Doubtless it is true that while consciousness is occupied in the scientific interpretation of a thing, which is now and again "a thing of beauty," it is not occupied in the aesthetic appreciation of it. But it is no less true that the same consciousness may at another time be so wholly possessed by the aesthetic appreciation as to exclude all thought of the scientific interpretation. The inability of a man of science to take the poetic view simply shows his mental limitation; as the mental limitation of a poet is shown by his inability to take the scientific view. The broader mind can take both.
HERBERT SPENCER, An Autobiography
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance -- the idea that anything is possible.
RAY BRADBURY, Los Angeles Times, Aug. 9, 1976
Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.
WILHELM REICH, The Function of the Organism
Although I was first drawn to math and science by the certainty they promised, today I find the unanswered questions and the unexpected connections at least as attractive.
LISA RANDALL, Warped Passages
One of the chief interests in Science is its bearing on [the] great questions: the light it throws on our own nature and the nature of the Universe; and the humility it teaches by everywhere leaving us in presence of the inscrutable. The dull world outside thinks of Science as nothing but a matter of chemical analyses, calculations of distance and times, labeling of species, physiological experiments, and the like; but among the initiated, those of higher type, while seeking scientific knowledge for its proximate value, have an ever-increasing consciousness of its ultimate value as a transfiguration of things, which, marvellous enough within the limits of the knowable, suggests a profounder marvel that cannot be known.
HERBERT SPENCER, An Autobiography
Science is the process of trying to understand the nature of reality. And it's a fundamental of science that we believe reality exists, instead of having it be a human construct or all a matter of relative point of view. There isn't another side of the story in science. There are the right and wrong answers, and you do a better or worse job of understanding that reality, but we do believe reality is there. That's fundamental to what we're doing.
LUCY JONES, Newsweek, Oct. 15, 2007
It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.
