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Science

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The poetry of reality. ~ Richard Dawkins

Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

A

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  • The extensive literature addressed to the definition or characterization of science is filled with inconsistent points of view and demonstrates that an adequate definition is not easy to attain. Part of the difficulty arises from the fact that the meaning of science is not fixed, but is dynamic. As science has evolved, so has its meaning. It takes on a new meaning and significance with successive ages.
    • Russell L. Ackoff, Scientific Method: Optimizing Applied Research Decisions (1962), p. 1
  • We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.
    • Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (2002), p. 115
  • Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.
    • Henry Adams, Letter (11 April 1862), in The Letters of Henry Adams (1982), vol. 1, p. 290
  • No sand-blast of science had yet skimmed off the epidermis of history, thought, and feeling.
    • Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918), "Rome"
  • While all other Sciences have advanced, that of Government is at a stand; little better understood; little better practiced now than 3 or 4 thousand Years ago.
    • John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson (9 July 1813)
  • Should not a true understanding of life promote care for the future along with the present? This is the immediate duty of every scientist. Until now scientists have dealt with life as finite — is it not now their mission to see life as extending into Infinity?
  • Religion and science must not be considered separate in their essential nature.
    • Agni Yoga, Fiery World III (1935)
If men have probed
Worlds far remote, can problems of this earth,
This common home to which we’re born, defy them? ~ Alexis
  • Discovery attends on every quest,
    Except for renegades who shirk the toil.
    Now certain men have pushed discovery
    Into the sphere of heaven. Some part they know,—
    How planets rise and set and wheel about,
    And of the sun’s eclipse. If men have probed
    Worlds far remote, can problems of this earth,
    This common home to which we’re born, defy them?
    • Fragment of a lost comedy of Alexis; tr. T. F. Higham, "The Confident Scientist", in The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (1938), p. 524
  • We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect.
  • The sciences we are familiar with have been installed in a number of great 'continents'. Before Marx, two such continents had been opened up to scientific knowledge: the continent of Mathematics and the continent of Physics. The first by the Greeks (Thales), the second by Galileo. Marx opened up a third continent to scientific knowledge: the continent of History.
  • Science is not a neutral or innocent commodity which can be employed as a convenience by people wishing to partake only of the West's material power. Rather it is spiritually corrosive, burning away ancient authorities and traditions. It has shown itself unable to co-exist with anything. Scientists inevitably take on the mantle of the wizards, sorcerers and witch-doctors. Their miracle cures are our spells, their experiments our rituals.
    • Bryan Appleyard, Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man (1992), ch. 1
  • Scientific Knowledge is a mode of conception dealing with universals and things that are of necessity; and demonstrated truths and all scientific knowledge (since this involves reasoning) are derived from first principles. Consequently the first principles from which scientific truths are derived cannot themselves be reached by Science; nor yet are they apprehended by Art, nor by Prudence. To be matter of Scientific Knowledge a truth must be demonstrated by deduction from other truths; while Art and Prudence are concerned only with things that admit of variation. Nor is Wisdom the knowledge of first principles either: for the philosopher has to arrive at some things by demonstration.
    • Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. VI, sec. vi, 1; tr. H. Rackham (1926; rev. 1934)
Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. ~ Isaac Asimov
  • Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It's 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. And this works, not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life. I should think people would want to know that what they know is truly what the universe is like, or at least as close as they can get to it.
  • Scientific theories can always be improved and are improved. That is one of the glories of science. It is the authoritarian view of the Universe that is frozen in stone and cannot be changed, so that once it is wrong, it is wrong forever.
    • Isaac Asimov, "The Nearest Star" (1989); reprinted in The Secret of the Universe (1992), p. 82
  • Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death?
    No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
    One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?"
    "Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."
    • Isaac Asimov, The Roving Mind (Prometheus Books, 1997), p. 349
  • The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I've found it!) but “That's funny...”
    • Isaac Asimov, reported The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Science (1999), p. 297
  • There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.
    • Isaac Asimov, reported in Barbara Rowes (ed.) The Book of Quotes (E. P. Dutton, 1979), p. 56
  • In human life, you will find players of religion until the knowledge and proficiency in religion will be cleansed from all superstitions, and will be purified and perfected by the enlightenment of real science.
  • Science is the most real guide for civilisation, for life, for success in the world. To search for a guide other than science is absurdity, ignorance and heresy.
    • Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, as quoted in Atatürkçülük, vol. 1 (Millî Eğitim Basımevi, 1984), p. 283
  • Science is systematic organisation of knowledge about the universe on the basis of explanatory hypotheses which are genuinely testable. Science advances by developing gradually more comprehensive theories; that is, by formulating theories of greater generality which can account for observational statements and hypotheses which appear as prima facie unrelated.

B

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  • Those who have taken upon them to lay down the law of nature as a thing already searched out and understood, whether they have spoken in simple assurance or professional affectation, have therein done philosophy and the sciences great injury. For as they have been successful in inducing belief, so they have been effective in quenching and stopping inquiry; and have done more harm by spoiling and putting an end to other men's efforts than good by their own. Those on the other hand who have taken a contrary course, and asserted that absolutely nothing can be known — whether it were from hatred of the ancient sophists, or from uncertainty and fluctuation of mind, or even from a kind of fullness of learning, that they fell upon this opinion — have certainly advanced reasons for it that are not to be despised; but yet they have neither started from true principles nor rested in the just conclusion, zeal and affectation having carried them much too far....
    Now my method, though hard to practice, is easy to explain; and it is this. I propose to establish progressive stages of certainty. The evidence of the sense, helped and guarded by a certain process of correction, I retain. But the mental operation which follows the act of sense I for the most part reject; and instead of it I open and lay out a new and certain path for the mind to proceed in, starting directly from the simple sensuous perception.
  • Moreover the works already known are due to chance and experiment rather than to sciences; for the sciences we now possess are merely systems for the nice ordering and setting forth of things already invented; not methods of invention or directions for new works.
    • Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), Bk. I, Aphorism VIII
  • Science, being the wonder of the ignorant and unskilful, may be not absurdly called a monster. In figure and aspect it is represented as many-shaped, in allusion to the immense variety of matter with which it deals. It is said to have the face and voice of a woman, in respect of its beauty and facility of utterance. Wings are added because the sciences and the discoveries of science spread and fly abroad in an instant ; the communication of knowledge being like that of one candle with another, which lights up at once. Claws, sharp and hooked, are ascribed to it with great elegance, because the axioms and arguments of science penetrate and hold fast the mind, so that it has no means of evasion or escape.
    • Francis Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum ['The Wisdom of the Ancients'] (1609), Ch. 28: "Sphinx, or Science", in The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 6 (London, 1858), p. 756
  • The divisions of the sciences are not like different lines that meet in one angle, but rather like the branches of trees that join in one trunk.
    • Francis Bacon, as quoted in J. Arthur Thomson, Introduction to Science (1911), ch. 4
  • We often frame our understanding of what the space telescope will do in terms of what we expect to find, and actually it would be terribly anticlimactic if in fact we find what we expect to find. ... The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined.
  • Science preceded the theory of science, and is independent of it. Science preceded naturalism, and will survive it.
  • The civilization of the West, which was brilliant by virtue of its scientific perfection for a long time, and which subjugated the whole world with the products of this science to its states and nations, is now bankrupt and in decline.
    • Hassan al-Banna, tr. C. Wendell, Five Tracts of Hassan al-Banna (University of California Press, 1978), p. 106
  • Mathematics became an experimental subject. Individuals could follow previously intractable problems by simply watching what happened when they were programmed into a personal computer. ... The PC revolution has made science more visual and more immediate ... by creating films of imaginary experiences of mathematical worlds. ... Words are no longer enough.
    • John D. Barrow, Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science (2008).
  • We say that the string is 'random' if there is no other representation of the string which is shorter than itself. But we will say that it is 'non-random' if there does exist such an abbreviated representation. ... In general, the shorter the possible representation... the less random... On this view we recognize science to be the search for algorithmic compressions. ... It is simplest to think of mathematics as the catalogue of all possible patterns. ... When viewed in this way, it is inevitable that the world is described by mathematics. ...In many ways the search for a Theory of Everything is a manifestation of a faith that this compression goes all the way down to the bedrock of reality...
  • Science has taught us how to put the atom to work. But to make it work for good instead of for evil lies in the domain dealing with the principles of human duty. We are now facing a problem more of ethics than physics.
    • Bernard Baruch, speech to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (14 June 1946), in Alfred J. Kolatch, Great Jewish Quotations (1996), p. 39
  • I do not believe that the present flowering of science is due in the least to a real appreciation of the beauty and intellectual discipline of the subject. It is due simply to the fact that power, wealth and prestige can only be obtained by the correct application of science.
    • Derek Barton, Some Reflections on the Present Status of Organic Chemistry, in Science and Human Progress: Addresses at the Celebrations of the 50th Anniversary of the Mellon Institute (1963), p. 90
  • Just because people doing science are embedded in a particular social and cultural milieu, it doesn’t follow that science is not universal.
    • Mordechai Ben-Ari, Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), ch. 6
  • It is clear today that modern science developed when people stopped debating metaphysical questions about the world and instead concerned themselves with the discovery of laws that were primarily mathematical.
    • Mordechai Ben-Ari, Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), ch. 11
  • Science was a systematic way to avoid fooling yourself, after all.
    • Gregory Benford, The Martian Race (1999), ch. 40
  • It is the aim of science to co-ordinate all observable phenomena within a single natural order and it is its faith that such is possible. Hence the basic objection to acceptance of the supernatural. If the scientific stand is justified, then everything, whether of matter, energy, mind or spirit, belongs to one vast scheme—it is all one and every part has meaning in relation to the whole. This is as much a tenet of faith as any other belief, but it forms the working hypothesis of all real scientific endeavor. As a basis for action or inquiry it is worth pushing to the limit ... If facts or phenomena, in whatever field, fail to fit in, then we modify or rebuild our conceptions until they do, on the assumption that they belong and that there is no separate pigeonhole for mystic revelation and no possibility for arbitrary intervention by any powers that be. If this brings the divine down to earth, so much the better for earthly inhabitants.
  • Engineering or Technology is the making of things that did not previously exist, whereas science is the discovering of things that have long existed.
    • David Billington, The Tower and the Bridge: The New Art of Structural Engineering (1983), 9.
  • Science, dimly perceiving the truth, may find Bacteria and other infinitesimals in the human body, and see in them but occasional and abnormal visitors to which diseases are attributed. Occultism — which discerns a life in every atom and molecule, whether in a mineral or human body, in air, fire or water -- affirms that our whole body is built of such lives, the smallest bacteria under the microscope being to them in comparative size like an elephant to the tiniest infusoria.
  • But in practical affairs, particularly in politics, men are needed who combine human experience and interest in human relations with a knowledge of science and technology. Moreover, they must be men of action and not contemplation. I have the impression that no method of education can produce people with all the qualities required. I am haunted by the idea that this break in human civilization, caused by the discovery of the scientific method, may be irreparable.
    • Max Born, My Life & My Views (1968), pp. 57-8
  • Your worship is your furnaces,
    Which, like old idols, lost obscenes,
    Have molten bowels; your vision is
    Machines for making more machines.
    • Gordon Bottomley, "To Iron-Founders and Others", st. 4. Chambers of Imagery, 2nd ser. (1912), p. 19
  • If the author is so interested in Science, why doesn't she take a course in it?
    • Peg Bracken, I Didn't Come Here to Argue (1969), Fawcett Crest edition, page 49.
  • L'Art est fait pour troubler, la Science rassure.
    • Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.
    • Georges Braque, Le Jour et la nuit: Cahiers 1917–52 ['Day and Night: Notebooks'] (1952). Reported in Rhoda Thomas Tripp (ed.) The International Thesaurus of Quotations (1970), p. 33
  • One of the most disconcerting issues of our time lies in the fact that modern science, along with miracle drugs and communications satellites, has also produced nuclear bombs. What makes it even worse, science has utterly failed to provide an answer on how to cope with them. As a result, science and scientists have often been blamed for the desperate dilemma in which mankind finds itself today.
    Science, all by itself, has no moral dimension. The same poison-containing drug which cures when taken in small doses, may kill when taken in excess. The same nuclear chain reaction that produces badly needed electrical energy when harnessed in a reactor, may kill thousands when abruptly released in an atomic bomb. Thus it does not make sense to ask a biochemist or a nuclear physicist whether his research in the field of toxic substances or nuclear processes is good or bad for mankind. In most cases the scientist will be fully aware of the possibility of an abuse of his discoveries, but aside from his innate scientific curiosity he will be motivated by a deep-seated hope and belief that something of value for his fellow man may emerge from his labors.
    The same applies to technology, through which most advances in the natural sciences are put to practical use.
    • Wernher von Braun, Responsible Scientific Investigation and Application (1976), address delivered to the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Lutheran Church in America, as published in Hans Ober Hess (ed.) The Nature of a Humane Society: A Symposium on the Bicentennial of the United States of America (1977), p. 97. Variants:
      • "Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently." — Robert B. Seidensticker, Futurehype: The Myths of Technology Change (2009)
      • "Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently. Should the knife have not been developed?" — Peter Daempfle, Science & Society (2012), ch. 6, p. 97
  • People keep saying "science doesn't know everything!" Well, science "knows" it doesn't know everything; otherwise it would stop.
  • Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
  • The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
    • Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (1956), pt. 2, sec. 6
  • 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 on nature.
    • Jacob Bronowski, in Universities Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 3 (1956), p. 252
  • Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved. The shame is ours if we do not make science part of our world...
    • Jacob Bronowski, The Sense of Human Dignity, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (19 March 1953), printed in Science and Human Values (1959), p. 94
  • All great scientists have used their imaginations freely, and let it ride them to outrageous conclusions without crying "Halt!"
    • Jacob Bronowski, The Reach of Imagination (1967)
  • That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.
    • Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (1973), ch. 4
  • I believe that the world is totally connected: that is to say, that there are no events anywhere in the universe which are not tied to every other event in the universe. ... It is ... an essential part of the methodology of science to divide the world for any experiment into ... relevant and ... irrelevant. We make a cut. We put the experiment ... into a box. ... The moment we do that, we do violence to the connections ... I get a set of answers which I try to decode in this context. ... I am certainly not going to get the world right, because the basic assumption that I have made about the world is a lie. ... It is bound to give me only an approximation to what goes inside the fence. Therefore, when we practice science (and this is true of all our experience) we are always decoding a part of nature which is not complete. We simply cannot get out of our own finiteness.
    • Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978), pp. 58-59
  • Science is an attempt to represent the known world as a closed system with a perfect formalism. Scientific discovery is a constant maverick process of breaking out at the ends of the system ... and then hastily closing it. ... The act of the imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections. ...every act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike. ... They introduce new likenesses, whether it is Shakespeare ... or Newton saying that the moon in essence is exactly like a thrown apple.
    • Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978), pp. 108-110
  • In my concept of time, which is largely connected with evolutionary time, the notion that errors are made by nature, that replication is not perfect, is central. ... We must accept the fact that all the imaginative inventions are to some extent errors with respect to the norm. ... But these errors have the peculiar property of being able to sustain themselves, of being able to reproduce themselves. ... More scientific discoveries are wrong than right. Of course, the wrong ones do not get published so often. But never confuse the process of exposition with the process of discovery. ... The discovery is made with tears and sweat (... with a good deal of bad language) by people who are constantly getting the wrong answer. ... So, of course, more bad science is produced than good and and more bad works of art are produced than good ones. The difference is only that most scientists take care not to exhibit their bad work.
    • Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978), pp. 110-112
  • Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endangers its cargo.
  • In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen on a single plane — the earth's surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times a bloody as it was before; but science does not teach brotherly love. Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future.
    • William Jennings Bryan, "Scopes Monkey Trial" summation for the prosecution (1925)
  • There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.
    • Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)
  • I find it [science] analytical, pretentious and superficial—largely because it does not address itself to dreams, chance, laughter, feelings, or paradox—in other words,—all the things I love the most.
  • Science has been advancing without interruption during the last three of four hundred years; every new discovery has led to new problems and new methods of solution, and opened up new fields for exploration. Hitherto men of science have not been compelled to halt, they have always found ways to advance further. But what assurance have we that they will not come up against impassable barriers? ... How can we be sure that some day progress may not come to a dead pause, not because knowledge is exhausted, but because our resources for investigation are exhausted? ... It is an assumption, which cannot be verified, that we shall not reach a point in our knowledge of nature beyond which the human intellect is unqualified to pass.

