Science Quotes by Edward Abbey, Albert Einstein, Richard Digance, John Allen Paulos, Robert Burns Woodward, Alice Stewart and many others.
There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.
I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me: “If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight.” I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation.
Now Einstein was a very clever man, with us all his philosophies he shared, He gave us the theory of relativity, which is E equals M C squared.
There is something inhuman and vaguely pornographic about statistics… Pornography, on the other hand, with its loosely bound sequences of storyless sexual couplings often has the feel of a statistical survey.
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
I love crystals, the beauty of their forms and formation; liquids, dormant, distilling, sloshing! The fumes, the odors good or bad, the rainbow of colors; the gleaming vessels of every size, shape and purpose.
In the old days, they killed the messenger who brought the bad news… a Cassandra is never popular in her time.
Out of man’s mind in free play comes the creation Science. It renews itself, like the generations, thanks to an activity which is the best game of homo ludens: science is in the strictest and best sense a glorious entertainment.
From an entertainment point of view, the Solar System has been a bust. None of the planets turns out to have any real-estate potential, and most of them are probably even useless for filming Dune sequels.
Let us keep the discoveries and indisputable measurements of physics. But … A more complete study of the movements of the world will oblige us, little by little, to turn it upside down; in other words, to discover that if things hold and hold together, it is only by reason of complexity, from above.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.
Nature’s great book is written in mathematics.
[It] may be laid down as a general rule that, if the result of a long series of precise observations approximates a simple relation so closely that the remaining difference is undetectable by observation and may be attributed to the errors to which they are liable, then this relation is probably that of nature.
I am tired of all this sort of thing called science here… We have spent millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped.
It seems to me that the evidence … is opposed to the view that the spirals are individual galaxies comparable with our own. In fact, there appears as yet no reason for modifying the tentative hypothesis that the spirals are not composed of typical stars at all, but are truly nebulous objects.
Man could not stay there forever. He was bound to spread to new regions, partly because of his innate migratory tendency and partly because of Nature’s stern urgency.
The next great task of science is to create a religion for humanity.
[I shall not] discuss scientific method, but rather the methods of scientists. We proceed by common sense and ingenuity. There are no rules, only the principles of integrity and objectivity, with a complete rejection of all authority except that of fact.
Philosophy fulfills the need to create for ourselves a single and complete concept of the world and of life.
We can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.
The growth of a naturalist is like the growth of a musician or athlete: excellence for the talented, lifelong enjoyment for the rest, benefit for humanity.
We can only penetrate the rind of the earth.
The forces of rotation caused red hot masses of stones to be torn away from the Earth and to be thrown into the ether, and this is the origin of the stars.
Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my Travels.
Philosophy always requires something more, requires the eternal, the true, in contrast to which even the fullest existence as such is but a happy moment.
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
Science can give mankind a better standard of living, better health and a better mental life, if mankind in turn gives science the sympathy and support so essential to its progress.
Language is the medium of our thoughts.
Pure phenomenology claims to be the science of pure phenomena. This concept of the phenomenon, which was developed under various names as early as the eighteenth century without being clarified, is what we shall have to deal with first of all.
One of the most tragicomic things in life is that when a man makes an imaginary thing – such as a religion – as his own flag and carries it all his life and even dies for it! An intelligent man has only one flag: Flag of reason and science!
Investing in science education and curiosity-driven research is investing in the future.
The works which this man [Joseph Banks] leaves behind him occupy a few pages only; their importance is not greatly superior to their extent; and yet his name will shine out with lustre in the history of the sciences.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more strongly the truths come from on high, and contained in the sacred writings.
When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.
I conceived and developed a new geometry of nature and implemented its use in a number of diverse fields. It describes many of the irregular and fragmented patterns around us, and leads to full-fledged theories, by identifying a family of shapes I call fractals.
It may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena.
A Composition on the Piano
The electric age … established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system.
The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.
To be anthropocentric is to remain unaware of the limits of human nature, the significance of biological processes underlying human behavior, and the deeper meaning of long-term genetic evolution.
Of course, if one ignores contradictory observations, one can claim to have an “elegant” or “robust” theory. But it isn’t science.
Science does not permit exceptions.
Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.
The gene as the basis of life.
…it’s the process of losing oneself in the jungle that makes science worth doing.
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
I’m saying that the leaders of the church have locked the sacred cow called science in the stable and they won’t let anybody enter; they should open it immediately so that we can milk that cow in the name of humanity and thus find the truth.
Nature tells every secret once.
Everything in food is science. The only subjective part is when you eat it.
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I’m talking about an organic computer – about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.
Science fiction writers aren’t fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.
All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.
The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.
Touch is the most fundamental sense. A baby experiences it, all over, before he is born and long before he learns to use sight, hearing, or taste, and no human ever ceases to need it. Keep your children short on pocket money but long on hugs
Science and technology are a propellant for building a thriving country, and the happiness of the people and the future of the country hinge on their development.
The operational approach demands that we make our reports and do our thinking in the freshest terms of which we are capable, in which we strip off the sophistications of millenia of culture and report as directly as we can on what happens.
For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.
The worth of a new idea is invariably determined, not by the degree of its intuitiveness-which incidentally, is to a major extent a matter of experience and habit-but by the scope and accuracy of the individual laws to the discovery of which it eventually leads.
Forensic science offers great potential, as it draws on almost every discipline and, in doing so, creates widespread opportunity for innovation.
Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.
What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. That’s not science. You can get a parrot to do that.
Intellect is void of affection and sees an object as it stands in the light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact, and not as I and mine.
Just as a physicist has to examine the telescope and galvanometer with which he is working; has to get a clear conception of what he can attain with them, and how they may deceive him; so, too, it seemed to me necessary to investigate likewise the capabilities of our power of thought.
The moment philosophy supposes it can find a final and comprehensive solution, it ceases to be inquiry and becomes either apologetics or propaganda.
In an age of specialization people are proud to be able to do one thing well, but if that is all they know about, they are missing out on much else life has to offer.
Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.
The people of Sydney who can speak of my work [on flying-machine models] without a smile are very scarce; it is doubtless the same with American workers. I know that success is dead sure to come, and therefore do not waste time and words in trying to convince unbelievers.
To derive two or three general Principles of Motion from Phænomena, and afterwards to tell us how the Properties and Actions of all corporeal Things follow from those manifest Principles, would be a very great step in Philosophy.
Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.
Keep a sharp lookout upon your materials; get rid of every pound of material you can do without; put to yourself the question what business has it to be there?, avoid complexities, and make everything as simple as possible.
If I say [electrons] behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have seen before.
In my 10th exams, I stood first with 80 percent but instead of picking science for my further studies, I chose arts… just so that I could continue to dance.
Our reasonings are grounded upon two great principles, that of contradiction, in virtue of which we judge false that which involves a contradiction, and true that which is opposed or contradictory to the false.
The future is uncertain… but this uncertainty is at the very heart of human creativity.
In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.
For an object under the eye will appear very different from the same object placed above it; in an inclosed space, very different from the same in an open space.
All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws.
And now the announcement of Watson and Crick about DNA. This is for me the real proof of the existence of God.
Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?
The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.
It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance.
Increased knowledge of heredity means increased power of control over the living thing, and as we come to understand more and more the architecture of the plant or animal we realize what can and what cannot be done towards modification or improvement.
The more people we can attract to science and technology – men, women, everybody – the more economic opportunity we have as a nation.
It is said to await certainty is to await eternity.
From a certain temperature on, the molecules ‘condense’ without attractive forces; that is, they accumulate at zero velocity. The theory is pretty, but is there some truth in it.
The world little knows how many of the thoughts and theories which have passed through the mind of a scientific investigator, have been crushed in silence and secrecy by his own severe criticism and adverse examination!
Moral science is better occupied when treating of friendship than of justice.
I like working closely with artists. I think that’s very important in fantasy and science fiction – the visual aspect of the worlds and the characters.
Mankind has one great habit, a bad habit: To create rules on behalf of God! Unless A God appears on the sky and says ‘Here are the rules,’ do not take any rule serious! Remember that in this universe, there is no port that you can take refuge apart from the reason and the science!
My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.
My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done. You can be sincere and still be stupid.
[A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause.
In order to more fully understand this reality, we must take into account other dimensions of a broader reality.
Anaximenes and Anaxagoras and Democritus say that its [the earth’s] flatness is responsible for it staying still: for it does not cut the air beneath but covers it like a lid, which flat bodies evidently do: for they are hard to move even for the winds, on account of their resistance.
The sciences are of a sociable disposition, and flourish best in the neighborhood of each other; nor is there any branch of learning but may be helped and improved by assistance drawn from other arts.
It is impossible for us, who live in the latter ages of the world, to make observations in criticism, morality, or in any art or science, which have not been touched upon by others. We have little else left us but to represent the common sense of mankind in more strong, more beautiful, or more uncommon lights.
EFFECT, n. The second of two phenomena which always occur together in the same order. The first, called a Cause, is said to generate the other-which is no more sensible than it would be for one who has never seen a dog except in pursuit of a rabbit to declare the rabbit the cause of the dog.
Wouldst thou enjoy a long Life, a healthy Body, and a vigorous Mind, and be acquainted also with the wonderful Works of God? labour in the first place to bring thy Appetite into Subjection to Reason.
You know how to split atoms, how to send explorers to the moon, how to splice genes, but you don’t know how people ought to live.
Whether we like it or not, one day science will take God from us! This will be especially a great destruction for the weak minds!
There is no significant man-made Global Warming underway and the science on which the computer projections of weather chaos are based is badly flawed.
You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart.
In Mathematics it is always best to cheat.
This is a huge step toward unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1-what happened in the beginning. This is a Genesis machine. It’ll help to recreate the most glorious event in the history of the universe.
Matter, though divisible in an extreme degree, is nevertheless not infinitely divisible. That is, there must be some point beyond which we cannot go in the division of matter. … I have chosen the word “atom” to signify these ultimate particles.
For many doctors the achievement of a published article is a tedious duty to be surmounted as a necessary hurdle in a medical career.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
This car of mine, I am tickled to death with it. The machine is nearly everything, its power, stability and balance. The driver, allowing for his experience and courage, is much less.
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…” Whatever our speculations may be in regard to a “beginning,” and when it was, it is written in the rocks that, like the animals and plants upon its surface, the earth itself grew.
Deviner avant de dГ©montrer! Ai-je besoin de rappeler que c’est ainsi que se sont faites toutes les dГ©couvertes importantes.
