. Real religion is beyond argument. It can only be lived both inwardly and outwardly.
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
It is rather astonishing how little practical value scientific knowledge has for ordinary men, how dull and commonplace such of it as has value is, and how its value seems almost to vary inversely to its reputed utility.
Science, Nature,-O, I’ve yearned to open some page.
It was astonishing that for some considerable distance around the mould growth the staphococcal colonies were undergoing lysis. What had formerly been a well-grown colony was now a faint shadow of its former self…I was sufficiently interested to pursue the subject.
The fine tuning of the universe provides prima facie evidence of deistic design.
That’s what Hubble can do for us. It can tell us whether the universe is expanding forever or if one day it’s going to come back together.
True science teaches us to doubt and, in ignorance, to refrain.
What’s the best part of being a mathematician? I’m not a religious man, but it’s almost like being in touch with God when you’re thinking about mathematics. God is keeping secrets from us, and it’s fun to try to learn some of the secrets.
We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.
I’ve lost my faith in science.
Surgeon generals are appointed by presidents, but our work isn’t about politics. Our highest duty to to the public. Our true guide is science. Our job is to speak the truth about public health, even when it’s controversial or perceived as political.
The church saves sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture.
Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?
In Buddhist practice a great deal of time is spent practicing mandala meditation. You learn to visualize and hold simultaneous concepts in the mind during meditation.
Of all the communities available to us, there is not one I would want to devote myself to except for the society of the true seekers, which has very few living members at any one time.
The future mathematician … should solve problems, choose the problems which are in his line, meditate upon their solution, and invent new problems. By this means, and by all other means, he should endeavor to make his first important discovery: he should discover his likes and dislikes, his taste, his own line.
All I ever aim to do is to put the Development hypothesis in the same coach as the creation one. It will only be a question of who is to ride outside & who in after all.
Knowledge of Nature is an account at bank, where each dividend is added to the principal and the interest is ever compounded; and hence it is that human progress, founded on natural knowledge, advances with ever increasing speed.
The roads of science are narrow, so that they who travel them, must wither follow or meet one another.
From the physician, as emphatically the student of Nature, is expected not only an inquiry into cause, but an investigation of the whole empire of Nature and a determination of the applicability of every species of knowledge to the improvement of his art.
…to many it is not knowledge but the quest for knowledge that gives greater interest to thought-to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
I once got a call from a bank, asking me to compute a mortgage, since their computers were down. This was a very depressing moment.
I’m lazy. But it’s the lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn’t like walking or carrying things.
During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.
He it was that first gave to the law the air of a science. He found it a skeleton, and clothed it with life, color, and complexion: he embraced the old statue, and by his touch it grew into youth, health, and beauty.
We must care to think about the unthinkable things, because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.
Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.
Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.
A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics.
Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.
An experiment in nature, like a text in the Bible, is capable of different interpretations, according to the preconceptions of the interpreter.
Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Geometry is one and eternal shining in the mind of God. That share in it accorded to men is one of the reasons that Man is the image of God.
To the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
The Chinese are clearly inculcating the idea that science is exciting and important, and that’s why they, as a whole-they’re graduating four times as many engineers as we are, and that’s just happened over the last 20 years.
When Da Vinci wanted an effect, he willed, he planned the means to make it happen: that was the purpose of his machines. But the machines of Newton … are means not for doing but for observing. He saw an effect, and he looked for its cause.
The material universe must consist … of bodies … such that each of them exercises its own separate, independent, and invariable effect, a change of the total state being compounded of a number of separate changes each of which is solely due to a separate portion of the preceding state.
It is a custom often practiced by seafaring people to throw a bottle overboard, with a paper, stating the time and place at which it is done. In the absence of other information as to currents, that afforded by these mute little navigators is of great value.
All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.
[The] great fairy Science, who is likely to be queen of all the fairies for many a year to come, can only do you good, and never do you harm.
There are checks and balances in science. There’s somebody checking the people doing the science, and then there’s somebody who checks the checkers and somebody who checks the checker’s checkers.
Technology is that which separates us from our environment.
Hopes are always accompanied by fears, and, in scientific research, the fears are liable to become dominant.
Such an atmosphere is un-American, the most un-American thing we have to contend with today. It is the climate of a totalitarian country in which scientists are expected to change their theories to match changes in the police state’s propaganda line.
The influence of modern physics goes beyond technology. It extends to the realm of thought and culture where it has led to a deep revision in man’s conception of the universe and his relation to it
I believe that in every person is a kind of circuit which resonates to intellectual discovery-and the idea is to make that resonance work
First of all a natural talent is required; for when Nature opposes, everything else is in vain; but when Nature leads the way to what is most excellent, instruction in the art takes place.
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us to making available what we are already acquainted with.
The spending in science and technology need to be to increased.
It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.
The reproaches against science for not having yet solved the problems of the universe are exaggerated in an unjust and malicious manner; it has truly not had time enough yet for these great achievements. Science is very young–a human activity which developed late.
A good physiological experiment like a good physical one requires that it should present anywhere, at any time, under identical conditions, the same certain and unequivocal phenomena that can always be confirmed.