C

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There are answers that science isn’t able to provide about the natural world—the questions about why instead of the questions about how. I’m interested in the whys. I find many of those answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.
~ Francis Collins
  • One of my complaints is that you've got far more scientists than ever before but the pace of discovery has not increased. Why? Because they're all busy just filling in the details of what they think is the standard story. And the youngsters, the people with different ideas have just as big a fight as ever and normally it takes decades for science to correct itself. But science does correct itself and that's the reason why science is such a glorious thing for our species.
  • Can all that Optics teach, unfold
    Thy form to please me so,
    As when I dreamed of gems and gold
    Hid in thy radiant bow?
    When Science from Creation's face
    Enchantment's veil withdraws,
    What lovely visions yield their place
    To cold material laws!
  • Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue. They may lead us—to put it in extreme terms—to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take.
    • Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture (1983), p. 87
  • What we might call, by way of Eminence, the Dismal Science.
    • Thomas Carlyle, as reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1922), pp. 691-92
  • But when science, passing beyond its own limits, assumes to take the place of theology, and sets up its own conception of the order of nature as a sufficient account of its cause, it is invading a province of thought to which it has no claim, and not unreasonably provokes the hostility of its best friends.
    • M. B. Carpenter, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert (ed.) Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) p. 530
  • The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.
    • Rachel Carson, Acceptance speech of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1952) for The Sea Around Us (1951); also in Linda Lear (ed.) Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999), p. 91
  • We see scientific societies acknowledging as "sustaining associates" a dozen or more giants of a related industry. When the scientific organization speaks, whose voice do we hear-that of science? or of the sustaining industry? It might be a less serious situation if this voice were always clearly identified, but the public assumes it is hearing the voice of science…All of these things raise the question of the communication of scientific knowledge to the public. Is industry becoming a screen through which facts must be filtered, so that the hard, uncomfortable truths are kept back and only the harmless morsels allowed to filter through?...here the tailoring-the screening of basic truth is done, not to suit a party line-but to accommodate to the short-term gain-to serve the gods of profit and production.
    • Rachel Carson, Speech to the Women's National Press Club (December 5, 1962), in Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment
  • The solutions put forth by imperialism are the quintessence of simplicity...When they speak of the problems of population and birth, they are in no way moved by concepts related to the interests of the family or of society...Just when science and technology are making incredible advances in all fields, they resort to technology to suppress revolutions and ask the help of science to prevent population growth. In short, the peoples are not to make revolutions, and women are not to give birth. This sums up the philosophy of imperialism.
    • Fidel Castro, Speech made in the closing session of the Cultural Congress of Havana, at the "Chaplin" Theatre on January 12, 1968; "Year of the Heroic Guerrilla", in Fidel Castro: Major Speeches (London: Stage 1, 1968), p. 196
  • In 1945, ... I proved a sentimental fool; and Mr. Truman could safely have classified me among the whimpering idiots he did not wish admitted to the presidential office. For I felt that no man has the right to decree so much suffering, and that science, in providing and sharpening the knife and in upholding the ram, had incurred a guilt of which it will never get rid. It was at that time that the nexus between science and murder became clear to me. For several years after the somber event, between 1947 and 1952, I tried desperately to find a position in what then appeared to me as a bucolic Switzerland,—but I had no success.
    • Erwin Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life before Nature (1978), 4
  • I'm not anti-science, I'm anti the way science is sometimes used.
    • Charles III (then Prince of Wales), "Charles at 60: The Passionate Prince", BBC television (12 November 2008)
  • We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost...
    The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men — cries out for universal brotherhood — for the unity of us all.
  • For out of olde feldes, as men seith,
    Cometh al this newe corn fro yeer to yere;
    And out of olde bokes, in good feith,
    Cometh al this newe science that men lere.
  • My own case for Christianity is rational; but it is not simple. It is an accumulation of varied facts, like the attitude of the ordinary agnostic. But the ordinary agnostic has got his facts all wrong. He is a non-believer for a multitude of reasons; but they are untrue reasons. He doubts because the Middle Ages were barbaric, but they weren't; because Darwinism is demonstrated, but it isn't; because miracles do not happen, but they do; because monks were lazy, but they were very industrious; because nuns are unhappy, but they are particularly cheerful; because Christian art was sad and pale, but it was picked out in peculiarly bright colours and gay with gold; because modern science is moving away from the supernatural, but it isn't, it is moving towards the supernatural with the rapidity of a railway train.
  • As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
    • Noam Chomsky, Television interview, 30 March 1978, in The Listener (6 April 1978). Reported in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 3rd ed. (1979), p. 148
  • It is arguable whether the human race have been gainers by the march of science beyond the steam engine. Electricity opens a field of infinite conveniences to ever greater numbers, but they may well have to pay dearly for them. But anyhow in my thought I stop short of the internal combustion engine which has made the world so much smaller. Still more must we fear the consequences of entrusting a human race so little different from their predecessors of the so-called barbarous ages such awful agencies as the atomic bomb. Give me the horse.
    • Winston Churchill, Address to the Royal College of Surgeons (10 July 1951). Collected in Stemming the Tide: Speeches 1951 and 1952 (1953), p. 91
  • As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
  • By scientific thought we mean the application of past experience to new circumstances by means of an observed order of events. By saying that this order of events is exact we mean that it is exact enough to correct experiments by, but we do not mean that it is theoretically or absolutely exact, because we do not know. The process of inference [is] in itself an assumption of uniformity, and... as the known exactness of the uniformity became greater, the stringency of the inference increased. By saying that the order of events is reasonable we do not mean that everything has a purpose, or that everything can be explained, or that everything has a cause; for neither of these is true. But we mean that to every reasonable question there is an intelligible answer, which either we or posterity may know by the exercise of scientific thought.
    • William Kingdon Clifford, "On the Aims and Instruments of Scientific Thought", Lecture before the members of the British Association at Brighton (19 August 1872), in Lectures and Essays by William Kingdon Clifford (1879), vol. 1, pp. 155-156
  • I specially wish you not to go away with the idea that the exercise of scientific thought is properly confined... When the Roman jurists applied their experience of Roman citizens to dealings between citizens and aliens, showing by the difference of their actions that they regarded the circumstances as essentially different, they laid the foundations of that great structure which has guided the social progress of Europe. That procedure was an instance of strictly scientific thought. When a poet finds that he has to move a strange new world which his predecessors have not moved; when, nevertheless, he catches fire from their flashes, arms from their armoury, sustentation from their foot-prints, the procedure by which he applies old experience to new circumstances is nothing greater or less than scientific thought. When the moralist studying the conditions of society and the ideas of right and wrong which have come down to us from a time when war was the normal condition of man and success in war the only chance of survival, evolves from them the conditions and ideas which must accompany a time of peace, when the comradeship of equals is the condition of national success; the process by which he does this is scientific thought and nothing else.
    • William Kingdon Clifford, "On the Aims and Instruments of Scientific Thought", Lecture before the members of the British Association at Brighton (19 August 1872), in Lectures and Essays by William Kingdon Clifford (1879), vol. 1, pp. 156-157
  • Remember, then, that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself. And for this reason the question what its characters are...is the question of all questions for the human race.
    • William Kingdon Clifford, "On the Aims and Instruments of Scientific Thought", Lecture before the members of the British Association at Brighton (19 August 1872), in Lectures and Essays by William Kingdon Clifford (1879), vol. 1, pp. 156-157
  • In the age of the genotype, phenotype is king!
    • Mike Coffey, "Dealing with complexity of new phenotypes in modern dairy cattle breeding", in Animal Frontiers, vol. 10, no. 2 (April 2020), pp. 23–28
  • Science is finding things out; and in that sense history is science.
  • ... there are answers that science isn’t able to provide about the natural world—the questions about why instead of the questions about how. I’m interested in the whys. I find many of those answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.
Modern science will continue to be blindly destructive as long as its operations are determined by the anarchism of market economic forces. ~ Clifford D. Conner
  • The French Revolution qualitatively transformed all aspects of human culture, including science, for better or worse. The institutional ideological changes wrought in French science by the Revolution and its aftermath shaped the subsequent course of modern science everywhere. The essential underlying factor, as the Hessen thesis maintains, was the victory of capitalism, which the Revolution consolidated. The new social order spread to Europe and the rest of the world, everywhere subordinating the further development of science to capitalist interests.
  • Modern science will continue to be blindly destructive as long as its operations are determined by the anarchism of market economic forces. The problem to be solved is whether science, technology, and industry can be brought under genuinely democratic control in the context of a global planned economy, so that all of us can collectively put our hard-won scientific knowledge to mutually beneficial use. I am confident it can be accomplished, but will it? If so, there is reason for optimism. If not... well, to paraphrase Keynes, "in the not-so-long run we're all dead."
    • Clifford D. Conner, A People's History of Science (2005)
  • Today, when so much depends on our informed action, we as voters and taxpayers can no longer afford to confuse science and technology, to confound “pure” science and “applied” science.
  • Far from attempting to control science, few among the general public even seem to recognize just what “science” entails. Because lethal technologies seem to spring spontaneously from scientific discoveries, most people regard dangerous technology as no more than the bitter fruit of science, the real root of all evil.
    • Jacques-Yves Cousteau, in The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus (2007), p. 181
  • Science is one of the few areas of human life in which the majority does not rule.
  • It seems to me that we live in a society in which technology is continuously presented as wonderful. We were less exposed to the negative aspects of technology which were inevitably there. One of my interests is to provide that kind of balance to these notions that cell phones and faxes are all wonderful and great. Isn't it fabulous that we all have computers? Well, yes and no is my response.
    I was particularly interested in that, in working on Jurassic Park that aspect of what are the negative parts. Because in talking with the people who were doing this kind of research what I was hearing was that the most responsible of them were deciding not to proceed down certain lines of inquiry which is really a new phase in science. Traditionally in science what the scientists themselves have said is: "I might as well do it, because if I don't, someone else will. It is going to happen inevitably." I think there's recognition now, that it's no so inevitable and it's quite conceivable that if I don't do this research neither will anyone else. It's simply too dangerous.
    • Michael Crichton, interview from the Lost World section of Beyond Jurassic Park (2001 DVD)
  • To spread healthy ideas among even the lowest classes of people, to remove men from the influence of prejudice and passion, to make reason the arbiter and supreme guide of public opinion; that is the essential goal of the sciences; that is how science will contribute to the advancement of civilization, and that is what deserves protection of governments who want to insure the stability of their power.

