quotations about science
In the history of science and throughout the whole course of its progress we see certain epochs following one another more or less rapidly. Some important view is expressed, it may be original or only revived; sooner or later it receives recognition; fellow workers spring up; the outcome of it finds its way into the schools; it is taught and handed down; and we observe, unhappily, that it does not in the least matter whether the view be true or false. In either case its course is the same; in either case it comes in the end to be a mere phrase, a lifeless word stamped on the memory.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Leave your faith in science's hands
Research might lead to your salvation
While you're in a state of suspended animation
PESTILENCE
"Suspended Animation"
Every science owns kin with its sister science.
HYPATIA
attributed, Day's Collacon
So what is science, and why do we consider it so useful and important? Despite the Hollywood stereotypes, science is not about white lab coats and bubbling beakers or sparkling apparatuses. Science is a way of looking at the world using a specific toolbox--the scientific method.
DONALD PROTHERO
"The Holocaust, Denier's Playbook, and the Tobacco Smokescreen: Common Threads in the Thinking and Tactics of Denialists and Pseudoscientists", Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem
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.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
attributed, Clarke Foundation
Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.
KARL MARX
Value, Price, and Profit
Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.
EDWIN H. LAND
attributed, QFINANCE: The Ultimate Resource
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The World As I See It
Science fails to recognize the single most
Potent element of human existence
Letting the reins go to the unfolding
Is faith, faith, faith, faith
SYSTEM OF A DOWN
"Science"
For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable. Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right.
GREGORY BENFORD
Timescape
Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation. Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.
STEPHEN HAWKING
A Brief History of Time
Weird Science
Weird, ooo!
Magic and technology
Voodoo dolls and chants
Electricity We're makin'
Fantasy and microchips
Shooting from the hip
Something different
OINGO BOINGO
"Weird Science"
The great contribution of science is to demonstrate that a person can regard the world as chaos, but can find in himself a method of perceiving, within that chaos, small arrangements of order, that out of himself, and out of the order that previous scientists have generated, he can make things that are exciting and thrilling to make, that are deeply spiritual contributions to himself and to his friends. The scientist comes to the world and says, "I do not understand the divine source, but I know, in a way that I don't understand, that out of chaos I can make order, out of loneliness I can make friendship, out of ugliness I can make beauty."
EDWIN H. LAND
address at MIT, "Generation of Greatness: The Idea of a University in an Age of Science", May 22, 1957
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance -- the idea that anything is possible.
RAY BRADBURY
Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1976
Science is not the total answer; this I know, this I have learned in my lifetime. And that leaves me with the belief that miracles, no matter how inexplicable or unbelievable, are real and can occur without regard to the natural order of things.
NICHOLAS SPARKS
The Notebook
I believe that for permanent survival, man must balance science with other qualities of life, qualities of body and spirit as well as those of mind -- qualities he cannot develop when he lets mechanics and luxury insulate him too greatly from the earth to which he was born.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
speech at the Annual Wright Dinner at the Aero Club of Washington, 1949
All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Out of My Later Years
The most exciting thing about being a scientist is not knowing and being wrong. Because that means there is a lot left to learn.
LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
"Cosmic Connections", 2011
Science unfolds the wisdom of God.
JUAN DE PINEDA
attributed, Day's Collacon
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, October 15, 2007