The [first] argument asserts the non-existence of motion on the ground that that which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
I’d like the [Cosmos] series to be so visually stimulating that somebody who isn’t even interested in the concepts will just watch for the effects. And I’d like people who are prepared to do some thinking to be really stimulated.
Elaborate apparatus plays an important part in the science of to-day, but I sometimes wonder if we are not inclined to forget that the most important instrument in research must always be the mind of man.
In all things which have a plurality of parts, and which are not a total aggregate but a whole of some sort distinct from the parts, there is some cause.
Questions that pertain to the foundations of mathematics, although treated by many in recent times, still lack a satisfactory solution. Ambiguity of language is philosophy’s main source of problems. That is why it is of the utmost importance to examine attentively the very words we use.
The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist. I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me.
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.
A discovery must be, by definition, at variance with existing knowledge. During my lifetime, I made two. Both were rejected offhand by the popes of the field. Had I predicted these discoveries in my applications, and had those authorities been my judges, it is evident what their decisions would have been.
I’ve been getting a lot of science fiction scripts which contained variations on my ‘Star Trek’ character and I’ve been turning them down. I strongly feel that the next role I do, I should not be wearing spandex.
Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
‘It’s this accursed Science,’ I cried. ‘It’s the very Devil. The mediaeval priests and persecutors were right, and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it-and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way.’
Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.
We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.
People like it when they understand something that they previously thought they couldn’t understand. It’s a sense of empowerment.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
“Half genius and half buffoon,” Freeman Dyson … wrote. … [Richard] Feynman struck him as uproariously American-unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science.
Without analysis, no synthesis.
The literary trappings and moralizing of science fiction I find insufficiently compelling.
Fifty years from now if an understanding of man’s origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.
A species is a reproductive community of populations reproductively isolated from others that occupies a specific niche in nature.
The brain has not explained the mind fully.
Although we often hear that data speak for themselves, their voices can be soft and sly
There is no counting the unsolved problems of Natural History.
But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?
The spectral density of black body radiation … represents something absolute, and since the search for the absolutes has always appeared to me to be the highest form of research, I applied myself vigorously to its solution.
What a deep faith in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton to enable them to unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work!
Religion, as it is understood in the West, does not lead toward progress, and science does not lead toward humanism.
Science burrows its insulted head in the filth of slaughterous inventions.
Business men are to be pitied who do not recognize the fact that the largest side of their secular business is benevolence. … No man ever manages a legitimate business in this life without doing indirectly far more for other men than he is trying to do for himself.
Boundaries which mark off one field of science from another are purely artificial, are set up only for temporary convenience. Let chemists and physicists dig deep enough, and they reach common ground.
What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal.
Electrical force is defined as something which causes motion of electrical charge; an electrical charge is something which exerts electric force.
Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing вЂlook over there.’
Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know.
In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face.
In science, reason is the guide; in poetry, taste. The object of the one is truth, which is uniform and indivisible; the object of the other is beauty, which is multiform and varied.
To study men, we must look close by; to study man, we must learn to look afar; if we are to discover essential characteristics, we must first observe differences.
Science is a seagull, it knows the sky; it is a squirrel, it knows the forest; it is a mole, it knows the underground; it is a dolphin, it knows the ocean! Science is a multi-talented creature!
Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.
I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.
Understanding what and why did not work may be more instructive than celebrating our successes.
Scientific theories tell us what is possible; myths tell us what is desirable. Both are needed to guide proper action.
The cause of nutrition and growth resides not in the organism as a whole but in the separate elementary parts-the cells.
“Genius is just enduring patience,” said Buffon. This is far from complete. Genius is impatience in ideas and patience with the facts: a lively imagination and a calm judgment, rather like a liquid boiling in a cup that remains cold.
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
All sciences are connected; they lend each other material aid as parts of one great whole, each doing its own work, not for itself alone, but for the other parts; as the eye guides the body and the foot sustains it and leads it from place to place.
The maxim of science is simply that of common sense-simple cases first; begin with seeing how the main force acts when there is as little as possible to impede it, and when you thoroughly comprehend that, add to it in succession the separate effects of each of the incumbering and interfering agencies.
Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities-that’s training or instruction-but is rather making visible what is hidden as a seed.
It is my belief that one of the most exciting things about the World Wide Web is that they allow minds, as Spock might say, to meld. The transfer of consciousness through a variety of mediums is nothing new.
The whole of the developments and operations of analysis are now capable of being executed by machinery … As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of science.
Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.
[In relation to business:] Invention must be its keynote-a steady progression from one thing to another. As each in turn approaches a saturated market, something new must be produced.
Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
To cross the seas, to traverse the roads, and to work machinery by galvanism, or rather electro-magnetism, will certainly, if executed, be the most noble achievement ever performed by man.
In size the electron bears the same relation to an atom that a baseball bears to the earth. Or, as Sir Oliver Lodge puts it, if a hydrogen atom were magnified to the size of a church, an electron would be a speck of dust in that church.