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  • The vast majority of modern scientists are agnostics in that they reject the claim of the metaphysical realist who presumes to have discovered substance and true being in the outside world. They will claim that substance and the thing in itself are unknowable, or at least that these elude rational investigation, and that the objective world of science is nothing but a mental construct imagined for the purpose of co-ordinating our sense impressions. But, once this point is admitted, they will recognise that this mentally constructed objective universe must to all intents and purposes be treated as a reality pre-existing to the observer who discovers it bit by bit. This last expression of opinion is not the result of some philosophical system. It is imposed upon scientists as an inevitable conclusion; for had it been proved impossible to imagine a common objective universe, the same for all men, science could never have existed, since it would have been reduced to individual points of view which could never have been co-ordinated. In other words, knowledge would have lacked generality; and without generality there could have been no such thing as science.
    • Aram D'Abro, The Evolution of Scientific Thought from Newton to Einstein (1927), p. 450
  • Alas! A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections — a mere heart of stone.
    • Charles Darwin, letter to T. H. Huxley, 9 July 1857; Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward (eds.) More Letters of Charles Darwin (1903) vol. I, ch. 2: "Evolution, 1844–1858", p. 98
  • Science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.
    • Charles Darwin, in The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (1958), p. 70
  • It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
  • In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
    • Sir Francis Darwin, "Francis Galton", the first Galton Lecture, delivered before the Eugenics Education Society, 16 February 1914; reprinted, with some changes, from the Eugenics Review of April 1914, in Rustic Sounds and Other Studies in Literature and Natural History (1917), p. 24
  • Finding hidden links between seemingly disparate phenomena is what makes the scientific method so powerful and compelling. The distinctive feature of science is that it is both broad and deep: broad in the way it tackles all physical phenomena and deep in the way it weaves them, economically, into a common explanatory scheme requiring fewer and fewer assumptions. No other system of thought can match its breadth and depth.
    • Paul Davies, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life (2007)
  • Nothing makes clearer the limits of science than the scientist’s opinions about any topic that is not strictly related to his profession.
  • Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and of no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown; and in philosophy, the sentiment of the Macedonian hero can never apply, — there are always new worlds to conquer.
    • Sir Humphry Davy, discourse delivered at the Royal Society of London (30 November 1825)
  • We know that mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics. The two eyes of exact science are mathematics and logic: the mathematical sect puts out the logical eye, the logical sect puts out the mathematical eye; each believing that it can see better with one eye than with two.
  • What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern: the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men the useful has succeeded to the beautiful. ...There are great truths to tell, if we had either the courage to announce them or the temper to receive them.
  • Test ideas by experiment and observation. Build on those ideas that pass the test. Reject the ones that fail. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. And question everything. Including authority.
  • What I would be so happy about is—I don’t expect everybody to understand everything about science at the end of the season, but I want them to be curious about learning more. I want them to understand the power of science, and its tremendous liberating potential. If those things are communicated, then I feel like my work is done.
    • Ann Druyan, Interview with Astronomy magazine (2020)
  • ... science is a birthright that belongs to every one of us. And the degree to which we're excluded from science is the degree to which we are powerless. We can't be informed decision-makers.
  • It is a great tragedy that science, this wonderful process for finding out what is true, has ceded the spiritual uplift of its central revelations: the vastness of the universe, the immensity of time, the relatedness of all life, and life’s preciousness on our tiny planet.
    • Ann Druyan, interview with Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 27, no. 6 (November–December 2003)
  • Science is a culture, constantly growing and changing. The science of today has broken out of the molds of classical nineteenth-century science, just as the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock broke out of the molds of nineteenth-century art. Science has as many competing styles as painting or poetry.

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All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking. ~ Einstein
  • Science has an important part to play in our everyday existence, and there is far too much neglect of science; but its intention is to supplement not to supplant the familiar outlook.
  • It is not enough that you should understand about applied science in order that your work may increase man's blessings. Concern for the man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors; concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.
    • Albert Einstein, speech at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California (February 16, 1931), as reported in The New York Times (February 17, 1931), p. 6.
  • All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.
    • Albert Einstein, "Physics and Reality" (1936); later published in Out of My Later Years (1950).
  • The aim of science is, on the one hand, a comprehension, as complete as possible, of the connection between the sense experiences in their totality, and, on the other hand, the accomplishment of this aim by the use of a minimum of primary concepts and relations. (Seeking, as far as possible, logical unity in the world picture, i.e. paucity in logical elements.)
    • Albert Einstein, "Physics and Reality", The Journal of the Franklin Institute, 221 (1936), pp. 349-82
  • 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. It is no mere chance that our older universities developed from clerical schools. Both churches and universities — insofar as they live up to their true function — serve the ennoblement of the individual. They seek to fulfill this great task by spreading moral and cultural understanding, renouncing the use of brute force.
    • Albert Einstein, "Moral Decay" (1937); later published in Out of My Later Years (1950)
  • Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
    • Albert Einstein, paper prepared for initial meeting of the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, New York City (September 9–11, 1940); in Einstein, Out of My Later Years (1950; rev. 1970), ch. 8, pt. 1, p. 26
  • There exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music. That passion is rather common in children, but it gets lost in most people later on. Without this passion, there would be neither mathematics nor natural science. Time and again the passion for understanding has led to the illusion that man is able to comprehend the objective world rationally, by pure thought, without any empirical foundations—in short, by metaphysics. I believe that every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist, no matter how pure a "positivist" he may fancy himself. The metaphysicist believes that the logically simple is also the real. The tamed metaphysicist believes that not all that is logically simple is embodied in experienced reality, but that the totality of all sensory experience can be "comprehended" on the basis of a conceptual system built on premises of great simplicity. The skeptic will say that this is a "miracle creed." Admittedly so, but it is a miracle creed which has been borne out to an amazing extent by the development of science.
    • Albert Einstein, On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation (April, 1950), in Scientific American, vol. 182, no. 4. Also quoted in Ideas and Opinions, (1954), Part V: "Contributions to Science"
  • [A]ll our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
    • Albert Einstein, Letter to Hans Muehsam (9 July 1951), Einstein Archives 38-408, quoted in Alice Calaprice, The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2010), p. 404
  • 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...
    • Gertrude B. Elion, as quoted in Susan Ambrose et al., Journeys of Women in Science and Engineering: No Universal Constants (1997)
Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it. ~ Jacques Ellul
  • From society's standpoint, modern science and technology appears Janus-faced : It has given us wealth in one sense, and poverty in another; it has harnessed nature to man's basic needs in ways and to extents undreamed - of only a few decades ago, but it has fostered a continuingly lowered "quality of life".
  • It is a cliché that the modern scientific vision has desacralized the world, and the world desacralized by scientific knowledge has become one of the existential elements that make up modern man, all the more so to the degree that he is "civilized." Ever since he has been subject to compulsory education, his mind has been stuffed with "positive" scientific notions; he cannot avoid seeing in a soulless light everything that surrounds him, and therefore acts destructively. What, for example, could the symbol of the sunset of a dynasty, like the Japanese, mean to him when he knows scientifically what the sun is: merely a star, at which one can even fire missiles.

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With the observable fact that scientific knowledge makes our lives better when applied with concern for human welfare and environmental protection, there is no question that science and technology can produce abundance so that no one has to go without... Our times demand the declaration of the world's resources as the common heritage of all people. ~ Jacque Fresco
  • The impression that science is over has occurred many times in various branches of human knowledge, often because of an explosion of discoveries made by a genius or a small group of men in such a short time that average minds could hardly follow and had the unconscious desire to take breath, to get used to the unexpected things that came to be revealed. Dazzled by these new truths, they could not see beyond. Sometimes an entire century did not suffice to produce this accommodation.
    • Charles Fabry, La vie et l'oeuvre scientifique de Augustin Fresnel (1927), p. 13
  • These days, scientists are largely treated like beggars, their tin cups externally extended to the government funding agencies.
    • J. Doyne Farmer, The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995), ed. John Brockman
  • Science is first of all the savants. A somewhat sorry crowd. They are timid, fusty, sad and shortsighted, wonderful when it comes to not seeing the world, to not appreciating men, to not knowing what man is, also to not knowing either the principles, origins and foundations nor the end, the importance and the consequences of the very science they are studying. Often enough they are superstitious and dogmatic in their superstitions and prejudices because, knowing exactly what effectively they know, they bring to the expression of their prejudices the strictness and imperiousness of the formulas of their laboratories and studies.
  • The delights of science and mathematics—their revelations of natural beauty and harmony, their visions of thing to come, and the joy of discovery in itself, the light and shadow it casts on the mystery dance of mind and nature—are too profound, and too important, to be left to scientists and mathematicians alone. They belong to the cultural heritage of the entire world, and to know something about them is to be acquainted with the finest new achievements of the human mind.
    • Timothy Ferris, The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics (Little, Brown & Co., 1991), Preface, p. xi
  • Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.
  • The separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution.
    • Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975) p. 295
  • The assertion...that there is no knowledge outside science – extra scientiam nulla salus – is nothing but another and most convenient fairy-tale.
    • Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975) p. 306
  • Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question — to doubt — to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained.
    • Richard Feynman, "The Value of Science", address to the National Academy of Sciences (Autumn 1955)
  • Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
    • Richard Feynman, "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society", lecture at the Galileo Symposium in Italy (1964)
  • Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. ... Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it.
    • Richard Feynman, "What is Science?", 15th annual meeting, National Science Teachers Association, New York City (1966); published in The Physics Teacher, vol. 7, no. 6 (1969), pp. 313-320
  • I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe...
    I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.
  • In science, just as in art and in life, only that which is true to culture is true to nature.
    • Ludwik Fleck (1935), reported in Wojciech Sady, "Ludwik Fleck–Thought Collectives and Thought Styles", Polish Philosophers of Science and Nature in the 20th Century (Brill, 2001), pp. 197-205
  • Edison definitely ended the distinction between the theoretical man of science and the practical man of science, so that today we think of scientific discoveries in connection with their possible present or future application to the needs of man. He took the old rule-of-thumb methods out of industry and substituted exact scientific knowledge, while, on the other hand, he directed scientific research into useful channels.
    • Henry Ford, in My Friend Mr. Edison (1930); quoted in Dyson Carter, If You Want to Invent (1939), p. 110
  • For indeed it is one of the lessons of the history of science that each age steps on the shoulders of the ages which have gone before. The value of each age is not its own, but is in part, in large part, a debt to its forerunners. And this age of ours, if, like its predecessors, it can boast of something of which it is proud, would, could it read the future, doubtless find much also of which it would be ashamed.
    • Sir Michael Foster, reported in F. H. Garrison, An Introduction to the History of Medicine (1917), p. 15
  • It is probably not too much to say that the hope of progress--moral and intellectual as well as material--in the future is bound up with the fortunes of science, and that every obstacle placed in the way of scientific discovery is a wrong to humanity.
    • James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890). Chapter 69, Farewell to Nem
  • Although many... feel we can prepare for our future by thinking, acting, and learning using present methods and values, nothing is farther from the truth... in today’s rapidly changing world... Each succeeding generation inherits the values, accomplishments, hopes, successes, and failings of previous generations... they inherit the results of the decisions made by those generations.
    For the hundreds of thousands of years of human existence when technologies were simple or non-existent, this may have had little impact on human life and the earth that sustains it. Each generation of hunters and gatherers, then plowmen and pioneers, passed on tools to the next generation to help them survive. Change from one generation to the next was slow and hardly noticeable. In those days there was little understanding of science and how things worked, and explanations were not scientific.
    This is no longer the case in today’s high-tech world where a change that affects millions may happen in a matter of seconds. A child born today inherits a world vastly different from that of its parent’s generation, let alone that from centuries ago. Previous generations left a legacy of, exploitation, occupation, and irrelevant values that present great challenges, but also opportunities to the people of today.
    The application of scientific principles, for better or worse, accounts for every single advance that has improved people’s lives... at the heart of human progress – or destruction – is the rock-solid foundation of science.
  • And most people say of astrology, "Oh, it's harmless fun, isn't it?" And I should say probably for about 80% of the cases it probably is harmless fun, but there's a strong way in which it isn't harmless: one, because it's so anti-science; you know, you'll hear things like "Science doesn't know everything." Well, of course science doesn't know everything. But because science doesn't know everything that doesn't mean science knows nothing. Science knows enough for us to be watched by a few million people now on television, for these lights to be working, for quite extraordinary miracles to have taken place in terms of the harnessing of the physical world and our dim approaches towards understanding it.
    • Stephen Fry, interview on Room 101, ser. 6 (2001), ep. 10
  • We must start with scientific fundamentals, and that means with the data of experiments and not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superficially seems to be obvious. It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.
    • Buckminster Fuller, "The Wellspring of Reality", Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975)
  • The word generalization in literature usually means covering too much territory too thinly to be persuasive, let alone convincing. In science, however, a generalization means a principle that has been found to hold true in every special case. ... The principle of leverage is a scientific generalization.
    • Buckminster Fuller, "The Wellspring of Reality", Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975)