Paradoxical as it may at first appear, the fact is that, as W. H. George has said, scientific research is an art, not a science.
Great steps in human progress are made by things that don’t work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don’t, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.
Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.
Not to destroy but to construct,
I hold the unconquerable belief
that science and peace will triumph over ignorance and war
that nations will come together
not to destroy but to construct
and that the future belongs to those
who accomplish most for humanity.
I hold the unconquerable belief
that science and peace will triumph over ignorance and war
that nations will come together
not to destroy but to construct
and that the future belongs to those
who accomplish most for humanity.
The Highways of America are built chiefly of politics, whereas the proper material is crushed rock or concrete.
Men will gather knowledge no matter what the consequences. Science will go on whether we are pessimistic or optimistic, as I am. More interesting discoveries than we can imagine will be made, and I am awaiting them, full of curiosity and enthusiasm.
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.
Our knowledge of stars and interstellar matter must be based primarily on the electromagnetic radiation which reaches us. Nature has thoughtfully provided us with a universe in which radiant energy of almost all wave lengths travels in straight lines over enormous distances with usually rather negligible absorption.
A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.
When the elements are arranged in vertical columns according to increasing atomic weight, so that the horizontal lines contain analogous elements again according to increasing atomic weight, an arrangement results from which several general conclusions may be drawn.
Ignorance is always ready to admire itself. Procure yourself critical friends.
Nature’s fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness.
No one wants to learn from mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art.
Unlike scientism, science in the true sense of the word is open to unbiased investigation of any existing phenomena.
Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true.
… finding that in [the Moon] there is a provision of light and heat; also in appearance, a soil proper for habitation fully as good as ours, if not perhaps better who can say that it is not extremely probable, nay beyond doubt, that there must be inhabitants on the Moon of some kind or other?
The constitution of the universe is total natural law. ‘Natural law,’ we say from the field of science. ‘Will of God,’ we say from the field of religion. It’s the same thing.
Science is not, despite how it is often portrayed, about absolute truths. It is about developing an understanding of the world, making predictions, and then testing these predictions.
Unless man can make new and original adaptations to his environment as rapidly as his science can change the environment, our culture will perish.
All sciences originated among the sons of Israel, the reason being the existence of prophecy among them which made their perfection in the sciences amazing.
The human body was designed by a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area ?
Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops
Herrmann Pidoux and Armand Trousseau stated ‘Disease exists within us, because of us, and through us’, Pasteur did not entirely disagree, ‘This is true for certain diseases’, he wrote cautiously, only to add immediately: ‘I do not think that it is true for all of them’.
The law of conservation of energy tells us we can’t get something for nothing, but we refuse to believe it.
Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.
You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him find it within himself.
I went through the standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14. I bought into that package deal of science equals atheism.
[When thinking about the new relativity and quantum theories] I have felt a homesickness for the paths of physical science where there are ore or less discernible handrails to keep us from the worst morasses of foolishness.
Therefore, the causes assigned to natural effects of the same kind must be, so far as possible, the same.
Doubt everything or believe everything: these are two equally convenient strategies. With either we dispense with the need for reflection.
Of the many forms of false culture, a premature converse with abstractions is perhaps the most likely to prove fatal to the growth of a masculine vigour of intellect.
Gamma rays are the sort of radiation you should avoid. Want proof? Just remember how the comic strip character “The Hulk” became big, green, and ugly.
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
No one believes an hypothesis except its originator but everyone believes an experiment except the experimenter. Most people are ready to believe something based on experiment but the experimenter knows the many little things that could have gone wrong in the experiment.
He will also find that the high and independent spirit, which usually dwells in the breast of those who are deeply versed in scientific pursuits, is ill adapted for administrative appointments; and that even if successful, he must hear many things he disapproves, and raise no voice against them.
Nevertheless most of the evergreen forests of the north must always remain the home of wild animals and trappers, a backward region in which it is easy for a great fur company to maintain a practical monopoly.
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
[In the Universe it may be that] Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth.
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it is the exact opposite.
But the best demonstration by far is experience, if it go not beyond the actual experiment.
We have already considered with disfavour the possibility of the universe having been planned by a biologist or an engineer; from the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.
[I attach] little importance to physical size. I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does.
I’ve always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative – the story of each patient, each illness.
The business of biomedical research is mostly about failure. Few projects we commission will ultimately result in success. But every study we do contributes to the body of knowledge that brings science and society closer to a solution.
A good writer should be able to write comedic work that made you laugh, and scary stuff that made you scared, and fantasy or science fiction that imbued you with a sense of wonder, and mainstream journalism that gave you clear and concise information in a way that you wanted it.
Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen.
Never any knowledge was delivered in the same order it was invented.
Science is not a thing. It’s a verb. It’s a way of thinking about things. It’s a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.
We ought to observe that practice which is the hardest of all – especially for young physicians – we ought to throw in no medicine at all – to abstain – to observe a wise and masterly inactivity.
Biochemistry is the science of life. All our life processes – walking, talking, moving, feeding – are essentially chemical reactions. So biochemistry is actually the chemistry of life, and it’s supremely interesting.
All of the physical universes put together, stretching out endlessly, are only a fraction of the totality of reality. In other words, all of the physical universes are only part of the physical dimensional plane, and there are thousands of dimensional planes.
Maxwell’s theory is Maxwell’s system of equations.
Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it.
The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.
[FlГјrscheim] was good at unanswerable arguments.
If the man doesn’t believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can’t burn him.
The partitions of knowledge are not like several lines that meet in one angle, and so touch not in a point; but are like branches of a tree, that meet in a stem, which hath a dimension and quantity of entireness and continuance, before it come to discontinue and break itself into arms and boughs.
And when statesmen or others worry him [the scientist] too much, then he should leave with his possessions. With a firm and steadfast mind one should hold under all conditions, that everywhere the earth is below and the sky above and to the energetic man, every region is his fatherland.
Despair is better treated with hope, not dope.
Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
In geology the effects to be explained have almost all occurred already, whereas in these other sciences effects actually taking place have to be explained.
All man must live in Machu Picchu for some time! Over there, you will be closer to the universe and you will realise how trivial you are in this chaotic cosmos. Science is the only power which will make you bigger and significant in this universe!
As time goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which Nature has chosen.
I rarely plan my research; it plans me.
Experiment is fundamentally only induced observation.
The thing that got me started on the science that I’ve been building now for about 20 years or so was the question of okay, if mathematical equations can’t make progress in understanding complex phenomena in the natural world, how might we make progress?
It may be that … when the advance of destructive weapons enables everyone to kill everybody else nobody will want to kill anyone at all. [Referring to the hydrogen bomb.]
Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.
I despise people who depend on these things [heroin and cocaine]. If you really want a mind-altering experience, look at a tree.
One thing I have no worry about is whether God exists. But it has occurred to me that God has Alzheimer’s and has forgotten we exist.
The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants.
Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought-particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.
Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.
Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.
Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.
A cell is regarded as the true biological atom.
It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet.
Philosophy is the science which considers truth.
In science we kill our hypothesis instead of each other.
In the year of chan yan…, Jupiter was in [the Zodiacal Division of] Zi, it rose in the morning and went under in the evening together with the Lunar Mansions Xunu, Xu and Wei. It was very large and bright. Apparently, there was a small reddish (chi) star appended (fu) to its side. This is called “an alliance” (tong meng).
We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.
You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb.
Biophilia, if it exists, and I believe it exists, is the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.
Gentlemen, now you will see that now you see nothing. And why you see nothing you will see presently.
HURRICANE, n. An atmospheric demonstration once very common but now generally abandoned for the tornado and cyclone. The hurricane is still in popular use in the West Indies and is preferred by certain old- fashioned sea-captains.
Little mirrors were attached to the front of their cars, at which they glanced to see where they had been; then they stared ahead again. I had thought that only beetles had this delusion of Progress.
Science fiction still is an idea genre.
For quite a while I have set for myself the rule if a theoretician says ‘universal’ it just means pure nonsense.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. What are now working conceptions, employed as a matter of course because they have withstood the tests of experiment and have emerged triumphant, were once speculative hypotheses.
One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.
Among the great men who have philosophized about [the action of the tides], the one who surprised me most is Kepler. He was a person of independent genius, [but he] became interested in the action of the moon on the water, and in other occult phenomena, and similar childishness.
Science has helped us to understand and master ourselves, creating an elevated new form of human life, the wealth and beauty of which cannot be pictured today by the keenest imagination.
Mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches; scientists understand its branches but not its roots. Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but man needs both.
If the double helix was so important, how come you didn’t work on It? Ther husband, Linus Pauling, when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Crick, Watson and Wilkins.
[Chemistry] laboratory work was my first challenge. … I still carry the scars of my first discovery-that test-tubes are fragile.
Mathematics… is a bit like discovering oil. … But mathematics has one great advantage over oil, in that no one has yet … found a way that you can keep using the same oil forever.
Nothing is constant but change! All existence is a perpetual flux of “being and becoming!” That is the broad lesson of the evolution of the world.
Life is the mode of action of proteins.
Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago, but it is put to better use.
Let us begin to understand the argument.
There is a solution to everything: Science.
There is a solution to everything: Science.
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.
Truth is a tyrant-the only tyrant to whom we can give our allegiance. The service of truth is a matter of heroism.
It cannot be that axioms established by argumentation should avail for the discovery of new works, since the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument. But axioms duly and orderly formed from particulars easily discover the way to new particulars, and thus render sciences active.
Publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.
Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over – except when they are different.
One good thing about my computer: it never asks why.
It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.
Remember how quickly our field [computer science] changes. That’s why you want to focus on learning things that don’t change: how to work well with other people, how to carefully assess a client’s real – as opposed to perceived – needs, and things like that.
If the expansion of the space of the universe is uniform in all directions, an observer located in anyone of the galaxies will see all other galaxies running away from him at velocities proportional to their distances from the observer.
The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.
As soon as any one belongs to a narrow creed in science, every unprejudiced and true perception is gone.
The intellectuals’ chief cause of anguish are one another’s works.
Once you have learned to ask questions – relevant and appropriate and substantial questions – you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.
Science is our only hope to be the ‘Holy Rope’ tying man to the existence.
There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you ever meet your antiself, don’t shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light.
That is the danger we now face. And this is why the intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history, and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest.
Science is our century’s art.
True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.
I’m not saying I’m gonna change the world, but I guarantee that I will spark the brain that will change the world.