The poetic beauty of Davy’s mind never seems to have left him. To that circumstance I would ascribe the distinguishing feature in his character, and in his discoveries,-a vivid imagination sketching out new tracts in regions unexplored, for the judgement to select those leading to the recesses of abstract truth.
Sadly, embryonic stem cell research is completely legal in this country and has been going on at universities and research facilities for years.
At quite uncertain times and places,
The atoms left their heavenly path,
And by fortuitous embraces,
Engendered all that being hath.
And though they seem to cling together,
And form ‘associations’ here,
Yet, soon or late, they burst their tether,
And through the depths of space career.
The atoms left their heavenly path,
And by fortuitous embraces,
Engendered all that being hath.
And though they seem to cling together,
And form ‘associations’ here,
Yet, soon or late, they burst their tether,
And through the depths of space career.
To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.
It’s very dangerous to invent something in our times; ostentatious men of the other world, who are hostile to innovations, roam about angrily. To live in peace, one has to stay away from innovations and new ideas. Innovations, like trees, attract the most destructive lightnings to themselves.
The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a man’s determination.
The history of science is science itself; the history of the individual, the individual.
Science is the search for truth.
Even in the vast and mysterious reaches of the sea we are brought back to the fundamental truth that nothing lives to itself.
Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.
There are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours. For the atoms being infinite in number… are borne on far out into space.
The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.
‘Arcturus’ is his other name- I’d rather call him ‘Star.’ It’s very mean of Science To go and interfere!
Desire for approval and recognition is a healthy motive, but the desire to be acknowledged as better, stronger, or more intelligent than a fellow being or fellow scholar easily leads to an excessively egoistic psychological adjustment, which may become injurious for the individual and for the community.
It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.
In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.
America forms the longest and straightest bone in the earth’s skeleton.
The universe is then one, infinite, immobile. … It is not capable of comprehension and therefore is endless and limitless, and to that extent infinite and indeterminable, and consequently immobile.
It is remarkable that when great discoveries are effected, their simplicity always seems to detract from their originality: on these occasions we are reminded of the egg of Columbus!
To present a scientific subject in an attractive and stimulating manner is an artistic task, similar to that of a novelist or even a dramatic writer. The same holds for writing textbooks.
Human science is an uncertain guess.
Facts, when combined with ideas, constitute the greatest force in the world. They are greater than armaments, greater than finance, greater than science, business and law because they constitute the common denominator of all of them.
Science is busy with the hither-end of things, not the thither-end.
I looked for it [heavy hydrogen, deuterium] because I thought it should exist. I didn’t know it would have industrial applications or be the basic for the most powerful weapon ever known [the nuclear bomb] … I thought maybe my discovery might have the practical value of, say, neon in neon signs.
Romantics might like to think of themselves as being composed of stardust. Cynics might prefer to think of themselves as nuclear waste.
One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer.
Research cannot be forced very much. There is always danger of too much foliage and too little fruit.
Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.
We must teach science in the mother tongue. Otherwise, science will become a highbrow activity. It will not be an activity in which all people can participate.
Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing “Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!” If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about the concept.
There’s no way we can possibly understand anything. But we can see things, we can perceive things, and we can wonder. We can just be in a world of awe and wonder. That’s the best we can do.
Unforeseen surprises are the rule in science, not the exception. Remember: Stuff happens.
The order of … successive generations is indeed much more clearly proved than many a legend which has assumed the character of history in the hands of man; for the geological record is the work of God.
I think horror or science fiction is another way of telling a modern myth – it’s like Ancient Greece; it’s like kids couldn’t wait for the next ‘Orpheus’ story, the next ‘Jason and the Argonauts.’
We must never make experiments to confirm our ideas, but simply to control them.
Biology, meaning the science of all life, is a late notion.
Penguins are an indicator of the health of our watery planet, and if they are unable to survive, we had better take notice or we might find our own survival threatened.
[In my home workshop,] generally I’m mending things, which is interesting because you learn a lot about why they broke.
I am almost inclined to coin a word and call the appearance fluorescence, from fluor-spar, as the analogous term opalescence is derived from the name of a mineral.
Whereas the chemico-chemists always find in industry a beautiful field of gold-laden soil, the physico-chemists stand somewhat farther off, especially those who seek only the greatest dilution, for in general there is little to make with watery solutions.
When science starts to be interpretive
it is more unscientific even than mysticism.
it is more unscientific even than mysticism.
In nature we find not only that which is expedient, but also everything which is not so inexpedient as to endanger the existence of the species.
War is the science of destruction.
The forces of rotation caused red hot masses of stones to be torn away from the Earth and to be thrown into the ether, and this is the origin of the stars.
The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.
A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.
Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.
In completing one discovery we never fail to get an imperfect knowledge of others.
Science and mythology were the topics which fascinated me since my early childhood.
So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the Chancellors of God.
The influence (for good or ill) of Plato’s work is immeasurable. Western thought, one might say, has been Platonic or anti-Platonic, but hardly ever non-Platonic.
We define organic chemistry as the chemistry of carbon compounds.
The aim of medicine is to prevent disease and prolong life, the ideal of medicine is to eliminate the need of a physician.