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  • Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore. The two are rarely compatible.
  • Man’s responsibility increases as that of the gods decreases.
    • André Gide, as quoted in Robert L. Park, Voodoo Science (2000), p. 31
  • So far what we’re doing here is pure science. We’re learning facts about the universe without worrying what they’re good for.
  • “Are you sure?” Myron asked.
    “If I was sure,” Uncle Hugo said, “I wouldn’t have to do the experiment.”
    • Mel Gilden, The Pumpkins of Time (1994), p. 14
  • Wissenschaft und Kunst gehören der Welt an, und vor ihnen verschwinden die Schranken der Nationalität.
    • Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.
    • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in a conversation with a German historian (1813), as reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1922), pp. 691-92
  • In many ways, science, including statistics, is like detective work. Beginning with a set of observations, we ask what can be said about the systems that generated them.
    • Larry Gonick and Woollcott Smith, The Cartoon Guide to Statistics (Collins, 1994), p. 113
  • In the measure in which they are scientific, the sciences of man can consider man only by selecting points of view under which it is possible to treat him objectively. It is obviously not a question for the philosopher to ignore the various forms of sociology, psychology, ethnology, neurology, and so forth: he must simply wonder if the sciences of man, added up, constitute a science of man.
    • Henri Gouhier, preface to Aimé Forest, L'Avènement de l'âme (Paris: Beauchesne, 1973), p. 11. Translation by Anne Englund Nash in Henri de Lubac, Theology in History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), p. 176
  • Jesse: Four pounds. Four pounds – like two pounds wasn't bad enough. We're talking two – three-hundred boxes of sinus pills. There ain't that many Smurfs in the world.
    Walter: We're not going to need pseudoephedrine. We're going to make phenylacetone in a tube furnace, then we're going to use reductive amination to yield methamphetamine. Four pounds.
    Jesse: So no pseudo?
    Walter: No pseudo.
    Jesse: So you do have a plan! Yeah, Mr. White! Yeah, science!
  • Science is not “organized common sense”; at it most exciting, it reformulates our view of the world by imposing powerful theories against the ancient, anthropocentric prejudices that we call intuition.
    • Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin (1977), "Organic Wisdom, or Why Should a Fly Eat Its Mother from Inside"
  • Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities. For many roads lead to almost any Rome.
    • Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb (1980), "Senseless Signs of History"
  • Science does progress toward more adequate understanding of the empirical world, but no pristine, objective reality lies "out there" for us to capture as our technologies improve and our concepts mature. The human mind is both an amazing instrument and a fierce impediment—and the mind must be interposed between observation and understanding. Thus we will always "see" with the aid (or detriment) of conventions. All observation is a partnership between mind and nature, and all good partnerships require compromise. The mind, we trust, will be constrained by a genuine external reality; this reality, in turn, must be conveyed to the brain by our equally imperfect senses, all jury-rigged and cobbled together by that maddeningly complex process known as evolution.
    • Stephen Jay Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995), "Last Snails and Right Minds"
  • The success of the scientific method in the past has encouraged us to think that with enough time and effort we can unravel nature's mysteries. But hitting the absolute limit of scientific explanation—not a technological obstacle or the current but progressing edge of human understanding—would be a singular event, one for which past experience could not prepare us. ...the possibility that there are limits to scientific explanation ...is an issue that may never be resolved.
    • Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (1999, 2003) Ch. 15 "Prospects."
  • That is better and more valuable which requires fewer, other circumstances being equal, just as that demonstration is better, other circumstances being equal, which necessitates the answering of a smaller number of questions for a perfect demonstration or requires a smaller number of suppositions and premises from which the demonstration proceeds. For if one thing were demonstrated from many and another thing from fewer equally known premisses, clearly that is better which is from fewer because it makes us know quickly, just as a universal demonstration is better than particular because it produces knowledge from fewer premises. Similarly in natural science, in moral science, and in metaphysics the best is that which needs no premisses and the better that which needs the fewer, other circumstances being equal.
    • Robert Grosseteste Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum Libros (c. 1217-1220) i. 17, f. 17vb; tr. A. C. Crombie (1953)
  • The gentleman [Mr. Taber] from New York says [agricultural research] is all foolish. Yes; it was foolish when Burbank was experimenting with wild cactus. It was foolish when the Wright boys went down to Kitty Hawk and had a contraption there that they were going to fly like birds. It was foolish when Robert Fulton tried to put a boiler into a sail boat and steam it up the Hudson. It was foolish when one of my ancestors thought the world was round and discovered this country so that the gentleman from New York could become a Congressman. (Laughter.) ... Do not seek to stop progress; do not seek to put the hand of politics on these scientific men who are doing a great work. As the gentleman from Texas points out, it is not the discharge of these particular employees that is at stake, it is all the work of investigation, of research, of experimentation that has been going on for years that will be stopped and lost.
    • Fiorello La Guardia Speaking (28 December 1932) as a member of the 72nd U.S. Congress, early in the Great Depression, in opposition to an attempt to eliminate a small amount from the agricultural appropriation bill. As quoted in "Mayor-Elect La Guardia on Research", Science, new ser., vol. 78, no. 2031 (1933), p. 511

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  • Science can only be comprehended epistemologically, which means as one category of possible knowledge, as long as knowledge is not equated either effusively with the absolute knowledge of a great philosophy or blindly with scientistic self-understanding of the actual business of research.
  • Much recent philosophy of science has been dedicated to disclosing that a 'given' or a 'pure' observation language is a myth-eaten fabric of philosophical fiction. ...In any observation statement the cloven hoofprint of theory can readily be detected.
  • Science could predict that the universe must have had a beginning.
  • He who performs not practical work nor makes experiments will never attain to the least degree of mastery. But then, O my son, do thou experiment so that thou mayesy acquire knowledge. Scientists delight not in abundance of material; they rejoice only in the excellence of their experimental methods.
  • Science embraces facts and debates opinion; religion embraces opinion and debates the facts.
  • The spirit of poetry (only authentic and great poetry is meant) is essentially superior to the spirit that prevails in all mere science.
  • In the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory we can indeed proceed without mentioning ourselves as individuals, but we cannot disregard the fact that natural science is formed by men. Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our nature of questioning. This was a possibility of which Descartes could not have thought, but it makes a sharp separation between the world and the I impossible.
    If one follows the great difficulty which even eminent scientists like Einstein had in understanding and accepting the Copenhagen interpretation... one can trace the roots... to the Cartesian partition. ... It will take a long time for it [this partition] to be replaced by a really different attitude toward the problem of reality.
  • Modern civilization depends on science … James Smithson was well aware that knowledge should not be viewed as existing in isolated parts, but as a whole, each portion of which throws light on all the other, and that the tendency of all is to improve the human mind, and give it new sources of power and enjoyment … narrow minds think nothing of importance but their own favorite pursuit, but liberal views exclude no branch of science or literature, for they all contribute to sweeten, to adorn, and to embellish life … science is the pursuit above all which impresses us with the capacity of man for intellectual and moral progress and awakens the human intellect to aspiration for a higher condition of humanity.
    • Joseph Henry, first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Inscription on the National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.; reported in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989)
  • Science … may be degraded from its native dignity … by placing it in the light of a mere appendage to and caterer for our pampered appetites. The question "cui bono" to what practical end and advantage do your researches tend? is one which the speculative philosopher who loves knowledge for its own sake, and enjoys, as a rational being should enjoy, the mere contemplation of harmonious and mutually dependent truths, can seldom hear without a sense of humiliation. He feels that there is a lofty and disinterested pleasure in his speculations which ought to exempt them from such questioning; communicating as they do to his own mind the purest happiness (after the exercise of the benevolent and moral feelings) of which human nature is susceptible, and tending to the injury of no one, he might surely allege this as a sufficient and direct reply to those who, having themselves little capacity, and less relish for intellectual pursuits, are constantly repeating upon him this enquiry.
  • Science is the knowledge of many, orderly and methodically digested and arranged, so as to become attainable by one.
    • John Frederick William Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831), Ch. 2
  • Wir müssen wissen — wir werden wissen!
    • We must not believe those, who today, with philosophical bearing and deliberative tone, prophesy the fall of culture and accept the ignorabimus. For us there is no ignorabimus, and in my opinion none whatever in natural science. In opposition to the foolish ignorabimus our slogan shall be:
         We must know — we will know!
    • David Hilbert, Address to the Society of German Scientists and Physicians, in Königsberg (8 September 1930)
  • Science is a good piece of furniture for a man to have in an upper chamber, provided he has common sense on the ground floor.
    • Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert (ed.) Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 531
  • Take from the air every aëroplane; from the roads every automobile; from the country every train; from the cities every electric light; from ships even wireless apparatus; from oceans all cables; from the land all wires; from shops all motors; from office buildings every elevator, telephone, and typewriter; let epidemics spread at will; let major surgery be impossible—all this and vastly more, the bondage of ignorance, where knowledge now makes us free, would be the terrible catastrophe if the tide of time should but ebb to the childhood days of men still living! ...Therefore, whoever desires progress and prosperity, whoever would advance humanity to a higher plane of civilization, must further the work of the scientist in every way he possibly can.
    • William J. Humphreys, reported in F. H. Garrison, An Introduction to the History of Medicine (1917), p. 15
  • The four criteria for evaluating hypotheses are relevant to the distinction between science and superstition. These criteria are adequacy, internal coherence, external consistency, and fruitfulness. But the distinction between science and superstition also involves psychological and volitional elements. It involves such factors as how the observer’s subjective states influence how he sees the world, and how his needs and desires play a role in the formation of his beliefs. Accordingly, to explore the distinction between science and superstition, we must introduce criteria that include these psychological and volitional elements. The criteria we suggest are evidentiary support, objectivity, and integrity.
    • Patrick J. Hurley, A Concise Introduction to Logic, 7th ed. (Wadsworth, 2000), p. 588
  • Science and superstition are, in large measure, polar opposites. Where scientific activity recognizes the importance of evidentiary support, objectivity, and integrity, superstition ignores them.
    • Patrick J. Hurley, A Concise Introduction to Logic (2000), p. 589
  • The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
    • Thomas Henry Huxley, Presidential Address at the British Association (1870); "Biogenesis and Abiogenesis", Collected Essays, vol. 8, p. 229.
    • Paraphrased variant: That's what happens when a beautiful hypotheses meets a brutal gang of facts.
  • Science ... commits suicide when it adopts a creed.
    • Thomas Henry Huxley, "The Darwin Memorial", in Popular Science Monthly, vol. 27 (August 1885), p. 535
  • Physical science is one and indivisible. ... [T]he method of investigation and the ultimate object of the physical inquirer are everywhere the same. The object is the discovery of the rational order which pervades the universe; the method consists of observation and experiment (which is observation under artificial conditions) for the determination of the facts of nature; of inductive and deductive reasoning for the discovery of their mutual relations and connection.

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  • Just re-member that you're standing on a planet that's evolving,
    And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour.
    It's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
    A sun that is the source of all our power.
    The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
    Are moving at a million miles a day
    In the outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
    Of the galaxy we call the "Milky Way".
  • Science is for the laboratory. Other men, who stand alone and face the elemental forces of nature, know that science as a shining, world-conquering hero, is a myth. Science lives in concrete structures full of bright factory toys, insulated from the earth's great forces. The priesthood of this new cult are seldom called upon to stand and face the onslaught.

J

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  • It is necessary to recognize that with respect to unity and coherence, mythical explanation carries one much further than scientific explanation. For science does not, as its primary objective, seek a complete and definitive explanation of the Universe... It satisfies itself with partial and conditional responses. Whether they be magical, mythical, or religious, the other systems of explanation include everything. They are applied to all domains. They answer all questions. They account for the origin, for the present and even for the evolution of the universe.
  • Habits of thought in the tradition of science are not readily changed, it is not easy to deviate from the customary channels of accumulated experience in conventionalized subjects.
    • G. L. Jepsen (1949), as quoted in Niles Eldredge, Time Frames: The Evolution of Punctuated Equilibria (1985)
  • Nature is to us like an infinite ballot-box, the contents of which are being continually drawn, ball after ball, and exhibited to us. Science is but the careful observation of the succession in which balls of various character present themselves...
    • William Stanley Jevons, The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method, vols. 1-2 (1874), p. 169