The Method of Bisection is a sophisticated version of a tool used in fifth grade called “Guess and Check”.
Art includes everything which stimulates the desire to live; science includes everything which sharpens the desire to know. Art, even the most disinterested, the most disembodied, is the auxiliary of life.
Fashion is the science of appearance, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.
It is more important to know the properties of chlorine than the improprieties of Claudius!
Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.
The teacher manages to get along still with the cumbersome algebraic analysis, in spite of its difficulties and imperfections, and avoids the smooth infinitesimal calculus, although the eighteenth century shyness toward it had long lost all point.
Science should be on tap, not on top.
Theorists tend to peak at an early age; the creative juices tend to gush very early and start drying up past the age of fifteen-or so it seems. They need to know just enough; when they’re young they haven’t accumulated the intellectual baggage.
USA Today has come out with a new survey – apparently, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population.
Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view.
To unfold the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matured, is a object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind.
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.
People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones.
To my deep mortification my father once said to me, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”
The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest where all human things … have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower.
Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn’t even nothing or once.
There are very few theorems in advanced analysis which have been demonstrated in a logically tenable manner. Everywhere one finds this miserable way of concluding from the special to the general and it is extremely peculiar that such a procedure has led to so few of the so-called paradoxes.
Universe is blind; it cannot see us; we must find a way to show ourselves to it and science is the way to open the eyes of the universe!
Only those works which are well-written will pass to posterity: the amount of knowledge, the uniqueness of the facts, even the novelty of the discoveries are no guarantees of immortality … These things are exterior to a man but style is the man himself.
When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, that is the heart of science.
We can invent as many theories we like, and any one of them can be made to fit the facts. But that theory is always preferred which makes the fewest number of assumptions.
The human mind has first to construct forms, independently, before we can find them in things.
It is the unqualified result of all my experience with the sick that, second only to their need of fresh air, is their need of light; that, after a close room, what hurts them most is a dark room and that it is not only light but direct sunlight they want.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: 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.
All fresh meat is eaten in a state of decay. The process may not have proceeded so far that the dull human nose can discover it, but a carrion bird or a carrion fly can smell it from afar.
The sciences throw an inexpressible grace over our compositions, even where they are not immediately concerned; as their effects are discernible where we least expect to find them.
A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.
The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.
The fact remains that, if the supply of energy failed, modern civilization would come to an end as abruptly as does the music of an organ deprived of wind.
Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.
The resolution of revolutions is selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science. The net result of a sequence of such revolutionary selections, separated by periods of normal research, is the wonderfully adapted set of instruments we call modern scientific knowledge.
Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.
The word “impossible” is not a scientific term.
All we know of the truth is that the absolute truth, such as it is, is beyond our reach.
There is nothing new under the sun.
When entering on new ground we must not be afraid to express even risky ideas so as to stimulate research in all directions. As Priestley put it, we must not remain inactive through false modesty based on fear of being mistaken.
There are many worlds and many systems of Universes existing all at the same time, all of them perishable.
Modern science is predicated on ‘truths’ verified through accurate observation and measurements of physical world phenomena.
We must remain, in a word, in an intellectual disposition which seems paradoxical, but which, in my opinion, represents the true mind of the investigator. We must have a robust faith and yet not believe.
What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.
That reminds me to remark, in passing, that the very first official thing I did, in my administration-and it was on the first day of it, too-was to start a patent office; for I knew that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn’t travel any way but sideways or backways.
Mathematics is much less formally complete and precise than computer programs.
Science is prediction, not explanation.
Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all – that has been my religion.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.
A miracle is not the breaking of physical laws, but rather represents laws which are incomprehensible to us.
While nothing is more uncertain than a single life, nothing is more certain than the average duration of a thousand lives.
Economics is not an exact science. It’s a combination of an art and elements of science. And that’s almost the first and last lesson to be learned about economics: that in my judgment, we are not converging toward exactitude, but we’re improving our data bases and our ways of reasoning about them.
AB=1/4((A+B)^2-(A-B)^2) is an amazing identity, and unfortunately, I have to remind my current students how to prove it.
There are checks and balances in science. There’s somebody checking the people doing the science, and then there’s somebody who checks the checkers and somebody who checks the checker’s checkers.
Questions of personal priority, however interesting they may be to the persons concerned, sink into insignificance in the prospect of any gain of deeper insight into the secrets of nature.
A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
The only difference between elements and compounds consists in the supposed impossibility of proving the so-called elements to be compounds.
Thoughts can increase our understanding of a subject, or they can just as easily constrict or block our understanding of a subject. It very much depends upon the language we are thinking in.
The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines.
Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.
Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob’s ladder.
But I must confess I am jealous of the term atom; for though it is very easy to talk of atoms, it is very difficult to form a clear idea of their nature, especially when compounded bodies are under consideration.
The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data.
The cigar-box which the European calls a ‘lift’ needs but to be compared with our elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors. That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American elevator acts like a man’s patent purge-it works.
Jesus was the consummate scientist. He knew the omnipresence of Light which we have expressed in radio, radar and television, but all He could say in His day was: “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.”
The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dustcloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.
Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.
It is no part of a physician’s business to use either persuasion or compulsion upon the patients.
One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn’t fall.
In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us to making available what we are already acquainted with.
Organic chemistry is the study of organs; inorganic chemistry is the study of the insides of organs.
We lay there and looked up at the night sky and she told me about stars called blue squares and red swirls and I told her I’d never heard of them. Of course not, she said, the really important stuff they never tell you. You have to imagine it on your own.
Man, whose organization is regarded as the highest, departs from the vertebrate archetype; and it is because the study of anatomy is usually commenced from, and often confined to, his structure, that a knowledge of the archetype has been so long hidden from anatomists.
Perhaps you have seen me. I know well, my purpose was merely that of a symbol, ‘equals’, ‘times’… ; but what is said, for all that, was identity-less: a kind of live geometry.
Genius is supposed to be a power of producing excellences which are put of the reach of the rules of art: a power which no precepts can teach, and which no industry can acquire.
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
The city of Hiroshima stands as more than a monument to massive death and destruction. It stands as a living testament to the necessity for progress toward nuclear disarmament.
As scientists, we step on the shoulders of science, building on the work that has come before us – aiming to inspire a new generation of young scientists to continue once we are gone.
Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.
The pilots I worked with in the aerospace industry were willing to put on almost anything to keep them safe in case of a crash, but regular people in cars don’t want to be uncomfortable even for a minute.
Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics.
Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.
It is not possible to be ignorant of the end of things if we know their beginning.
The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.
The edifice of science not only requires material, but also a plan. Without the material, the plan alone is but a castle in the air-a mere possibility; whilst the material without a plan is but useless matter.
Almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method.
The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.
I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.
Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking.
When you see the natural and almost universal craving in English sick for their ‘tea,’ you cannot but feel that nature knows what she is about. … A little tea or coffee restores them. … There is nothing yet discovered which is a substitute to the English patient for his cup of tea.
How many wells of science there are in whose depths there is nothing but clear water!
Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.
The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to rethink our beliefs about the universe and our place in it.
Even the most scientific investigator in science, the most thoroughgoing Positivist, cannot dispense with fiction; he must at least make use of categories, and they are already fictions, analogical fictions, or labels, which give us the same pleasure as children receive when they are told the “name” of a thing.
Science can have a purifying effect on religion, freeing it from beliefs of a pre-scientific age and helping us to a truer conception of God. At the same time, I am far from believing that science will ever give us the answers to all our questions.
Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of the mind; the first is the capacity of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations (spontaneity [in the production] of concepts).
If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.
We cannot hope to either understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.
Poetry creates life; Science dissects death.
It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection.
Even in the dark times between experimental breakthroughs, there always continues a steady evolution of theoretical ideas, leading almost imperceptibly to changes in previous beliefs.
I am the thought you are now thinking.
Perspective is a most subtle discovery in mathematical studies, for by means of lines it causes to appear distant that which is near, and large that which is small.
Against filling the Heavens with fluid Mediums, unless they be exceeding rare, a great Objection arises from the regular and very lasting Motions of the Planets and Comets in all manner of Courses through the Heavens.
We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years.
Every new discovery of science is a further ‘revelation’ of the order which God has built into His universe.
When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.
I think that support of this [stem cell] research is a pro-life pro-family position. This research holds out hope for more than 100 million Americans.
A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.
There is a reference in Aristotle to a gnat produced by larvae engendered in the slime of vinegar. This must have been Drosophila.
A thesis has to be presentable… but don’t attach too much importance to it. If you do succeed in the sciences, you will do later on better things and then it will be of little moment. If you don’t succeed in the sciences, it doesn’t matter at all.
Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.
I like to think of mathematicians as forming a nation of our own without distinctions of geographical origin, race, creed, sex, age or even time… all dedicated to the most beautiful of the arts and sciences.
Today’s science is tomorrow’s technology.
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.
Science and art are the handmaids of religion.
Damn the Solar System. Bad light; planets too distant; pestered with comets; feeble contrivance; could make a better myself.
Our ignorance is God; what we know is science. When we abandon the doctrine that some infinite being created matter and force, and enacted a code of laws for their government … the real priest will then be, not the mouth-piece of some pretended deity, but the interpreter of nature.
Science increases our power in proportion as it lowers our pride.
What the use of P [the significance level] implies, therefore, is that a hypothesis that may be true may be rejected because it has not predicted observable results that have not occurred.
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
Do you remember how electrical currents and ‘unseen waves’ were laughed at? The knowledge about man is still in its infancy.
Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.
I am convinced, by repeated observation, that marbles, lime-stones, chalks, marls, clays, sand, and almost all terrestrial substances, wherever situated, are full of shells and other spoils of the ocean.
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
Sir Humphrey Davy Abominated gravy. He lived in the odium Of having discovered sodium. Said to have been written as a schoolboy during a chemistry class at St. Paul’s School.
The man of science is a poor philosopher.
The chances of Israeli science competing with big American science are small. For almost 15 years, we had no competition.
There is nothing that can be said by mathematical symbols and relations which cannot also be said by words. The converse, however, is false. Much that can be and is said by words cannot successfully be put into equations, because it is nonsense.
We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.
Within a hundred years of physical and chemical science, men will know what the atom is. It is my belief when science reaches this stage, God will come down to earth with His big ring of keys and will say to humanity, ‘Gentlemen, it is closing time.’
My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school, So? Did you learn anything today? But not my mother. Izzy, she would say, did you ask a good question today? That difference – asking good questions – made me become a scientist.