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  • There are many examples of old, incorrect theories that stubbornly persisted, sustained only by the prestige of foolish but well-connected scientists. … Many of these theories have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness. .. Thus the yeoman work in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest.
  • The life of a biological scientist in the United States is a life of discussion and debate—it is the Talmudic tradition writ large. ...The egalitarian structure of American science encourages this camaraderie. ...this would not—could not—have taken place in the Austria, the Germany, the France, or perhaps even the England of 1955.
  • Science can be defined as a self-correcting way to get knowledge about the natural universe, plus the body of knowledge obtained that way. It is both a method and the resulting understanding and knowledge. The method requires making models to explain phenomena, testing them experimentally, and revising them until they work. The goal of science is understanding.
  • Science makes progress by combining imagination with experimental results—by insisting on evidence.
  • I maintain that in every special natural doctrine only so much science proper is to be met with as mathematics; for... science proper, especially of nature, requires a pure portion, lying at the foundation of the empirical, and based upon à priori knowledge of natural things. ...the conception should be constructed. But the cognition of the reason through construction of conceptions is mathematical. A pure philosophy of nature in general, namely, one that only investigates what constitutes a nature in general, may thus be possible without mathematics; but a pure doctrine of nature respecting determinate natural things (corporeal doctrine and mental doctrine), is only possible by means of mathematics; and as in every natural doctrine only so much science proper is to be met with therein as there is cognition à priori, a doctrine of nature can only contain so much science proper as there is in it of applied mathematics.
  • Natural science is throughout either a pure or an applied doctrine of motion.
    • Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), Preface; tr. Ernest Belfort Bax (1883)
  • When brought to the proletariat from the capitalist class, science is invariably adapted to suit capitalist interests. What the proletariat needs is a scientific understanding of its own position in society. That kind of science a worker cannot obtain in the officially and socially approved manner. The proletarian himself must develop his own theory. For this reason he must be completely self-taught.
  • Do not all charms fly
    At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
    There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
    We know her woof, her texture; she is given
    In the dull catalogue of common things.
    Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
    Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
    Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine—
    Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
    The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.
  • Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all—the apathy of human beings.
  • The admired wisdom turns out to be that the subject’s task is to strip away more and more of his subjectivity and become more and more objective. … It thereby quite correctly understands the accidental, the angular, the selfish, the eccentric, etc., of which every human being can have plenty. Christianity does not deny, either, that such things are to be discarded. … But the difference is simply that science and scholarship want to teach that becoming objective is the way, whereas Christianity teaches that the way is to become subjective, that is, truly to become a subject.
  • Someone who has lived his whole life in a remote place and in addition has had only slight interest in getting to know nature-how little he knows, he who also speaks of the multiplicity of creation. A natural scientist, on the other hand, who traveled around the world, who has been all over, both above and under the surface of the earth, has seen the abundance that he has seen, and moreover with armed eyes he has at a distance discovered otherwise invisible stars and at extraordinarily close range has discovered otherwise invisible creeping things-how amazing much he knows; yet he uses the same phrase, “multiplicity of creation.” And further, although the natural scientist is happy about what he has succeeded in observing, he willingly admits that there is no limit to discoveries since there is not even any limit to discoveries regarding the instruments used for discovery; therefore the multiplicity, as it is discovered or as new instruments of discovery are discovered, continually becoming greater and greater and can continually become even greater, that is, proves to be even greater-yet all in all it is still, comprehended in the phrase “the multiplicity of creation.”
  • To name and describe you must first see, and science polishes the gift of seeing.
  • Doing science with awe and humility is a powerful act of reciprocity with the more-than-human world.
    • Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), p. 252
  • Science can be a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species that is rivaled only by the observations of traditional knowledge holders. It can be a path to kinship.
    • Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), p. 252
  • There is something wrong with our world, something fundamentally and basically wrong. I don't think we have to look too far to see that. I'm sure that most of you would agree with me in making that assertion. And when we stop to analyze the cause of our world's ills, many things come to mind. We begin to wonder if it is due to the fact that we don't know enough. But it can't be that. Because in terms of accumulated knowledge we know more today than men have known in any period of human history. We have the facts at our disposal. We know more about mathematics, about science, about social science, and philosophy than we've ever known in any period of the world's history. So it can't be because we don't know enough. And then we wonder if it is due to the fact that our scientific genius lags behind. That is, if we have not made enough progress scientifically. Well then, it can't be that. For our scientific progress over the past years has been amazing. Man through his scientific genius has been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains, so that today it's possible to eat breakfast in New York City and supper in London, England. Back in about 1753 it took a letter three days to go from New York City to Washington, and today you can go from here to China in less time than that. It can't be because man is stagnant in his scientific progress. Man's scientific genius has been amazing. I think we have to look much deeper than that if we are to find the real cause of man's problems and the real cause of the world's ills today. If we are to really find it I think we will have to look in the hearts and souls of men.
  • We have genuflected before the God of Science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.
  • Softmindedness often invades religion. ... Softminded persons have revised the Beautitudes to read "Blessed are the pure in ignorance: for they shall see God." This has led to a widespread belief that there is a conflict between science and religion. But this is not true. There may be a conflict between softminded religionists and toughminded scientists, but not between science and religion. ... Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary.
    • Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love (1963), 1: "A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart"
  • Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrandt nude differs from a nude by Manet.
  • Some people think that science is just all this technology around, but no: it's something much deeper than that. Science, scientific thinking, scientific method is for me the only philosophical construct that the human race has developed to determine what is reliably true.

L

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  • The men in the laboratory... cannot be said to observe the actual objects of their curiosity at all. ...The sense data on which the propositions of modern science rest are, for the most part, little photographic spots and blurs, or inky curved lines on paper. ... What is directly observable is only a sign of the "physical fact"; it requires interpretation to yield scientific propositions.
  • There's a reason for poetry... Poetry is a very nonlinear use of language, where the meaning is more than just the sum of the parts. And science requires that it be nothing more than the sum of the parts. And just the fact that there's stuff to explain out there that's more than the sum of the parts means that the traditional approach, just characterizing the parts and the relations, is not going to be adequate for capturing the essence of many systems that you would like to be able to do. That's not to say that there isn't a way to do it in a more scientific way than poetry, but I just like the feeling that culturally there's going to be more of something like poetry in the future of science.
  • The worldview of the classical sciences conceptualized nature as a giant machine composed of intricate but replaceable machine-like parts. The new systems sciences look at nature as an organism endowed with irreplaceable elements and an innate but non-deterministic purpose for choice, for flow, for spontaneity.
    • Ervin László, The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time (1996), pp. 10-11
  • The notion of "system" has gained central importance in contemporary science, society and life. In many fields of endeavor, the necessity of a "systems approach" or "systems thinking" is emphasized, new professions called "systems engineering," "systems analysis" and the like have come into being, and there can be little doubt that this this concept marks a genuine, necessary, and consequential development in science and world-view.
    • Ervin László, Introduction to Systems Philosophy: Toward a New Paradigm of Contemporary Thought (1972), p. xvii
  • In the penultimate decade of the twentieth century science is sufficiently advanced to resolve the puzzles that stymied scientists in the last century and demonstrate, without metaphysical speculation, the consistency of evolution in all realms of experience. It is now possible to advance a general evolution theory based on unitary and mutually consistent concepts derived from the empirical sciences.
    • Ervin László, Evolution: The General Theory (1996), p. 21
  • Obviously something is wrong with the entire argument of "obviousness".
    • Paul Lazarsfeld, about the interpretation of results in social science as obvious, in "The American Soldier — An Expository Review", Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 3, (1949), p. 380
  • It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, 'My God what have I done?
    • Ursula K. Le Guin, The Stalin in Soul (1973); quoted in Gary Westfahl, Science Fiction Quotations (2005), p. 322
  • Focusing on the science-technology relationship may strike some as strange, because conventional wisdom views this relationship as an unproblematic given. ... Technology is seen as being, at best, applied science ... the conventional view perceives science as clearly preceding and founding technology. ... Recent studies in the history of technology have begun to challenge this assumed dependency of technology on science. ... But the conventional view of science is persistent.
    • Arie Leegwater, "Technology and Science", in Stephen V. Monsma (ed.) Responsible Technology: A Christian Perspective (1986), pp. 78-79
  • Science does not speak of the world in the language of words alone, and in many cases it simply cannot do so. The natural language of science is a synergistic integration of words, diagrams, pictures, graphs, maps, equations, tables, charts, and other forms of visual and mathematical expression... [Science thus consists of] the languages of visual representation, the languages of mathematical symbolism, and the languages of experimental operations.
    • Jay Lemke, Teaching All the Languages of Science: Words, Symbols, Images and Actions (2003), p. 3; as cited in Phil Scott, Hilary Asoko and John Leach, "Student conceptions and conceptual learning in science", 'Handbook of Research on Science Education (2007), pp. 31-56
  • In Science the paramount appeal is to the Intellect — its purpose being instruction; in Art, the paramount appeal is to the Emotions — its purpose being pleasure. A work of Art must of course indirectly appeal to the Intellect, and a work of Science will also indirectly appeal to the Feelings; nevertheless a poem on the stars and a treatise on astronomy have distinct aims and distinct methods. But having recognised the broadly-marked differences, we are called upon to ascertain the underlying resemblances. Logic and Imagination belong equally to both. It is only because men have been attracted by the differences that they have overlooked the not less important affinities.
  • One can ask two different kinds of questions with regard to the topics of study in psychology as well as in other sciences. One can ask for the phenomenal characteristics of psychological units or events, for example, how many kinds of feelings can be qualitatively differentiated from one another or which characteristics describe an experience of a voluntary act. Aside from this are the questions asking for the why, for the cause and the effect, for the conditional-genetic interrelations. For example, one can ask: Under which conditions has been a decision made and which are the specific psychological effects which follow this decision? The depiction of phenomenal characteristics is usually characterized as “description”, the depiction of causal relationships as “explanation.”
    • Kurt Lewin, "Gesetz und experiment in der Psychologie" ['Law and experiment in psychology']; tr. Kurt Kreppner, in Symposion, vol. 1 (1927), pp. 375-421
  • Science intensifies religious truth by cleansing it of ignorance and superstition.
    • Charles Lindbergh, quoted in "Antiseptic Christianity", book review of Of Flight and Life, in TIME (6 September 1948)
  • The world seemed so large I had assumed that portions would remain in primitive state, attainable at reasonable cost in time and effort. Days spent in laboratories, factories and offices were lightened by intuitive contact with wilderness outside. Had the choice confronted me, I would not have traded nature's miracles of life for all of science's toys. Was not my earth's surface more important than increasing the speed of transport and visiting the moon and Mars?
    • Charles Lindbergh, "The Wisdom of Wilderness", in LIFE (22 December 1967)
  • In wilderness, I sense the miracle of life, and behind it, our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia. The construction of an analogue computer or a supersonic airplane is simple when compared to the mixture of space and evolutionary eons represented by a cell.
    • Charles Lindbergh, "The Wisdom of Wilderness", in LIFE (22 December 1967)
  • With respect to science, the assumption behind consensus is that science is a source of authority and that authority increases with the number of scientists. Of course, science is not primarily a source of authority. Rather, it is a particularly effective approach to inquiry and analysis. Skepticism is essential to science; consensus is foreign.
  • [Maxims] are not of use to help men forward in the advancement of sciences, or new discoveries of yet unknown truths. Mr. Newton, in his never enough to be admired book, has demonstrated several propositions, which are so many new truths, before unknown to the world, and are further advances in mathematical knowledge: but, for the discovery of these, it was not the general maxims, 'what is, is;' or, 'the whole is bigger than a part,' or the like, that helped him. These were not the clues that led him into the discovery of the truth and certainty of those propositions. Nor was it by them that he got the knowledge of those demonstrations, but by finding out intermediate ideas that showed the agreement or disagreement of the ideas, as expressed in the propositions he demonstrated. This is the greatest exercise and improvement of human understanding in the enlarging of knowledge, and advancing the sciences; wherein they are far enough from receiving any help from the contemplation of these or the like magnified maxims.
    • John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (1689), Epistle to the Reader
  • The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
  • The successful launching of the Sputnik was a demonstration of one of the highest scientific and technological achievements of man—a tantalizing invitation both to the militarist in search of ever more devastating means of destruction and to the astronomer searching for new means of carrying his instruments away from their earthbound environment.
    • Sir Bernard Lovell, "Astronomy Breaks Free", BBC Reith Lecture (9 November 1958), published as The Individual and the Universe (1959; 1961), p. 72
  • To grasp the proof of things and search into doubtful causes, to hallow genius, to raise the head to the sky, to know the number and character of natal elements in the mighty universe ... this is the mind's divine and grateful pleasure.
    • Lucilius Junior, Aetna, l. 224; tr. J. W. and A. M. Duff, Minor Latin Poets, vol. 1 (1934; rev. 1935)

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  • Within the short span of a human life and with man's limited powers of memory, any stock of knowledge worthy of the name is unattainable except by the greatest mental economy. Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.
  • The function of science...is to replace experience. Thus, on the one hand, science must remain in the province of experience, but, on the other, must hasten beyond it, constantly expecting confirmation, constantly expecting the reverse. Where neither confirmation nor refutation is possible, science is not concerned. Science acts and only acts in the domain of uncompleted experience.
    • Ernst Mach, tr. Thomas J. McCormack, The Science of Mechanics (1893), p. 490
  • Science is about wonder, Jalila. I was a poor teacher if I never told you that.
  • Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land.
    • Mao Tse-Tung, Speech at Peking, 27 February 1957, in Quotations of Chairman Mao (1966), p. 302
  • Theology is to-day recognised to be the instrument of myth, philosophy to be the instrument of science.
    • Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, Russland und Europa (1914); tr. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul, The Spirit of Russia (1919), vol. 1, p. 208
  • Science by itself has no moral dimension. But it does seek to establish truth. And upon this truth morality can be built.
    • William Masters, in "Two Sex Researchers on the Firing Line", LIFE magazine (24 June 1966), p. 49
  • To conduct the operations of science in a perfectly legitimate manner, by means of methodised experiment and strict demonstration, requires a strategic skill which we must not look for, even among those to whom science is most indebted for original observations and fertile suggestions. It does not detract from the merit of the pioneers of science that their advances, being made on unknown ground, are often cut off, for a time, from that system of communications with an established base of operations, which is the only security for any permanent extension of science.
  • “And now you have had to alter your theory.”
    ”Well,” Andrews said, smiling, “that’s science.”
  • The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature.
    • Peter Medawar, Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought (1969)
  • Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery. For all its aberrations, the evidence of the senses is essentially to be relied upon—provided we observe nature as a child does, without prejudices and preconceptions, but with that clear and candid vision which adults lose and scientists must strive to regain.
  • Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
    • H. L. Mencken, in Minority Report: H. L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956), p. 412
  • The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to a rigorous scrutiny, and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world, of which science is the second-order expression.
  • We'll try to imitate how Galileo and Newton learned so much by studying the simplest kinds of pendulums and weights, mirrors and prisms. ... It is the same reason why so many biologists today devote more attention to tiny germs and viruses than to magnificent lions and tigers. ... In science, one can learn the most by studying what seems the least.
  • Perhaps we would have forestalled [human] extinction if Louis Pasteur had abandoned his studies on the germ theory. What about the plant pathologists who scorned centuries of superstitions and identified the fungi responsible for cereal diseases? They made it possible to combat the rusts and smuts that wasted crops and allowed modern agriculture to feed us in our billions. Science is so central to modern civilization that we will not willingly retreat from the continuing exploration and manipulation of nature.
  • What is a scientist?… We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself.
  • This political movement has patently demonstrated that it will not defend the integrity of science in any case in which science runs afoul of its core political constituencies. In so doing, it has ceded any right to govern a technologically advanced and sophisticated nation.
  • Our abiding belief is that just as the workmen in the tunnel of St. Gothard, working from either end, met at last to shake hands in the very central root of the mountain, so students of nature and students of Christianity will yet join hands in the unity of reason and faith, in the heart of their deepest mysteries.
    • Lemuel Moss, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert (ed.) Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 530
  • By deliberately cutting off certain phases of man's personality, the warm life of private sensation and private feelings and private perceptions, the sciences assisted in building up a more public world which gained in accessibility what it lost in depth.
    • Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934) Ch. 7 "Assimilation of the Machine".
  • By isolating simple systems and simple causal sequences the sciences created confidence in the possibility of finding a similar type of order in every aspect of experience: it was, indeed, by the success of science in the realm of the inorganic that we have acquired whatever belief we may legitimately entertain in the possibility of achieving similar understanding and control in the vastly more complex domain of life.
    • Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934) Ch. 7 "Assimilation of the Machine".
  • The introduction of science marked the beginning of a rapid acceleration of the modern enterprise. It deepened the sense of separateness and transcendence from nature. It planted the false notion that we could overcome any limit—ultimately perhaps even death itself. It was the elixir of godly ambitions. I can hardly overstate how much of a game-changer it was to merge our already-destructive stream with science. Incidentally, the science label here also covers technology, as an application of the scientific approach.
  • Science is a narrow tool: powerful and tenacious like a pit bull, but having no intrinsic wisdom or context. It concerns itself with what we can do, not what we should do.