We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that “we choose death.”
[The blame for the future ‘plight of civilization] must rest on scientific men, equally with others, for being incapable of accepting the responsibility for the profound social upheavals which their own work primarily has brought about in human relationships.
The average human has one breast and one testicle.
Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand… So Greek mathematics is ‘permanent’, more permanent even than Greek literature.
SCIENCE! thou fair effusive ray
From the great source of mental Day,
Free, generous, and refin’d!
Descend with all thy treasures fraught,
Illumine each bewilder’d thought,
And bless my labour’g mind.
From the great source of mental Day,
Free, generous, and refin’d!
Descend with all thy treasures fraught,
Illumine each bewilder’d thought,
And bless my labour’g mind.
The frying pan you should give to your enemy. Food should not be prepared in fat. Our bodies are adapted to a stone age diet of roots and vegetables.
The people – could you patent the sun ?
One might talk about the sanity of the atom the sanity of space the sanity of the electron the sanity of water- For it is all alive and has something comparable to that which we call sanity in ourselves. The only oneness is the oneness of sanity.
The body of the earth is of the nature of a fish… because it draws water as its breath instead of air.
There were details like clothing, hair styles and the fragile objects that hardly ever survive for the archaeologist-musical instruments, bows and arrows, and body ornaments depicted as they were worn… No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely
It is not possible for form to do without matter because it is not separable, nor can matter itself be purged of form.
You’re basically killing each other to see who’s got the better imaginary friend.
The high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.
There is no result in nature without a cause; understand the cause and you will have no need of the experiment.
One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion.
The method of political science is the interpretation of life; its instrument is insight, a nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.
What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
[All phenomena] are equally susceptible of being calculated, and all that is necessary, to reduce the whole of nature to laws similar to those which Newton discovered with the aid of the calculus, is to have a sufficient number of observations and a mathematics that is complex enough.
Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.
Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences because by means of it one comes to the fruits of mathematics.
It is very difficult to say nowadays where the suburbs of London come to an end and where the country begins. The railways, instead of enabling Londoners to live in the country have turned the countryside into a city.
Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.
If the greenhouse effect is a blanket in which we wrap ourselves to keep warm, nuclear winter kicks the blanket off.
It would be as useless to perceive how things ‘actually look’ as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.
Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.
If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
Electronic calculators can solve problems which the man who made them cannot solve; but no government-subsidized commission of engineers and physicists could create a worm.
I don’t know whether guys are more promiscuous or just bigger liars.
That no generally applicable law of the formulation and development of hybrids has yet been successfully formulated can hardly astonish anyone who is acquainted with the extent of the task and who can appreciate the difficulties with which experiments of this kind have to contend.
Every year the inventions of science weave more inextricably the web that binds man to man, group to group, nation to nation.
Many ‘hard’ scientists regard the term ‘social science’ as an oxymoron. Science means hypotheses you can test, and prove or disprove. Social science is little more than observation putting on airs.
To us investigators, the concept ‘soul’ is irrelevant and a matter for laughter. But matter is an abstraction of exactly the same kind, just as good and just as bad as it is. We know as much about the soul as we do of matter.
To be a Naturalist is better than to be a King.
Each metal has a certain power, which is different from metal to metal, of setting the electric fluid in motion.
The valuable attributes of research men are conscious ignorance and active curiosity.
The modern tradition of equating death with an ensuing nothingness can be abandoned. For there is no reason to believe that human death severs the quality of the oneness in the universe.
Your center of mass is a place you cannot visit but you always carry with you. Like memories, it is part of life’s baggage.
It’s much more effective to allow solutions to problems to emerge from the people close to the problem rather than to impose them from higher up.
We didn’t set out to be educators or even scientists, and we don’t purport that what we do is real science but we’re demonstrating a methodology by which one can engage and satisfy your curiosity.
I am almost inclined to coin a word and call the appearance fluorescence, from fluor-spar, as the analogous term opalescence is derived from the name of a mineral.
Physics isn’t a religion. If it were, we’d have a much easier time raising money.
It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.
In my personal view, a failure to discover unimagined objects and answer unasked questions, once HST functions properly, would indicate a lack of imagination in stocking the Universe on the part of the Deity.
The first mark of intelligence, to be sure, is not to start things; the second mark of intelligence is to pursue to the end what you have started.
Nature does not suffer her veil to be taken from her, and what she does not choose to reveal to the spirit, thou wilt not wrest from her by levers and screws.
I often say that research is a way of finding out what you are going to do when you can’t keep on doing what you are doing now.
The final discovery is the discovery of knowledge.
The philosopher of science is not much interested in the thought processes which lead to scientific discoveries; he looks for a logical analysis of the completed theory, including the establishing its validity. That is, he is not interested in the context of discovery, but in the context of justification.
The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply.
Without analysis, no synthesis.
Medical scientists are nice people, but you should not let them treat you.
Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.
If we wish to make a new world we have the material ready. The first one, too, was made out of chaos.
The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.
The ocean … like the air, is the common birth-right of mankind.
The fact is the physical chemists never use their eyes and are most lamentably lacking in chemical culture. It is essential to cast out from our midst, root and branch, this physical element and return to our laboratories.
Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.
Snicker on hearing his name: ‘the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.’
Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd [should] be forestalled … I never saw a more striking coincidence. If Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters.
Good people are seldom fully recognised during their lifetimes, and here, there are serious problems of corruption. One day it will be realised that my findings should have been acknowledged. It was difficult, but she always smiled when asked why she went on when recognition eluded her in her own country.
It is a common observation that a science first begins to be exact when it is quantitatively treated. What are called the exact sciences are no others than the mathematical ones.
At Tencent, we may be businessmen, but we are still chasing our IT, our science. We are still striving to create something really cool, trying to create things we couldn’t even imagine without our new technologies. I am still clinging to this enthusiasm.
Electrical science has revealed to us the true nature of light, has provided us with innumerable appliances and instruments of precision, and has thereby vastly added to the exactness of our knowledge.
Nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order.
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day!
Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.
Thinking is seeing…. Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.
Dentist: a prestidigitator who, putting metal into your mouth, pulls coin out of your pocket.
The science of the mind can only have for its proper goal the understanding of human nature by every human being, and through its use, brings peace to every human soul.
Science has but one fashion-to lose nothing once gained.
A visitor to Niels Bohr’s country cottage, noticing a horseshoe hanging on the wall, teasing the eminent scientist about this ancient superstition. “Can it be true that you, of all people, believe it will bring you luck?’
‘Of course not,’ replied Bohr, ‘but I understand it brings you luck whether you believe it or not.’
‘Of course not,’ replied Bohr, ‘but I understand it brings you luck whether you believe it or not.’
I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.
Science to me is sufficiently weird and interesting, and stranger than fiction.
Philosophy became a gloomy science, in the labyrinth of which people vainly tried to find the exit, called The Truth.
An irrefutable proof that such single-celled primaeval animals really existed as the direct ancestors of Man, is furnished according to the fundamental law of biogeny by the fact that the human egg is nothing more than a simple cell.
We especially need imagination in science.
There can never be two or more equivalent electrons in an atom, for which in a strong field the values of all the quantum numbers n, k1, k2 and m are the same. If an electron is present, for which these quantum numbers (in an external field) have definite values, then this state is ‘occupied.’
The only bit of logic-based public bathroom humor I know is: the difference between men and women is that between the statement [P and not Q] and the statement [Q and not P].
The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.
In Plato’s opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon’s opinion, philosophy was made for man.
History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
Linnaeus had it constantly in mind:’The closer we get to know the creatures around us, the clearer is the understanding we obtain of the chain of nature, and its harmony and system, according to which all things appear to have been created.’
We cannot take one step in geology without drawing upon the fathomless stores of by-gone time.
Whenever you can, count.
I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.
Dogbert: Scientists have discovered the gene that makes some people love golf.
Dilbert: How can they tell it’s the golf gene?
Dogbert: It’s plaid and it lies.
Dilbert: How can they tell it’s the golf gene?
Dogbert: It’s plaid and it lies.
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
His [Erwin SchrГ¶dinger’s] private life seemed strange to bourgeois people like ourselves. But all this does not matter. He was a most lovable person, independent, amusing, temperamental, kind and generous, and he had a most perfect and efficient brain.
I think that the discovery of antimatter was perhaps the biggest jump of all the big jumps in physics in our century.
[Science doesn’t deal with facts; indeed] fact is an emotion-loaded word for which there is little place in scientific debate.
Then we’ll work a hundred years without physics and chemistry.
Some gifted adventurer is always sailing round the world of art and science, to bring home costly merchandise from every port.
The history of science is a record of the transformations of contempts amd amusements.
I don’t think the science is clear of what percentage is man-made and what percentage is natural. It’s convoluted, for the people to say the science is decided on this is really arrogant, to be honest with you.
A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.
I looked for it [heavy hydrogen, deuterium] because I thought it should exist. I didn’t know it would have industrial applications or be the basic for the most powerful weapon ever known [the nuclear bomb] … I thought maybe my discovery might have the practical value of, say, neon in neon signs.
A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.
All things that come into being and grow are earth and water.
Do not Bodies and Light act mutually upon one another; that is to say, Bodies upon Light in emitting, reflecting, refracting and inflecting it, and Light upon Bodies for heating them, and putting their parts into a vibrating motion wherein heat consists?
Science knows no politics. Are we in this frenzy of [the Depression] economy, brought about by those who control the wealth of this country, seeking to put a barrier on science and research for the paltry sum of $39,113 out of an appropriation of $100,000,000?
As true as steel, as plantage to the moon,
As sun to day, at turtle to her mate,
As iron to adamant, as earth to centre.
As sun to day, at turtle to her mate,
As iron to adamant, as earth to centre.
Science is composed of laws which were originally based on a small, carefully selected set of observations, often not very accurately measured originally; but the laws have later been found to apply over much wider ranges of observations and much more accurately than the original data justified.
Great triumphs of engineering genius-the locomotive, the truss bridge, the steel rail- … are rather invention than engineering proper.
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, that one small head could carry all he knew.
It is the rule which says that the other rules of scientific procedure must be designed in such a way that they do not protect any statement in science against falsification.
The scientist knows that the ultimate of everything is unknowable. No matter What subject you take, the current theory of it if carried to the ultimate becomes ridiculous. Time and space are excellent examples of this.
It’s a lazy Saturday afternoon, there’s a couple lying naked in bed reading Encyclopediea Brittannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more ‘numinous’ than the Ressurection. Do they know how to have a good time, or don’t they?
A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.
The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience
Gin a body meet a body
Flyin’ through the air,
Gin a body hit a body,
Will it fly? and where?
Flyin’ through the air,
Gin a body hit a body,
Will it fly? and where?
Sedimentation in the past has often been very rapid indeed and very spasmodic. This may be called the “Phenomenon of the Catastrophic Nature of the Stratigraphical Record.”
Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness [all-at-once-ness]. ‘Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global village … a simultaneous happening. … The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
In political science, public support doesn’t have a reverse gear. It always goes forward.
The advance of scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our inner life in it any less mysterious.
There is nothing more certain in nature than that it is impossible for any body to be utterly annihilated.
Long intervals frequently elapse between the discovery of new principles in science and their practical application… Those intellectual qualifications, which give birth to new principles or to new methods, are of quite a different order from those which are necessary for their practical application.
The modern naturalist must realize that in some of its branches his profession, while more than ever a science, has also become an art.
It is reasonable to expect the doctor to recognize that science may not have all the answers to problems of health and healing.
He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.
There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it.
The Sun is a mass of fiery stone, a little larger than Greece.
Geology holds the keys of one of the kingdoms of nature; and it cannot be said that a science which extends our Knowledge, and by consequence our Power, over a third part of nature, holds a low place among intellectual employments.
I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.
Don’t confuse hypothesis and theory. The former is a possible explanation; the latter, the correct one. The establishment of theory is the very purpose of science.
The virtues of science are skepticism and independence of thought.
‘Time’s noblest offspring is the last.’ This line of Bishop Berkeley’s expresses the real cause of the belief in progress in the animal creation.
I am keen to serve one-sixth of the world’s population where the miracles of science and technology would multiply manifold for betterment of mankind.
When the physicists ask us for the solution of a problem, it is not drudgery that they impose on us, on the contrary, it is us who owe them thanks.
The accumulation of skill and science which has been directed to diminish the difficulty of producing manufactured goods, has not been beneficial to that country alone in which it is concentrated; distant kingdoms have participated in its advantages.
Combinatorial analysis, in the trivial sense of manipulating binomial and multinomial coefficients, and formally expanding powers of infinite series by applications ad libitum and ad nauseamque of the multinomial theorem, represented the best that academic mathematics could do in the Germany of the late 18th century.
This knot of nature is so well tied that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends.
We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, or spirit, or poetry,–a narrow belt.
Proof, one might say, does not merely shew that it is like this, but: how it is like this. It shows how 13+14 yield 27.
I don’t believe medical discoveries are doing much to advance human life. As fast as we create ways to extend it we are inventing ways to shorten it.
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.
Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing.
The scientific tradition is distinguished from the pre-scientific tradition by having two layers. Like the latter, it passes on its theories; but it also passes on a critical attitude towards them.
To my mind, the most important aspect of the Nobel Awards is that they bring home to the masses of the peoples of all nations, a realization of their common interests. They carry to those who have no direct contact with science the international spirit.
Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!
It is not a Pandora’s box that science opens; it is, rather, a treasure chest. We, humanity, can choose whether or not to take out the discoveries and use them, and for what purpose.
The reproduction of mankind is a great marvel and mystery. Had God consulted me in the matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning them out of clay.
I am not accustomed to saying anything with certainty after only one or two observations.
You must all know about Bourgain, so I don’t have to write his name on the board-for an obvious reason.
It is easier to understand mankind in general than any individual man.
Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
Some men grow mad by studying much to know,
But who grows mad by studying good to grow.
But who grows mad by studying good to grow.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I’m looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.
In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.
Error held as truth has much the effect of truth. In politics and religion this fact upsets many confident predictions.
The scientist believes in proof without certainty.
Philosophy is that part of science which at present people chose to have opinions about, but which they have no knowledge about. Therefore every advance in knowledge robs philosophy of some problems which formerly it had …and will belong to science.
If you want to see the real Saints, don’t go to the Temples of the Religion, but go to the Temples of the Science!
You must not talk about ‘ain’t and can’t’ when you speak of this great wonderful world round you, of which the wisest man knows only the very smallest corner, and is, as the great Sir Isaac Newton said, only a child picking up pebbles on the shore of a boundless ocean.
The aims of pure basic science, unlike those of applied science, are neither fast-flowing nor pragmatic. The quick harvest of applied science is the useable process, the medicine, the machine. The shy fruit of pure science is understanding.
Electronic communication is an instantaneous and illusory contact that creates a sense of intimacy without the emotional investment that leads to close friendships.
It is the facts that matter, not the proofs. Physics can progress without the proofs, but we can’t go on without the facts … if the facts are right, then the proofs are a matter of playing around with the algebra correctly.
And as I had my father’s kind of mind-which was also his mother’s-I learned that the mind is not sex-typed.
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
The man who doesn’t know what the universe is doesn’t know where he lives.
…the source of all great mathematics is the special case, the concrete example. It is frequent in mathematics that every instance of a concept of seemingly generality is, in essence, the same as a small and concrete special case.
It is now conceivable that our children’s children will know the term cancer only as a constellation of stars.
A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.
Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.
For [Richard] Feynman, the essence of the scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule. What scientists create must match reality. It must match what is already known. Scientific creativity is imagination in a straitjacket.
Scientific progress is the discovery of a more and more comprehensive simplicity… The previous successes give us confidence in the future of science: we become more and more conscious of the fact that the universe is cognizable.
“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice. “I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light.”
University politics make me long for the simplicity of the Middle East.
Always try to innovate. If you lose your old fitness, you lose out to Bose-Einstein condensation. I am sure that companies that go under would feel better if they knew that they were victims of Bose-Einstein condensation.
The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn’t matter.
A mathematician experiments, amasses information, makes a conjecture, finds out that it does not work, gets confused and then tries to recover. A good mathematician eventually does so – and proves a theorem.
There is an old maxim that says that two empires that are too large will collapse. The analog in set theory is that two different theories that are too powerful must necessarily contradict each other.
[I was advised] to read Jordan’s ‘Cours d’analyse’; and I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what mathematics really meant.
I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.
I was in analysis. I was suicidal. As a matter of fact, I would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian and if you kill yourself they make you pay for the sessions you miss.
I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating, but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us. Perhaps we shall have to colonise the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there.
Mind is not simply the collection of aggregate cells inside your brain. If you are only the grey matter, then when that dies, you won’t exist any more. It’s not that easy. You exist forever.
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform… But it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself.
The soft power of science has the potential to reshape global diplomacy.
What I thought was unreal now, for me, seems in some ways to be more real than what I think to be real, which seems now to be unreal
And if doctor says that you don’t have IBS with constipation, you might want to get a second opinion, because I had doctors that were telling me… of course, a lot of this has to do with science – progressing.
From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It’s not a miracle; we just decided to go.
I had rather be Mercury, the smallest among seven [planets], revolving round the sun, than the first among five [moons] revolving round Saturn.
Hereafter we shall be compelled to acknowledge that the only distinction between species and well-marked varieties is, that the latter are known, or believed to be connected at the present day by intermediate gradations whereas species were formerly thus connected.
It is only to the individual that a soul is given.
Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology – looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.
The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded.
Life is not an exact science, it is an art.
This, however, seems to be certain: the ichor, that is, the material I have mentioned that finally becomes red, exists before the heart begins to beat, but the heart exists and even beats before the blood reddens.
We must care to think about the unthinkable things, because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.
Astronomy is one of the sublimest fields of human investigation. The mind that grasps its facts and principles receives something of the enlargement and grandeur belonging to the science itself. It is a quickener of devotion.
We may indeed live yet to see, or at least we may feel some confidence that those who come after us will see, such bodies as oxygen and hydrogen in the liquid, perhaps even in the solid state, and the question of their metallic or non-metallic nature thereby finally settled.
It seems to me there’s this grand mathematical world out there, and I am wandering through it and discovering fascinating phenomena that often totally suprise me. I do not think of mathemaatics as invented but rather discovered.
Science explained people, but could not understand them. After long centuries among the bones and muscles it might be advancing to knowledge of the nerves, but this would never give understanding
Which is the best religion? […] The religion that brings you closest to God.
But anything that can be called “rigor” is lost exactly where the things become interesting and non trivial.
The ocean is not just blank blue space but rather the habitat for amazing wildlife, and we have to take care how we use it. If we want to keep having the goods and services it provides, we have to treat it more carefully in terms of fishing and dumping.
It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers.
To put it crudely but graphically, the monkey who did not have a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a dead monkey-and therefore did not become one of our ancestors.
Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?
The names of the plants ought to be stable [certa], consequently they should be given to stable genera.
The divergent series are the invention of the devil, and it is a shame to base on them any demonstration whatsoever. By using them, one may draw any conclusion he pleases and that is why these series have produced so many fallacies and so many paradoxes.
From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.
All the fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to answer the question, “What are light quanta?” Of course today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself.
The object of science is knowledge; the objects of art are works. In art, truth is the means to an end; in science, it is the only end. Hence the practical arts are not to be classed among the sciences
Science has been seriously retarded by the study of what is not worth knowing and of what is not knowable.
There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.
It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man – social and political – and to the entire universe as a whole.
The physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses.
They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work.
[An engineer’s] invention causes things to come into existence from ideas, makes world conform to thought; whereas science, by deriving ideas from observation, makes thought conform to existence.
A categorization implies a hierarchical way of seeing things. Life is really relational, not hierarchical. Hierarchical is a human way of looking at things. Relational is much more the way things are. Everything is connected.
If necessity is the mother of invention, scientifically developed production is the mother of scientific research.
In science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it. … In art nothing worth doing can be done without genius; in science even a very moderate capacity can contribute to a supreme achievement.
Perhaps the only thing that saves science from invalid conventional wisdom that becomes effectively permanent is the presence of mavericks in every generation – people who keep challenging convention and thinking up new ideas for the sheer hell of it or from an innate contrariness.
Neither is there a smallest part of what is small, but there is always a smaller (for it is impossible that what is should cease to be). Likewise there is always something larger than what is large.
To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness.
As geology is essentially a historical science, the working method of the geologist resembles that of the historian. This makes the personality of the geologist of essential importance in the way he analyzes the past.
Trying to capture the physicists’ precise mathematical description of the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catcher’s mitt on the other.