N

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  • Historically, science has pursued a premise that Nature can be understood fully, its future predicted precisely, and its behavior controlled at will. However, emerging knowledge indicates that the nature of Earth and biological systems transcends the limits of science, questioning the premise of knowing, prediction, and control. This knowledge has led to the recognition that, for civilized human survival, technological society has to adapt to the constraints of these systems.
    • Nari Narasimhan, as quoted in Chris Maser, Decision-Making for a Sustainable Environment: A Systemic Approach (2012), 4, citing N. Narasimhan, "Limitations of Science and Adapting to Nature", Environmental Research Letters (July–September 2007), p. 2
  • Politics and Religion are obsolete. The time has come for Science and Spirituality.
    • Jawaharlal Nehru, as quoted in Arthur C. Clarke, Voices from the Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age (1966); Nehru may himself have been either quoting or paraphrasing a statement of Vinoba Bhave
  • Doctrinaire formula-worship—that is our real enemy.
    • Max Neuburger, reported in F. H. Garrison, An Introduction to the History of Medicine (1917), p. 15
  • I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
    • Isaac Newton, in Sir David Brewster (ed.) Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855), vol. 2, ch. 27
  • Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning of the Bible—of God’s mortal terror of science?... No one, in fact, has understood it. This priest-book par excellence opens, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he faces only one great danger; ergo, “God” faces only one great danger.—
    The old God, wholly “spirit,” wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against boredom even gods struggle in vain. What does he do? He creates man—man is entertaining. ... But then he notices that man is also bored. God’s pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God’s first mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining—he sought dominion over them; he did not want to be an “animal” himself.—So God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an end—and also many other things! Woman was the second mistake of God.—“Woman, at bottom, is a serpent, Heva”—every priest knows that; “from woman comes every evil in the world”—every priest knows that, too. Ergo, she is also to blame for science....It was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.—What happened? The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike—it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!—Moral: science is the forbidden per se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of morality.—“Thou shall not know”:—the rest follows from that.—God’s mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one to protect one’s self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought—and all thoughts are bad thoughts!—Man must not think.—And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sickness—nothing but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don’t allow him to think....Nevertheless—how terrible!—, the edifice of knowledge begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods—what is to be done?—The old God invents war; he separates the peoples; he makes men destroy one another (—the priests have always had need of war....). War—among other things, a great disturber of science!—Incredible! Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in spite of war.—So the old God comes to his final resolution: “Man has become scientific—there is no help for it: he must be drowned!”...

O

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  • One thing about a science: it works.
    If an engineer knows his business, his bridge does not fall down.
  • Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
    • Robert Oppenheimer's last published words; "With Oppenheimer on an Autumn Day", Look, vol. 30, no. 26 (December 19, 1966)

P

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  • It is not so much knowledge of science that the public needs as a scientific worldview—an understanding that we live in an orderly universe, governed by physical laws that cannot be circumvented.
    • Robert L. Park, Voodoo Science (2000), p. 40
  • Those (natural) laws cannot be circumvented by any amount of piety or cleverness, but they can be understood. Uncovering them should be the highest goal of a civilized society. Not, as we have seen, because scientists have any claim to greater intellect or virtue, but because the scientific method transcends the flaws of individual scientists. Science is the only way we have of separating the truth from ideology, or fraud, or mere foolishness.
    • Robert L. Park, Voodoo Science (2000), p. 211
  • Science, that was going to save the world in H. G. Wells' time is regimented, straight-jacked, [and] scared shitless, its universal language diminished to one word: security.
    • Jack Parsons, as quoted in George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons (2005), p. 290
  • Give me the nobler glass that swells to the eye
    The things which near us lie,
    Till Science rapturously hails,
    In the minutest water-drop,
    A torment of innumerable tails.
  • I don't believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him. But as far as he is concerned there is no split between science and religion: the central order is part of the subjective as well as the objective realm, and this strikes me as being a far better starting point.
  • Too often, this concern for the big picture is simply obscurantist and is put forward by people who prefer vagueness and mystery to (partial) answers. Vagueness is at times necessary and mystery is never in short supply, but I don’t think they’re anything to worship. Genuine science and mathematical precision are more intriguing than are the “facts” published in supermarket tabloids or a romantic innumeracy which fosters credulity, stunts skepticism, and dulls one to real imponderables.
  • A greater gain to the world ... than all the growth of scientific knowledge is the growth of the scientific spirit, with its courage and serenity, its disciplined conscience, its intellectual morality, its habitual response to any disclosure of the truth.
  • Some feminist cultural theorists in France, Britain, and the United States have argued that visualization and objectification as privileged ways of knowing are specifically masculine (man the viewer, woman the spectacle). Without falling into such essentialism, we may suppose that the language, perceptions, and uses of visual information may be different for women, as pregnant subjects, than they are for men (or women) as physicians, researchers, or reporters. And this difference will reflect the historical control by men over science, medicine, and obstetrics in Western society and over the historical definitions of masculinity in Western culture. The deep gender bias of science (including medicine), of its very ways of seeing problems, resonates, Keller argues, in its "common rhetoric. "Mainly "adversarial" and "aggressive" in its stance toward what it studies, "science can come to sound like a battlefield." Similarly, presentations of scientific and medical "conquests" in the mass media commonly appropriate this terrain into Cold War culture and macho style. Consider this piece of text from Life's 1965 picture story on ultrasound in pregnancy, "A Sonar' Look' at an Unborn Baby": The astonishing medical machine resting on this pregnant woman's abdomen in a Philadelphia hospital is "looking" at her unborn child in precisely the same way a Navy surface ship homes in on enemy submarines. Using the sonar principle, it is bombarding her with a beam of ultra-high-frequency sound waves that are inaudible to the human ear. Back come the echoes, bouncing off the baby's head, to show up as a visual image on a viewing screen.
  • A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
    • Max Planck, Wissenschaftliche Selbstbiographie. Mit einem Bildnis und der von Max von Laue gehaltenen Traueransprache (Leipzig: 1948), p. 35; tr. tr. F. Gaynor, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (New York, 1949), pp. 33-34 (as cited in T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions)
  • The unprecedented development of science and technology... so rapid that it is said that 90 per cent of the scientists which this country has ever produced are still living today.
    • Robert Platt (Lord Platt of Grindleford), Reflections on Medicine and Humanism: Linacre Lecture (1963), p. 328
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art! Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
  • Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
       Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
    Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
      Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
  • Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
      And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
    To seek a shelter in some happier star?
      Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
    The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
    The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
    • Edgar Allan Poe, "Sonnet—To Science", ll. 1 and 9. Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)
  • Most of us rather hastily and thoughtlessly regard “science” as a sort of collection of linear accelerators and space vehicles and organic chemistry models. In fact it is not any of these things; it is only a systematic method of gathering and testing knowledge, involving certain formal procedures: gathering information, forming a theory to explain the information, predicting certain consequences of the theory and performing an experiment to test the prediction. If you investigate any area of knowledge (whether it is stellar physics or the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin) by this method, you are doing science. If you use any other method, you are doing something else.
    • Frederik Pohl, "The Game-Playing Literature" (1971), in Robin Wilson (ed.) Clarion, pp. 72-73
  • There is no science apart from the general. It may even be said that the object of the exact sciences is to spare us these direct verifications.
  • Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
    • Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis (1905), ch. 9
  • There might be a serious objection to classical studies. If it is to be desired that nine out of ten Frenchmen become good merchants and business men, is it not dangerous to disgust them beforehand with that which is to fill their lives? No doubt, it would not be impossible to refute such an objection; but that is no business mine. ... I seek what must be done to form men of science. And here all is clear. The man of science ought not tarry in the realization of practical aims; these, no doubt, he will obtain, but he must obtain them over and above. ...Science has wonderful applications; but the science which would have in view only applications would no longer be science—It would be only the kitchen. There is no science but disinterested science. ... The spirit which should animate the man science is that which breathed of old on Greece and brought there to birth poets and thinkers. There remains in our classical teaching I know not what of the Greek soul; I know not what that makes us look ever upward. And that is more precious for the making of a man of science than the reading of many volumes of geometry.
    • Henri Poincaré (c. 1902) campaign of the League of Culture, France, in support for the necessity of training in the Humanities for the study of the Sciences, as quoted by S. D., "The French University Conflict", The Nation, vol. 97 (11 September 1913), p. 231
  • Scientists believe there is a hierarchy of facts and that among them may be made a judicious choice. They are right, since otherwise there would be no science... One need only open the eyes to see that the conquests of industry which have enriched so many practical men would never have seen the light, if these practical men alone had existed and if they had not been preceded by unselfish devotees who died poor, who never thought of utility, and yet had a guide far other than caprice.
    As Mach says, these devotees have spared their successors the trouble of thinking.
    • Henri Poincaré, La Valeur de la Science (1907); tr. G. B. Halsted]], The Value of Science (1907), Prefatory Essay: "The Choice of Facts", p. 4
  • Without interpolation all science would be impossible.
    • Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science (1907), Ch. 11: "Science and Reality", p. 134
  • Now what is science? ... It is before all a classification, a manner of bringing together facts which appearances separate, though they are bound together by some natural and hidden kinship. Science, in other words, is a system of relations. ... It is in relations alone that objectivity must be sought. ... It is relations alone which can be regarded as objective.
    External objects... are really objects and not fleeting and fugitive appearances, because they are not only groups of sensations, but groups cemented by a constant bond. It is this bond, and this bond alone, which is the object in itself, and this bond is a relation.
    • Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science (1907), Ch. 11: "Science and Reality", pp. 137-138
  • It is only through science and art that civilization is of value. Some have wondered at the formula: science for its own sake; and yet it is as good as life for its own sake, if life is only misery; and even as happiness for its own sake, if we do not believe that all pleasures are of the same quality...
    Every act should have an aim. We must suffer, we must work,     we must pay for our place at the game, but this is for seeing's sake; or at the very least that others may one day see.
    • Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science (1907), Ch. 11: "Science and Reality", p. 142
  • To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient truths; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
    • Henri Poincaré, in Harold Chapman Brown, "The Work of Henri Poincare", The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol 11 (1914), pp. 9, 225-236
  • How index-learning turns no student pale,
    Yet holds the eel of science by the tail.
  • One science only will one genius fit,
    So vast is art, so narrow human wit.
  • Today we preach that science is not science unless it is quantitative... [however] many - perhaps most - of the great issues of science are qualitative, not quantitative, even in physics and chemistry. Equations and measurements are useful when and only when they are related to proof; but proof or disproof comes first and is in fact strongest when it is absolutely convincing without any quantitative measurement.
    Or to say it another way, you can catch phenomena in a logical box or in a mathematical box. The logical box is coarse but strong. The mathematical box is fine-grained but flimsy. The mathematical box is a beautiful way of wrapping up a problem, but it will not hold the phenomena unless they have been caught in a logical box to begin with.
    • John R. Platt, "Science, Strong Inference — Proper Scientific Method (The New Baconians)", Science Magazine, vol. 146, no. 3642 (16 October 1964)
  • I don’t believe in evolution, like people believe in God … Science and technology are not advanced by people who believe, but by people who don’t know but are doing their best to find out.
    • Terry Pratchett, as quoted in Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld (2014), p. 41
  • No matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.