I used to say: “Everything is Representation Theory”. Now I say: “Nothing is Representation Theory”.
Unfortunately what is little recognized is that the most worthwhile scientific books are those in which the author clearly indicates what he does not know; for an author most hurts his readers by concealing difficulties.
He that in ye mine of knowledge deepest diggeth, hath, like every other miner, ye least breathing time, and must sometimes at least come to terr. alt. for air.
I’d be perfectly happy with a mathematically precise description of how time began. I see science and religion as being two completely different things. I don’t see science as relevant to the question of whether or not there’s a God.
I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our “creations,” are simply the notes of our observations.
True greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier-when it’s spelled with a lower case letter.
In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Therefore, O students, study mathematics and do not build without foundations.
The northern ocean is beautiful, … and beautiful the delicate intricacy of the snowflake before it melts and perishes, but such beauties are as nothing to him who delights in numbers, spurning alike the wild irrationality of life and baffling complexity of nature’s laws.
One naturally asks, what was the use of this great engine set at work ages ago to grind, furrow, and knead over, as it were, the surface of the earth? We have our answer in the fertile soil which spreads over the temperate regions of the globe. The glacier was God’s great plough.
Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.
Don’t talk me about religion! Don’t talk me about tales for children! Be serious! Trust science, because only the science can save you!
Toil of science swells the wealth of art.
To me, fantasy has always been the genre of escape, science fiction the genre of ideas. So if you can escape and have a little idea as well, maybe you have some kind of a cross-breed between the two.
When you think about something, you separate yourself from it.
We seem to be heading for a state of affairs in which the determination of whether or not Doomsday has arrived will be made either by an automatic device … or by a pre-programmed president who, whether he knows it or not, will be carrying out orders written years before by some operations analyst.
The animal frame, though destined to fulfill so many other ends, is as a machine more perfect than the best contrived steam-engine-that is, is capable of more work with the same expenditure of fuel.
Earth has few secrets from the birds.
Being the most striking manifestation of the art of metal structures by which our engineers have shown in Europe, it [the Eiffel Tower] is one of the most striking of our modern national genius.
It is possible for science to make the world like the Garden of Eden! Amen. But it is also possible, and sometimes it seems more probable, that science will make the world a very good imitation of hell.
Looking ahead, I believe that the underlying importance of higher education, of science, of technology, of research and scholarship to our quality of life, to the strength of our economy, to our security in many dimensions will continue to be the most important message.
Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.
Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.
Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.
If you understand something, you understand that it is obvious.
I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.
The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home.
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Unfortunately, in many cases, people who write science fiction violate the laws of nature, not because they want to make a point, but because they don’t know what the laws of nature are.
If we would serve science, we must extend her limits, not only as far as our own knowledge is concerned, but in the estimation of others.
There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]
What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us.
Nothing can be sworn impossible since Zeus made night during mid-day, hiding the light of the shining Sun.
I like people. I like animals, too-whales and quail, dinosaurs and dodos. But I like human beings especially, and I am unhappy that the pool of human germ plasm, which determines the nature of the human race, is deteriorating.
No isolated experiment, however significant in itself, can suffice for the experimental demonstration of any natural phenomenon; for the “one chance in a million” will undoubtedly occur, with no less and no more than its appropriate frequency, however surprised we may be that it should occur to us.
We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
No great advance has been made in science, politics, or religion without controversy.
In fact, we will have to give up taking things for granted, even the apparently simple things. We have to learn to understand nature and not merely to observe it and endure what it imposes on us. Stupidity, from being an amiable individual defect, has become a social crime.
A vast technology has been developed to prevent, reduce, or terminate exhausting labor and physical damage. It is now dedicated to the production of the most trivial conveniences and comfort.
Above all things expand the frontiers of science: without this the rest counts for nothing.
Science is organized knowledge.
However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson; nothing is impossible.
Thinkers perish, thoughts don’t.
But he who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine. If he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal.
Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.
Love is like Pi: natural, irrational, and very important.
Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.
Religion is a bell jar; you cannot find God in that jar, because it is your bell jar, you have created it! Break the glass prison and get fresh air, elevate your intelligence! Wake up and open your eyes; see the truth beyond your prison! If you can’t break the glass, don’t worry; science will do it for you!
[Newton wrote to Halley … that he would not give Hooke any credit] That, alas, is vanity. You find it in so many scientists. You know, it has always hurt me to think that Galileo did not acknowledge the work of Kepler.
Do experimental work but keep in mind that other investigators in the same field will consider your discoveries as less than one fourth as important as they seem to you.
Simplification of modes of proof is not merely an indication of advance in our knowledge of a subject, but is also the surest guarantee of readiness for farther progress.
God may exist, but science can explain the universe without the need for a creator.
Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention writing has transformed human consciousness.
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Religion is the servant of the vanishing; science, of the existence! Disappearance belongs to the chaos and the Devil; existence, to the God!
If you’ve read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can’t help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I’ve gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.
The kitchen’s a laboratory, and everything that happens there has to do with science. It’s biology, chemistry, physics. Yes, there’s history. Yes, there’s artistry. Yes, to all of that. But what happened there, what actually happens to the food is all science.
People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
The secret of science is to ask the right question, and it is the choice of problem more than anything else that marks the man of genius in the scientific world.
For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts.
We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. … This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object’s sole reason for living.
She [Chien-Shiung Wu] is a slave driver. She is the image of the militant woman so well known in Chinese literature as either empress or mother.
Trace Science, then, with Modesty thy guide,
First strip off all her equipage of Pride,
Deduct what is but Vanity or Dress,
Or Learning’s Luxury or idleness,
Or tricks, to show the stretch of the human brain
Mere curious pleasure or ingenious pain.
First strip off all her equipage of Pride,
Deduct what is but Vanity or Dress,
Or Learning’s Luxury or idleness,
Or tricks, to show the stretch of the human brain
Mere curious pleasure or ingenious pain.
Through radio I look forward to a United States of the World. Radio is standardizing the peoples of the Earth, English will become the universal language because it is predominantly the language of the ether. The most important aspect of radio is its sociological influence. (1926)
Excusing bad programming is a shooting offence, no matter what the circumstances.
There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry… There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.
Society lives by faith, and develops by science.
This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.
Life is the twofold internal movement of composition and decomposition at once general and continuous.
Each species may have had its origin in a single pair, or individual, where an individual was sufficient, and species may have been created in succession at such times and in such places as to enable them to multiply and endure for an appointed period, and occupy an appointed space on the globe.
FROG, n. A reptile with edible legs
What, more petitions! Won’t you be, and stay, intimidated? You must really annoy Sen. Dodd. Here it is [my signature], and I hope it does some good.
When forced to summarize the general theory of relativity in one sentence: Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter.
We must teach science in the mother tongue. Otherwise, science will become a highbrow activity. It will not be an activity in which all people can participate.
There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think.
Arts and sciences in one and the same century have arrived at great perfection; and no wonder, since every age has a kind of universal genius, which inclines those that live in it to some particular studies; the work then, being pushed on by many hands, must go forward.
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
The six thousand years of human history form but a portion of the geologic day that is passing over us: they do not extend into the yesterday of the globe, far less touch the myriads of ages spread out beyond.
Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience.
Regardless of communication between man and man, speech is a necessary condition for the thinking of the individual in solitary seclusion. In appearance, however, language develops only socially, and man understands himself only once he has tested the intelligibility of his words by trial upon others.
As Bertrand Russell once wrote, two plus two is four even in the interior of the sun.
For whatever reason, I didn’t succumb to the stereotype that science wasn’t for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.
So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the Chancellors of God.
Learning is like mercury, one of the most powerful and excellent things in the world in skillful hands; in unskillful, the most mischievous.
It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.
Sciences may be learned by rote, but wisdom not.
Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.
[W.H.R.] Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology; I shall be the Conrad.
The region of the mysterious is rapidly shrinking.
Globalisation means many other countries are asserting themselves and trying to take over leadership. Please don’t ask Americans to let others assume the leadership of human exploration. We can do wonderful science on the Moon, and wonderful commercial things. Then we can pack up and move on to Mars.
Man follows only phantoms.
We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.
All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.
Scientific research was much like prospecting: you went out and you hunted, armed with your maps and instruments, but in the ened your preparations did not matter, or even your intuition. You needed your luck, and whatever benefits accrued to the diligent, through sheer, grinding hard work.
The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth.
More and more of out colleagues fail to understand our work because of the high specialization of research problems. We must not be discouraged if the products of our labor are not read or even known to exist. The joy of research must be found in doing since every other harvest is uncertain.
Through our scientific and technological genius we’ve made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers-or we will all perish together as fools.
If I make a decision it is a possession. I take pride in it, I tend to defend it and not listen to those who question it. If I make sense, then this is more dynamic, and I listen and I can change it. A decision is something you polish. Sensemaking is a direction for the next period.
Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.
The brain is a three pound mass you can hold in your hand that can conceive of a universe a hundred billion light-years across.
Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.
What chemists took from Dalton was not new experimental laws but a new way of practicing chemistry (he himself called it the ‘new system of chemical philosophy’), and this proved so rapidly fruitful that only a few of the older chemists in France and Britain were able to resist it.
I don’t believe in mathematics.
Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian.
Phylogeny and ontogeny are, therefore, the two coordinated branches of morphology. Phylogeny is the developmental history [Entwickelungsgeschichte] of the abstract, genealogical individual; ontogeny, on the other hand, is the developmental history of the concrete, morphological individual.
…nature seems very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics, as our own mathematicians have formulated them in their studies, out of their own inner consciousness and without drawing to any appreciable extent on their experience of the outer world.
Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.
Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.
The telescope sweeps the sky without finding God.
When I investigate and when I discover that the forces of the heavens and the planets are within ourselves, then truly I seem to be living among the gods.
[About Pierre de Fermat] It cannot be denied that he has had many exceptional ideas, and that he is a highly intelligent man. For my part, however, I have always been taught to take a broad overview of things, in order to be able to deduce from them general rules, which might be applicable elsewhere.
It will be contributing to bring forward the moment in which, seeing clearer into the nature of things, and having learnt to distinguish real knowledge from what has only the appearance of it, we shall be led to seek for exactness in every thing.
It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms.
The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.
America faces many challenges…but the enemy I fear most is complacency. We are about to be hit by the full force of global competition. If we continue to ignore the obvious task at hand while others beat us at our own game, our children and grandchildren will pay the price. We must now establish a sense of urgency.