R

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  • We should be very jealous of who speaks for science, particularly in our age of rapidly expanding technology. How can the public be educated? I do not know the specifics, but of this I am certain: The public will remain uninformed and uneducated in the sciences until the media professionals decide otherwise. Until they stop quoting charlatans and quacks and until respected scientists speak up.
    • Dixy Lee Ray, "Who Speaks For Science?", Chemical Times and Trends (January 1990); as quoted in Jay H. Lehr (ed.) Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns (1992), p. 730, and cited on p. 735
  • The belief that established science and scholarship-which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making-are "objective" and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture.
    • Adrienne Rich, "What Does a Woman Need to Know?" (1979), in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose (1986)
  • Science does not aim to cover exhaustively the whole of reality, but to construct systems and concepts which will perhaps — and it is a big perhaps — allow man to act on the world.
    • Alain Robbe-Grillet (1975), in Robbe-Grillet: analyse, théorie, ed. Jean Ricardou (Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1976), vol. 2, p. 418; as translated in John Fletcher, Alain Robbe-Grillet (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 16
  • Science isn't structured to recognize hierarchy.
    • Adam Roberts, Me•Topia (2006), reprinted in Rich Horton (ed.), Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2007, p. 258
  • In a fashion, at least in your time, science has as much as religion to fear from the free intellect as religion does. And (with irony) any strong combination of intellectual and intuitional abilities is not tailor-made to bring you great friends from either category. Science has, unfortunately, bound up the minds of its own most original thinkers, for they dare not stray from certain scientific principles.
    • Jane Roberts, in The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto, p. 146
    1. Science is constantly, systematically and inexorably revisionary. It is a self-correcting process and one that is self-destroying of its own errors...
    2. A related trait of science is its destruction of idols, destruction of the gods men live by... Science has no absolute right or absolute justice... To live comfortably with science it is necessary to live with a dynamically changing system of concepts... it has a way of weakening old and respected bonds...
    3. Not only are the tenets of science constantly subject to challenge and revision, but its prophets are under challenge too...
    4. Further, the findings of science have an embarrassing way of turning out to be relevant to the customs and to the civil laws of men—requiring these customs and laws also to be revised...
    5. Certainly we have seen spectacular changes in the concept of private property and of national borders as we have moved into the space age...
    6. Moreover, the pace of technological advance gravely threatens the bountiful and restorative power of nature to resist modification...
    7. Another trait of science that leads to much hostility or misunderstanding by the non-scientist is the fact that science is practiced by a small elite... (which) has cultural patterns discernibly different from those of the rest of society...
    8. The trait that to me seems the most socially important about science, however, is that it is a major source of man's discontent with the status quo...
    • Walter Orr Roberts, "Science, A Wellspring of Our Discontent", in The American Scholar (Summer 1967), pp. 252-58; reported in Richard F. Ericson, Organizational Cybernetics and Human Values (1969), p. 1164
  • This day relenting God
    Hath placed within my hand
    A wondrous thing; and God
    Be praised. At his command,
    Seeking His secret deeds
    With tears and toiling breath,
    I find thy cunning seeds,
    O million-murdering Death.
  • A theory which cannot be mortally endangered cannot be alive.
    • W. A. H. Rushton, as quoted in J. R. Platt, "Strong Inference: Certain systematic methods of scientific thinking may produce much more rapid progress than others", Science, vol. 146, no. 3642 (1964), pp. 347–353
  • Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making. The whole process of science is wildly under-represented in science fiction because it's not easy to write about. There are many facets of science that are almost exactly opposite of dramatic narrative. It's slow, tedious, inconclusive, it's hard to tell good guys from bad guys — it's everything that a normal hour of Star Trek is not.
  • If feminist psychology is correct, the very concept of scientific "objectivity" as a disciplined withdrawal of sympathy by the knower from the known, is a male separation anxiety writ large. Written, in fact, upon the entire universe.
  • A scientist looks for a description of the universe in terms of a model that allows him to understand how things work, allow him to predict how things are going to work, and allows him to put together devices that work according to his predictions.
  • What science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.
  • Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know.
  • Gradually, … the aspect of science as knowledge is being thrust into the background by the aspect of science as the power of manipulating nature. It is because science gives us the power of manipulating nature that it has more social importance than art. Science as the pursuit of truth is the equal, but not the superior, of art. Science as a technique, though it may have little intrinsic value, has a practical importance to which art cannot aspire.
    • Bertrand Russell, In The Scientific Outlook (1931; reprinted 2009), p. xxiv
  • It is not in the nature of things for any one man to make a sudden violent discovery; science goes step by step, and every man depends on the work of his predecessors. When you hear of a sudden unexpected discovery—a bolt from the blue, as it were—you can always be sure that it has grown up by the influence of one man on another, and it is this mutual influence which makes the enormous possibility of scientific advance. Scientists are not dependent on the ideas of a single man, but on the combined wisdom of thousands of men, all thinking of the same problem, and each doing his little bit to add to the great structure of knowledge which is gradually being erected.
  • All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
    • Ernest Rutherford, as quoted in J. B. Birks, Rutherford at Manchester (1962), p. 108
  • We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most critical elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
    • Ernest Rutherford, as quoted in The Demon-Haunted World (1996), p. 26
  • All the sciences in the world never smoothed down a dying pillow. No earthly philosophy ever supplied hope in death.
    • J. C. Ryle, Startling Questions (New York: Robert Carter & Bros., 1853), "How Readest Thou?", p. 146

S

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In the nineteenth century, ... official Western medicine recognized drapetomania, the tendency of slaves to run away from their owners, as a disease. ... With hindsight, drapetomania is easily dismissed as a harmful fabrication of fictitious disease, in a culture violating human rights. Less easy is it to recognize harmful fabrications of our own era for what they are. ~ Wim J. van der Steen, et. al.
  • All inquiries carry with them some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions. But I do not see how we can deal with the universe—both the outside and the inside universe—without studying it. The best way to avoid abuses is for the populace in general to be scientifically literate, to understand the implications of such investigations. In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work. If science is considered a closed priesthood, too difficult and arcane for the average person to understand, the dangers of abuse are greater. But if science is a topic of general interest and concern—if both its delights and its social consequences are discussed regularly and competently in the schools, the press, and at the dinner table—we have greatly improved our prospects for learning how the world really is and for improving both it and us.
  • Our perceptions may be distorted by training and prejudice or merely because of the limitations of our sense organs, which, of course, perceive directly but a small fraction of the phenomena of the world. Even so straightforward a question as whether in the absence of friction a pound of lead falls faster than a gram of fluff was answered incorrectly by Aristotle and almost everyone else before the time of Galileo. Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage—at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom.
    • Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain (Ballantine Books, 1979), Ch. 1: "Broca's Brain" (pp. 15-16)
  • I believe that even a smattering of such findings in modern science and mathematics is far more compelling and exciting than most of the doctrines of pseudoscience, whose practitioners were condemned as early as the fifth century B.C. by the Ionian philosopher Heraclitus as “nightwalkers, magicians, priests of Bacchus, priestesses of the wine-vat, mystery-mongers.” But science is more intricate and subtle, reveals a much richer universe, and powerfully evokes our sense of wonder. And it has the additional and important virtue—to whatever extent the word has any meaning—of being true.
    • Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain (Ballantine Books, 1979), Ch. 5, "Night Walkers and Mystery Mongers: Sense and Nonsense at the End of Science" (p. 76)
  • The history of science is full of cases where previously accepted theories and hypotheses have been entirely overthrown, to be replaced by new ideas that more adequately explain the data. While there is an understandable psychological inertia—usually lasting about one generation—such revolutions in scientific thought are widely accepted as a necessary and desirable element of scientific progress. Indeed, the reasoned criticism of a prevailing belief is a service to the proponents of that belief; if they are incapable of defending it, they are well advised to abandon it. This self-questioning and error-correcting aspect of the scientific method is its most striking property, and sets it off from many other areas of human endeavor where credulity is the rule.
    • Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain (Ballantine Books, 1979), Ch. 7: "Venus and Dr. Velikovsky" (p. 96)
  • The idea of science as a method rather than as a body of knowledge is not widely appreciated outside of science, or indeed in some corridors inside of science.
    • Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain (Ballantine Books, 1979), Ch. 7: "Venus and Dr. Velikovsky" (p. 96)
  • Vigorous criticism is more constructive in science than in some other areas of human endeavor because in science there are adequate standards of validity that can be agreed upon by competent practitioners the world over. The objective of such criticism is not to suppress but rather to encourage the advance of new ideas: those that survive a firm skeptical scrutiny have a fighting chance of being right, or at least useful.
    • Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain (Ballantine Books, 1979), Ch. 7: "Venus and Dr. Velikovsky" (p. 98)
  • Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything — new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It’s an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. Our task is not just to train more scientists but also to deepen public understanding of science.
  • At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes—an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.
    • Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)
  • A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.
    • Carl Sagan, Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium (1997) Chapter 14, "The Common Enemy".
  • We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That’s a clear prescription for disaster.
    • Carl Sagan, interview with Anne Kalosh, "Bringing Science Down to Earth", in Hemispheres (October 1994), p. 99. Collected in Tom Head (ed.) Conversations with Carl Sagan (2006), p. 100
  • We regard as 'scientific' a method based on deep analysis of facts, theories, and views, presupposing unprejudiced, unfearing open discussion and conclusions. The complexity and diversity of all the phenomena of modern life, the great possibilities and dangers linked with the scientific-technical revolution and with a number of social tendencies demand precisely such an approach, as has been acknowledged in a number of official statements.
  • I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means that you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.
  • Science holds our answer; knowledge—real knowledge, verifiable knowledge, not superstition, not religious nonsense—will be our salvation.
  • To the natural philosopher, to whom the whole extent of nature belongs, all the individual branches of science constitute the links of an endless chain, from which not one can be detached without destroying the harmony of the whole.
  • Science, especially evolutionary sciences, can only proceed from learning about theories of hypotheses that do not stand the test of time.
  • Loquimur de materia "circa quam" est scientia, quae dicitur a quibusdam subiectum scientiae, uel magis proprie obiectum, sicut et illud circa quod est uirtus dicitur obiectum uirtutis proprie, non subiectum. De isto autem obiecto huius scientiae ostensum est prius quod haec scientia est circa transcendentia; ostensum est autem quod est circa altissimas causas. Quod autem istorum debeat poni proprium eius obiectum, uariae sunt opiniones. Ideo de hoc quaeritur primo utrum proprium subiectum metaphysicae sit ens in quantum ens (sicut posuit Auicenna) uel Deus et Intelligentiae (sicut posuit Commentator Auerroes.)
    • We speak of the matter [of this science] in the sense of its being what the science is about. This is called by some the subject of the science, but more properly it should be called its object, just as we say of a virtue that what it is about is its object, not its subject. As for the object of the science in this sense, we have indicated above that this science is about the transcendentals. And it was shown to be about the highest causes. But there are various opinions about which of these ought to be considered its proper object or subject. Therefor, we inquire about the first. Is the proper subject of metaphysics being as being, as Avicenna claims, or God and the Intelligences, as the Commentator, Averroes, assumes.
    • Duns Scotus Quaestiones subtilissimae de metaphysicam Aristotelis, as translated in: William A. Frank, Allan Bernard Wolter, Duns Scotus, Metaphysician (1995), pp. 20-21
  • Essentially all civilizations that rose to the level of possessing an urban culture had need for two forms of science-related technology, namely, mathematics for land measurements and commerce and astronomy for time-keeping in agriculture and aspects of religious rituals.
    • Frederick Seitz, The Science Matrix: The Journey, Travails, Triumphs (1992, 1998), Preface, p. x
  • Darwin recognized that thus far the civilization of mankind has passed through four successive stages of evolution, namely, those based on the use of fire, the development of agriculture, the development of urban life and the use of basic science for technological advancement.
    • Frederick Seitz, in The Science Matrix: The Journey, Travails, Triumphs (1992, 2012), p. 86
  • In scientific matters there was a common language and one standard of values; in moral and political problems there were many. ... Furthermore, in science there is a court of last resort, experiment, which is unavailable in human affairs.
  • Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Kepler, Copernicus, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton and Einstein ... These great men, they have been the makers of one side of humanity, which has two sides. We call the one side religion, and we call the other science. Religion is always right. Religion protects us against that great problem which we all must face. Science is always wrong; it is the very artifice of men. Science can never solve one problem without raising 10 more problems.
    • George Bernard Shaw, in a dinner speech at the Savoy Hotel, London (28 October 1930), as quoted in Michael Holroyd, "Albert Einstein, Universe Maker", The New York Times (14 March 1991)
  • It may be true, that as Francis Thompson noted, "Thou canst not stir a flower without troubling a star", but in computing the motion of stars and planets, the effects of flowers do not loom large. It is the disregarding of the effect of flowers on stars that allows progress in astronomy. Appropriate abstraction is critical to progress in science.
    • Herman Shugart, in Plant Functional Types (1997 edn.) by Smith, Shugart and Woodward, Cambridge University Press, p. 20
  • People in the present day will be slow to believe that any knowledge worth considering can be found outside the bright focus of Western culture.
  • Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
    • Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford, 1976), p. 796
  • The act of freezing a dead body and storing it indefinitely on the chance that some future generation may restore it to life is an act of faith, not science.
  • If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.
  • The development of human thought and achievement, as a whole, has not been, as commonly supposed, a continual upward progression, nor even the equivalent of a continuous series of ascertained results. Thoughts and inventions, which seemed on the verge of practical fruition, have often been reduced to nothingness, even at the most decisive moment, through some combination of untoward circumstances; yes, even the very memory of a pathway broken into the Land of Promise is often obliterated and what seemed accomplished fact has had to be recreated by laborious work covering years, decades and even centuries. Just the simplest, most natural and, in the end, almost self evident facts are the hardest to evolve and elucidate, just what was most decisive and potent of result has been time and again overlooked by the seeker after truth. ... The gold of historic thought, indeed, is as little to be found in the street as the gold of actual daily strife, and it is by no means the task of the historian of broad general scope to give the initial clew to its discovery. He, indeed, can only reproduce the past with fidelity and exactitude. The intuition of the true investigator and pathfinder of today and tomorrow must find its own way to new guiding principles from the work of yesterday, before yesterday, and the distant past.
    • Karl Sudhoff, reported in F. H. Garrison, An Introduction to the History of Medicine (1917), p. 15
  • Scientific skepticism is considered good. [...] Under this principle, one must question, doubt, or suspend judgment until sufficient information is available. Skeptics demand that evidence and proof be offered before conclusions can be drawn. [...] One must thoughtfully gather evidence and be persuaded by the evidence rather than by prejudice, bias, or uncritical thinking.
  • In the nineteenth century, ... official Western medicine recognized drapetomania, the tendency of slaves to run away from their owners, as a disease. ... With hindsight, drapetomania is easily dismissed as a harmful fabrication of fictitious disease, in a culture violating human rights. Less easy is it to recognize harmful fabrications of our own era for what they are.
    Are you sure that medicine and psychiatry are on the right track, morally and scientifically, in providing millions of person with drugs after having diagnosed them as depressed?
  • The science and technology which have advanced man safely into space have brought about startling medical advances for man on earth. Out of space research have come new knowledge, techniques and instruments which have enabled some bedridden invalids to walk, the totally deaf to hear, the voiceless to talk, and, in the foreseeable future, may even make it possible for the blind to “see.”
    • Hubertus Strughold, From Outer Space—Advances For Medicine on Earth, in Lillian Levy, Space, Its Impact on Man and Society (1965, reprinted 1973), p. 117
  • Science deals with but a partial aspect of reality, and... there is no faintest reason for supposing that everything science ignores is less real than what it accepts. ...Why is it that science forms a closed system? Why is is that the elements of reality it ignores never come in to disturb it? The reason is that all the terms of physics are defined in terms of one another. The abstractions with which physics begins are all it ever has to do with...
  • 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.
    • Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin (1973), "Science and Scientism"