…I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think there is an eminently important difference.
I am among those who think that science has great beauty.
It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.
Scientists are human-they’re as biased as any other group. But they do have one great advantage in that science is a self-correcting process.
I’m sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.
Computer science inverts the normal. In normal science, you’re given a world, and your job is to find out the rules. In computer science, you give the computer the rules, and it creates the world.
The male has more teeth than the female in mankind, and sheep and goats, and swine. This has not been observed in other animals. Those persons which have the greatest number of teeth are the longest lived; those which have them widely separated, smaller, and more scattered, are generally more short lived.
The two fulcra of medicine are reason and observation. Observation is the clue to guide the physician in his thinking.
Water is the most precious, limited natural resource we have in this country…But because water belongs to no one – except the people – special interests, including government polluters, use it as their private sewers.
I’ve always been on a quest to use science in an artful way.
science never threatens God – it opens up more possibilities.
The universe, as we see it, is the result of regularly working forces, having a causal connection with each other and therefore capable of being understood by human reason.
The principal result of my investigation is that a uniform developmental principle controls the individual elementary units of all organisms, analogous to the finding that crystals are formed by the same laws in spite of the diversity of their forms.
The great Sir Isaac Newton, He once made a valid proclamation, That the forces equal to a nominated mass, when multiplied by acceleration That was the law of motion.
I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.
The process of scientific discovery is, in effect, a continual flight from wonder.
The spending in science and technology need to be to increased.
But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn’t be imagined without it.
The energy available for each individual man is his income, and the philosophy which can teach him to be content with penury should be capable of teaching him also the uses of wealth.
Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?
There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.
Mathematics is the key and door to the sciences.
Dogbert: So, Since Columbus is dead, you have no evidence that the earth is round. Dilbert: Look. You can Ask Senator John Glenn. He orbited the earth when he was an astronaut. Dogbert: So, your theory depends on the honesty of politicians. Dilbert: Yes… no, wait.
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?
Chaotic mathematics is essentially the study of chaos. It can’t be chaos, if you can study it and it has an order.
Homologue. The same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function.
Entropy theory, on the other hand, is not concerned with the probability of succession in a series of items but with the overall distribution of kinds of items in a given arrangement.
Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.
What quantum physics teaches us is that everything we thought was physical is not physical.
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.
It appears to me that those who rely simply on the weight of authority to prove any assertion, without searching out the arguments to support it, act absurdly. I wish to question freely and to answer freely without any sort of adulation. That well becomes any who are sincere in the search for truth.
Today, in directly harnessing the power of the Sun, we’re taking the energy that God gave us, the most renewable energy that we will ever see, and using it to replace our dwindling supplies of fossil fuels.
The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.
We are living in a science fiction world.
I await your sentence with less fear than you pass it. The time will come when all will see what I see.
Every great improvement has come after repeated failures. Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.
You too can win Nobel Prizes. Study diligently. Respect DNA. Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Avoid women and politics. That’s my formula.
Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines. Only such people will so contrive and control those machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of them.
One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike — and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
By night the Glass
Of Galileo … observes
Imagin’d Land and Regions in the Moon.
Of Galileo … observes
Imagin’d Land and Regions in the Moon.
There is synthesis when, in combining therein judgments that are made known to us from simpler relations, one deduces judgments from them relative to more complicated relations.
There is analysis when from a complicated truth one deduces more simple truths.
There is analysis when from a complicated truth one deduces more simple truths.
I trust I may be enabled in the treatment of patients always to act with a single eye to their good.
We should provide the meaning of the universe in the meaning of our own lives. So I think science doesn’t necessarily have to get in the way of kind of spiritual fulfillment.
Classical thermodynamics … is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced … will never be overthrown.
Nature. As the word is now commonly used it excludes nature’s most interesting productions-the works of man. Nature is usually taken to mean mountains, rivers, clouds and undomesticated animals and plants. I am not indifferent to this half of nature, but it interests me much less than the other half.
The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done-men who are creative, inventive, and discovers. The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered.
Number theorists say that number theory is too complicated, so let’s pretend that there is only one prime number, and then let’s combine all these results. Surprisingly, sometimes it works.
How science dwindles, and how volumes swell,
How commentators each dark passage shun,
And hold their farthing candle to the sun!
How commentators each dark passage shun,
And hold their farthing candle to the sun!
When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
The science [geometry] is pursued for the sake of the knowledge of what eternally exists, and not of what comes for a moment into existence, and then perishes.
The primes are the raw material out of which we have to build arithmetic, and Euclid’s theorem assures us that we have plenty of material for the task.
Too often a sister puts all her patients back to bed as a housewife puts all her plates back in the plate-rack-to make a generally tidy appearance.
The most important thing is insight, that is to be – curious – to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.
All experience is a drug experience. Whether it’s mediated by our own [endogenous] drugs, or whether it’s mediated by substances that we ingest that are found in plants, cognition, consciousness, the working of the brain, it’s all a chemically mediated process. Life itself is a drug experience.
Chocolate milk has everything I need in a drink: the carbs, the protein, and the electrolytes. It’s even backed by science, showing how you’re able to recover. I can speak from experience, this is what I drink.
Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.
People don’t die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that’s Progress, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
Science progresses best when observations force us to alter our preconceptions.
Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.
We are like dwarfs [the moderns] sitting on the shoulders of giants [the ancients]. Our glance can thus take in more things and reach farther than theirs. It is not because our sight is sharper nor our height greater than theirs; it is that we are carried and elevated by the high stature of the giants.
I wandered away on a glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted nearly fifty years and is not yet completed, always happy and free, poor and rich, without thought of a diploma or of making a name, urged on and on through endless, inspiring Godful beauty.
If … the past may be no Rule for the future, all Experience becomes useless and can give rise to no Inferences or Conclusions.
Tyndall, … I must remain plain Michael Faraday to the last; and let me now tell you, that if accepted the honour which the Royal Society desires to confer upon me, I would not answer for the integrity of my intellect for a single year.
We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?
I’m a science guy. I’m a geek. I love geology and botany and marine science. I thought maybe I’d be a professional guide, or maybe even a park ranger, working for the Department of Fish and Game.
A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.
Our world faces a crisis as yet unperceived by those possessing power to make great decisions for good or evil. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy’s heels.
It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.
The great revelation of the quantum theory was that features of discreteness were discovered in the Book of Nature, in a context in which anything other than continuity seemed to be absurd according to the views held until then.
If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
Power politics existed before Machiavelli was ever heard of; it will exist long after his name is only a faint memory. What he did, like Harvey, was to recognize its existence and subject it to scientific study.
It becomes the urgent duty of mathematicians, therefore, to meditate about the essence of mathematics, its motivations and goals and the ideas that must bind divergent interests together.
To one, science is an exalted goddess; to another it is a cow which provides him with butter.
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Where should I start? Start from the statement of the problem. … What can I do? Visualize the problem as a whole as clearly and as vividly as you can. … What can I gain by doing so? You should understand the problem, familiarize yourself with it, impress its purpose on your mind.
Save for the wild force of Nature, nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin.
The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.
The purpose of models is not to fit the data but to sharpen the question.
For the scientific acquisition of knowledge is almost as tedious as the routine acquisition of wealth.
There is abundant science out there that connects mercury exposure in vaccines to not only autism, but to ASD, to SIDS, to ADD, ADHD, language tics – which is like Tourette Syndrome – OCD, asthma, food allergies, and diabetes.
Mathematical physics is in the first place physics and it could not exist without experimental investigations.
Science studies the relations of things to each other: but art studies only their relations to man.
The Governor was strong upon
The Regulation Act:
The Doctor said that Death was but
A scientific fact:
And twice a day the Chaplain called,
And left a little tract.
The Regulation Act:
The Doctor said that Death was but
A scientific fact:
And twice a day the Chaplain called,
And left a little tract.
In highschool I was very excited that alog(b)=blog(a), and still find it useful today.
Learning is ever in the freshness of its youth, even for the old.
The separation of science and non-science is not only artificial but also detrimental to the advancement of knowledge. If we want to understand nature, if we want to master our physical surroundings, then we must use all ideas, all methods, and not just a small selection of them.
Chance is the pseudonym God uses when He’d rather not sign His own name.
Science belongs to no one country.
And as we continue to improve our understanding of the basic science on which applications increasingly depend, material benefits of this and other kinds are secured for the future.
Sporting competitions seem to be what we obsess over, frankly. So if we can put engineering, science, technology into a format of healthy, fun competition, we can attract all sorts of kids that might not see the kind of activity we do as accessible or rewarding.
With so many scientific achievements we know so little of where we came from and where we are going. But we know even less of the most important discovery of all – Love. Only love can accept our differences as we journey through life. And only love can allow space for our growth.
It’s not a science when you are judging art, but we’d be remiss to say you can’t look at something and say, ‘This is more well done than that.’
Science is the quintessential international endeavour, and the sterling reputation of the Nobel awards is partly due to the widely-perceived lack of national and other biases in the selection of the laureates.
Science is merely an extremely powerful method of winnowing what’s true from what feels good.
And now, as a germination of planetary dimensions, comes the thinking layer which over its full extent develops and intertwines its fibres, not to confuse and neutralise them but to reinforce them in the living unity of a single tissue.
Till facts are grouped & called there can be no prediction. The only advantage of discovering laws is to foretell what will happen & to see bearing of scattered facts.
My price is five dollars for a miniature on ivory, and I have engaged three or four at that price. My price for profiles is one dollar, and everybody is willing to engage me at that price
If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive men and primitive society, we perceive that the first task of life is to live. Men begin with acts, not with thoughts.
I do not think that the radio waves I have discovered will have any practical application.
Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.
The university is the archive of the Western mind, it’s the keeper of the Western culture, … the guardian of our heritage, the teacher of our teachers, … the dwelling place of the free mind.
An organized product of nature is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.
[The purpose of flight research] is to separate the real from the imagined problems and to make known the overlooked and the unexpected.
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
As to writing another book on geometry [to replace Euclid] the middle ages would have as soon thought of composing another New Testament.
We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.
I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God’s, or Nature’s method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way.
Science is a beautiful gift to humanity; we should not distort it.
The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized. It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away.
It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.
We will look upon the earth and her sister planets as being with us, not for us.
Faith is a fine invention When gentlemen can see, But microscopes are prudent In an emergency.
That our knowledge only illuminates a small corner of the Universe, that it is incomplete, approximate, tentative and merely probable need not concert us. It is genuine nevertheless. Physical science stands as one of the great achievements of the human spirit.