T

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  • Today's science is tomorrow's technology.
  • Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery's being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880's, science played almost no role in the advances of technology. For example, James Watt developed the first efficient steam engine long before science established the equivalence between mechanical heat and energy.
    • Edward Teller, with Judith L. Shoolery, Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics (2001), p. 42
  • Science, my forward-looking friend, is a complex of interlocking theories, all derived from observation.
  • I trust I have not wasted breath:
      I think we are not wholly brain,
      Magnetic mockeries; not in vain,
    Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death;
    Not only cunning casts in clay:
      Let Science prove we are, and then
      What matters Science unto men,
    At least to me? I would not stay.
    Let him, the wiser man who springs
      Hereafter, up from childhood shape
      His action like the greater ape,
    But I was born to other things.
  • When we speak of man, we have a conception of humanity as a whole, and before applying scientific methods to the investigation of his movement we must accept this as a physical fact. But can anyone doubt to-day that all the millions of individuals and all the innumerable types and characters constitute an entity, a unit? Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. I cut myself in the finger, and it pains me: this finger is a part of me. I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one. And now I see stricken down an enemy, a lump of matter which, of all the lumps of matter in the universe, I care least for, and it still grieves me. Does this not prove that each of us is only part of a whole?
  • 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.
    • Nikola Tesla, "Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World" in Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934)
  • Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.
    • Nikola Tesla (1934), reported in Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, Jim Glenn, Tesla: Master of Lightning (1999), p. 137
  • What are the sciences but maps of universal laws, and universal laws but the channels of universal power; and universal power but the outgoings of a universal mind?
    • Edward Thompson, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert (ed.) Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) p. 531
  • I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.
  • The great difference between science and technology is a difference of initial attitude. The scientific man follows his method whithersoever it may take him. He seeks acquaintance with his subject­matter, and he does not at all care about what he shall find, what shall be the content of his knowledge when acquaintance-with is transformed into knowledge-about. The technologist moves in another universe; he seeks the attainment of some determinate end, which is his sole and obsessing care; and he therefore takes no heed of anything that he cannot put to use as means toward that end.
  • The High-Elves, … the Noldor or Loremasters, were always on the side of ‘science and technology’, as we should call it: they wanted to have the knowledge that Sauron genuinely had.
    • J. R. R. Tolkien, from Letter draft to Peter Hastings (manager of a Catholic bookshop in Oxford, who wrote about his enthusiasm for Lord of the Rings) (Sep 1954). In Humphrey Carpenter (ed.) assisted by Christopher Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1995, 2014), 190, Letter No. 153.
  • Different media of publication... have been introduced... to meet new professional needs; and the historically changing operations of the scientific profession are reflected... in the transfer of influence from one medium to another. The 'invisible colleges' of seventeenth-century Europe were initially linked by the circulated correspondence of men like Henry Oldenburg. With the foundation of national academies, emphasis shifted to their Transactions and to treatises such as Newton's Principia, which were published under their auspices. In subsequent centuries, the balance has again shifted several times: to quarterlies... twice monthly... weeklies, and even shorter-term publications. The proliferation... and the acceleration of publication are effects, in part of the fragmentation of sub-disciplines, in part of the sharpened competition for priority; but they are associated also with the great decentralization of scientific authority. Where no-one can hope to master all... scientific professions were bound to move towards a pluralistic pattern of authority. On the very frontiers of research, indeed, we are now back not only with 'invisible colleges' but with a multiplicity of Oldenburgs, who circulate duplicated 'prepublication' material in highly specialized subjects to an international circle of equally specialized devotees. In the more self-consciously original branches of science—it has even been suggested—only out-of-date ideas ever actually get into print!
    • Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding (1972), Vol. 1: "The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts"
  • Science tends to frighten those who are infrequently exposed to it, while the practitioners of science are often the most misunderstood people in the world.
  • The history of science may be treated from the point of view that it records attempts to place metaphysical disguises upon the faces of process and procedure... The metaphysics that still dominates science and enthralls the minds of men is nothing but a metaphor, and a limited one.
  • The Good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

U

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  • The justification for [basic research] is that this constitutes the fount of all new knowledge, without which the opportunities for further technical progress must eventually become exhausted.
    • From a British government publication, "Technological Innovation in Britain" (1968), quoted in M. Gibbons and C. Johnson, "Relationship between Science and Technology", Nature (11 July 1970), p. 125; as cited in Arie Leegwater, "Technology and Science", Stephen V. Monsma (ed.) Responsible Technology: A Christian Perspective (1986), p. 79

V

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  • Il faut n'appeler Science que l'ensemble des recettes qui réussissent toujours.—Tout le reste est littérature.
    • Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
    • Paul Valéry, Moralités (1932), p. 41; reported in Tony Augarde (ed.) The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations (1991), p. 220
  • Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.
    • Jules Verne, Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864; rev. 1867); tr. F. A. Malleson, Journey into the Interior of the Earth (1877), ch. 31

W

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To provide scientific information is not a necessarily innocent act, and may entail the gravest consequences. ~ Norbert Wiener
  • ... it really gets to this idea — how science asks us to learn about organisms, traditional knowledge asks us to learn from them.
  • [To the cultures of Asia and the continent of Africa] it is the Western impact which has stirred up the winds of change and set the processes of modernization in motion. Education brought not only the idea of equality but also another belief which we used to take for granted in the West—the idea of progress, the idea that science and technology can be used to better human conditions. In ancient society, men tended to believe themselves fortunate if tomorrow was not worse than today and anyway, there was little they could do about it.
    • Barbara Ward, Lecture at State University of Iowa (6 Apr 1961). In Barbara Ward, The Unity of the Free World (1961), 12.
  • Holding then to science with one hand — the left hand — we give the right hand to religion, and cry: "Open Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things, more wondrous than the shining worlds can tell." Obedient to the promise, religion does waken faculties within us, does teach our eyes to the beholding of more wonderful things. Those great worlds blazing like suns die like feeble stars in the glory of the morning, in the presence of this new light. The soul knows that an infinite sea of love is all about it, throbbing through it, everlasting arms of affection lift it, and it bathes itself in the clear consciousness of a Father's love.
    • Bishop H. W. Warren, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert (ed.) Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 531
  • Pure science is no more and no less than the logical process of deduction and experimentation upon observable events. It has no good or bad about it, merely right or wrong in a strictly mathematical definition. What people do with that science is cause for ethical debate, but it is not for the true scientist to concern themselves with that. Leave it to the politicians and philosophers.
  • A scientific argument must have some degree of data, some...some sniff of theoretical basis behind it; otherwise it's not a scientific argument, it's a philosophical debate.
    • Catherine Webb, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014), ch. 28
  • I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess.
    • Walt Whitman, as quoted in Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906), p. 101
  • In the past, the community of scholars has made it a custom to furnish scientific information to any person seriously seeking it. However, we must face these facts: The policy of the government itself during and after the war, say in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has made it clear that to provide scientific information is not a necessarily innocent act, and may entail the gravest consequences. One therefore cannot escape reconsidering the established custom of the scientist to give information to every person who may inquire of him.
    • Norbert Wiener, responding to a request for information concerning controlled missiles, first published in The Atlantic Monthly (December 1946)
  • Some "unmasking" accounts of natural science ... aim to show that its pretensions to deliver the truth are unfounded, because of social forces that control its activities. Unlike the case of history, these do not use truths of the same kind; they do not apply science to the criticism of science. They apply the social sciences, and typically depend on the remarkable assumption that the sociology of knowledge is in a better position to deliver truth about science than science is to deliver truth about the world.
    • Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (2002); as cited in Michael W. Hill, The Impact of Information on Society (2005), p. 41
  • What I found most disillusioning, however, was not that the sacred texts contained errors, but that they suffered by comparison. Compared to what I was leaning in science, they offered few truly surprising and powerful insights. Where was there a vision to compete with the concepts of infinite space, of vast expanses of time, of distant stars that rival and surpass our Sun? Of hidden forces and new, invisible forms of "light"? Or of tremendous energies that humans could, by understanding natural processes, learn to liberate and control?
    • Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces (2008), p. 7
  • No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.
  • One reason for the astonishing growth of science and technology in this century has been, of course, war; but another, and perhaps a more important one, is simply that science has created the conditions—in western society at least—under which it best flourishes: these are affluence, leisure, and a high regard for education.
  • Paradoxically, while applied science and its material fruits have won for the scientist new status, new acceptance by the public, the increasingly exotic nature of scientific inquiry has made what the scientist does more and more incomprehensible to a public which thanks him for new vaccines, better transportation and communications, and the somato–forming miracles of Lycra fiber. In short, although science has enormous impact on us all, has transformed our society almost beyond the power of words to express, it has steadily made less and less of a contribution to general culture.
    • Robin Scott Wilson, "The Terrific Play of Forces Natural and Human", in Robin Scott Wilson (ed.) Clarion, p. 207
  • From all this, one can see that modern science poses a peculiar dilemma. On one hand, however remotely, science is a tremendous influence on the quality of all our lives. On the other, it has penetrated ever more deeply into a temple of abstractions whose mysteries are not understandable to very many people. We are being moved by forces we no longer comprehend. Science, which bids fair to "unlock the mysteries of the universe," has itself come to constitute a mystery of very nearly equal obscurity. Technology, the means man has employed to deal with a hostile nature, has itself produced a new environment in many ways far more hostile....We don't understand what it is, and it worries us.
    • Robin Scott Wilson, "The Terrific Play of Forces Natural and Human", in Robin Scott Wilson (ed.) Clarion, p. 209
  • Science has no teleology; the “scientific method” and teleology are, by definition, mutually exclusive.
    • Robin Scott Wilson, "The Terrific Play of Forces Natural and Human", in Robin Scott Wilson (ed.) Clarion, p. 209

Y

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  • This statement appears to us to be conclusive with respect to the insufficiency of the undulatory theory, in its present state, for explaining all the phenomena of light. But we are not therefore by any means persuaded of the perfect sufficiency of the projectile system: and all the satisfaction that we have derived from an attentive consideration of the accumulated evidence, which has been brought forward, within the last ten years, on both sides of the question, is that of being convinced that much more evidence is still wanting before it can be positively decided. In the progress of scientific investigation, we must frequently travel by rugged paths, and through valleys as well as over mountains. Doubt must necessarily succeed often to apparent certainty, and must again give place to a certainty of a higher order; such is the imperfection of our faculties, that the descent from conviction to hesitation is not uncommonly as salutary, as the more agreeable elevation from uncertainty to demonstration. An example of such alternations may easily be adduced from the history of chemistry. How universally had phlogiston once expelled the aërial acid of Hooke and Mayow. How much more completely had phlogiston given way to oxygen! And how much have some of our best chemists been lately inclined to restore the same phlogiston to its lost honours! although now again they are beginning to apprehend that they have already done too much in its favour. In the mean time, the true science of chemistry, as the most positive dogmatist will not hesitate to allow, has been very rapidly advancing towards ultimate perfection.
    • Thomas Young, in George Peacock and John Leitch (eds.) Miscellaneous Works of the Late Thomas Young (1855), vol. 1, p. 249

See also

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