In science we have to consider two things: power and circumstance.
I have to keep going, as there are always people on my track. I have to publish my present work as rapidly as possible in order to keep in the race. The best sprinters in this road of investigation are Becquerel and the Curies.
Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund.
Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
The subjective element in geological studies accounts for two characteristic types that can be distinguished among geologists. One considering geology as a creative art, the other regarding geology as an exact science.
Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.
NEWTONIAN, Pertaining to a philosophy of the universe invented by Newton, who discovered that an apple will fall to the ground, but was unable to say why. His successors and disciples have advanced so far as to be able to say when.
That’s what Hubble can do for us. It can tell us whether the universe is expanding forever or if one day it’s going to come back together.
Man lives for science as well as bread.
Newsreader: A huge asteroid could destroy Earth! And by coincidence, that’s the subject of tonight’s miniseries. Dogbert: In science, researchers proved that this simple device can keep idiots off your television screen. [TV remote control] Click.
Reliable scientific knowledge is value free and has no moral or ethical value. Science tells us how the world is. … Dangers and ethical issue arise only when science is applied as technology.
…neither is it possible to discover the more remote and deeper parts of any science, if you stand but upon the level of the same science, and ascend not to a higher science.
A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.
One cannot explain words without making incursions into the sciences themselves, as is evident from dictionaries; and, conversely, one cannot present a science without at the same time defining its terms.
The grand thing is to be able to reason backwards.
Fed on the dry husks of facts, the human heart has a hidden want which science cannot supply.
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert, but for every fact there is not necessarily an equal and opposite fact.
Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.
Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things. But to use and apply that language, we must be able fully to appreciate, to feel, to seize the unseen, the unconscious.
What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
He who attempts to draw any conclusion whatever as to the nation’s wealth or poverty from the mere fact of a favorable or unfavorable Balance of Trade, has not grasped the first fundamental principle of Political Economy.
In the spirit of science, there really is no such thing as a ‘failed experiment.’ Any test that yields valid data is a valid test.
Everything around us is shifting all the time. Energy is moving in all things. What gives energy a continuity, what creates a pattern, is you.
Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
We need only reflect on what has been prov’d at large, that we are never sensible of any connexion betwixt causes and effects, and that ’tis only by our experience of their constant conjunction, we can arrive at any knowledge of this relation.
You all have learned reliance
On the sacred teachings of Science,
So I hope, through life, you will never decline
In spite of philistine Defiance
To do what all good scientists do.
Experiment.
Make it your motto day and night.
Experiment.
And it will lead you to the light.
On the sacred teachings of Science,
So I hope, through life, you will never decline
In spite of philistine Defiance
To do what all good scientists do.
Experiment.
Make it your motto day and night.
Experiment.
And it will lead you to the light.
Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.
I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
Perhaps it would be better for science, that all criticism should be avowed.
Medicine for the soul.
We [entrepreneurs] required that you leave us free to function — free to think and work as we choose … — free to earn our own profits and make our own fortunes … Such was the price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high.
Psychologists, like other scientists, pride themselves on being extremely modern, and therefore much better than any group of people that ever were before.
I do not think that this [the universe] can be explained only by natural causes, and are forced to impute to the wisdom and ingenuity of an intelligent.
I am here tracing the History of the Earth itself, from its own Monuments.
Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.
Geology … offers always some material for observation. … [When] spring and summer come round, how easily may the hammer be buckled round the waist, and the student emerge from the dust of town into the joyous air of the country, for a few delightful hours among the rocks.
Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.
A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink of it deeply, or taste it not, for shallow thoughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking deeply sobers us again.
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
My passion for innovation and my interest in the ‘business of science’ has seen Biocon commercialize many innovative platforms and products.
If you are a natural scientist, a publication the journal Science carries enormous prestige.
Einstein’s space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh’s sky.
Nothing in science has any value if it is not communicated.
History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.
Human judgment is notoriously fallible and perhaps seldom more so than in facile decisions that a character has no adaptive significance because we do not know the use of it.
Genius is not inspired. Inspiration is perspiration.
Everybody goes into different dimensional planes. You do it every night when you dream. You are journeying into other dimensional planes. Dreams are not just functions of the cerebral cortex.
We can’t all be Einstein (because we don’t all play the violin). At the very least, we need a sort of street-smart science: the ability to recognize evidence, gather it, assess it, and act on it.
Girls are breaking barriers and boundaries every day in everything from sports and science to business and the creative arts.
The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes; and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.
The chief art of learning, as Locke has observed, is to attempt but little at a time. The widest excursions of the mind are made by short flights frequently repeated; the most lofty fabrics of science are formed by the continued accumulation of single propositions.
This was the ultimate form of ostentation among technology freaks – to have a system so complete and sophisticated that nothing showed; no machines, no wires, no controls.
Dilbert: I’m obsessed with inventing a perpetual motion machine. Most scientists think it’s impossible, but I have something they don’t. Dogbert: A lot of spare time? Dilbert: Exactly.
If science can eliminate sleep, we will have more time to live and no time for the dreams. But living is superior to the dream because it is real!
It’s great to be able to work on some science fiction. I love the genre.
Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.
When we attempt to imagine death, we perceive ourselves as spectators.
[The natural world cleans water, pollinates plants and provides pharmaceuticals, among many other gifts.] Thirty trillion dollars worth of services, scot-free to humanity, every year.
Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.
The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. … [By seeking] logical beauty spiritual formulas are discovered necessary for the deeper penetration into the laws of nature.
Jamaica is more than just the ‘brand’ the world recognizes so well; it’s a place of pride for the people who live here, its educational institutions, its sports achievements, its science and technology growth.
Science is really about describing the way the universe works in one aspect or another in all branches of science-how a life-form works, how this works, how that works. … You have to have a natural curiosity for that.
And therefore in geometry (which is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind), men begin at settling the significations of their words; which settling of significations, they call definitions, and place them in the beginning of their reckoning.
The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.
The Sun and the science are the same; when they set down, the darkness comes!
Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
I tell [medical students] that they are the luckiest persons on earth to be in medical school, and to forget all this worry about H.M.O.’s and keep your eye on helping the patient. It’s the best time ever to be a doctor because you can heal and treat conditions that were untreatable even a couple of years ago.
Was it not the great philosopher and mathematician Leibnitz who said that the more knowledge advances the more it becomes possible to condense it into little books?
Women’s liberation could have not succeeded if science had not provided them with contraception and household technology.
The history of science is the saga of nature defying common sense.
Nnothing tends more to the corruption of science than to suffer it to stagnate. These waters must be troubled, before they can exert their virtues.
Men of Science. If they are worthy of the name they are indeed about God’s path and about his bed and spying out all his ways.
Why are things as they are and not otherwise?
One week ago I said that cloning of mammals was years away… it is fun to be alive at this point in history.
In Europe I have been accused of taking my scientific ideas from the Church. In America I have been called a heretic, because I will not let my church-going friends pat me on the head.
Life is not a miracle. It is a natural phenomenon, and can be expected to appear whenever there is a planet whose conditions duplicate those of the earth.
We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
[M]anufacturing, science and engineering are … incredibly creative. I’d venture to say more so than creative advertising agencies and things that are known as the creative industries.
I have divers times endeavoured to see and to know, what parts the Blood consists of; and at length I have observ’d, taking some Blood out of my own hand, that it consists of small round globuls driven through a Crystalline humidity or water.
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
It is sometimes easier to circumvent prevailing difficulties [in science] rather than to attack them.
During an intense period of lab work, the outside world vanishes and the obsession is total. Sleep is when you can curl up on the accelerator floor for an hour.
Four years ago nobody but nuclear physicists had ever heard of the Internet. Today even my cat, Socks, has his own web page. I’m amazed at that. I meet kids all the time, been talking to my cat on the Internet.
Every discovery opens a new field for investigation of facts, shows us the imperfection of our theories. It has justly been said, that the greater the circle of light, the greater the boundary of darkness by which it is surrounded.
PROBOSCIS, n. The rudimentary organ of an elephant which serves him in place of the knife-and-fork that Evolution has as yet denied him. For purposes of humor it is popularly called a trunk.
We are a scientific civilization. That means a civilization in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge … Knowledge is our destiny.
Rational argument can be defeated by refusing to argue rationally.
If the [Vestiges] be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen; and man and woman are only better beasts!
(1) I have told you more than I know about osteoporosis. (2) What I have told you is subject to change without notice. (3) I hope I raised more questions than I have given answers. (4) In any case, as usual, a lot more work is necessary.
No fairer destiny could be allotted to any physical theory than that it should of itself point out the way to the introduction of a more comprehensive theory, in which it lives on as a limiting case.
One’s intelligence may march about and about a problem, but the solution does not come gradually into view. One moment it is not. The next it is there.
Science no longer is in the position of observer of nature, but rather recognizes itself as part of the interplay between man and nature. The scientific method … changes and transforms its object: the procedure can no longer keep its distance from the object.
I never think of the future – it comes soon enough.
There was some sort of maze-learning experiment involved in my final grade and since I remember the rat who was my colleague as uncooperative, or perhaps merely incompetent at being a rat, or tired of the whole thing, I don’t remember how I passed.
Far be it from me to suggest that geologists should be reckless in their drafts upon the bank of Time; but nothing whatever is gained, and very much is lost, by persistent niggardliness in this direction.
The classification of facts, the recognition of their sequence and relative significance is the function of science, and the habit of forming a judgment upon these facts unbiassed by personal feeling is characteristic of what may be termed the scientific frame of mind.
If I want to stop a research program I can always do it by getting a few experts to sit in on the subject, because they know right away that it was a fool thing to try in the first place.
No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.
Ere land and sea and the all-covering sky Were made, in the whole world the countenance Of nature was the same, all one, well named Chaos, a raw and undivided mass, Naught but a lifeless bulk, with warring seeds Of ill-joined elements compressed together.
The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars… A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space.
I called it ignose, not knowing which carbohydrate it was. This name was turned down by my editor. ‘God-nose’ was not more successful, so in the end ‘hexuronic acid’ was agreed upon. To-day the substance is called ‘ascorbic acid’ and I will use this name.
We know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate the subject matters.
As far as he can achieve it, readability is as important for the scientific writer as it is for the novelist.
Australia, Australia, we love you from the heart. The kidneys, the liver & the giblets too. And every other part.
Nature is earlier than man, but man is earlier than natural science.
Nomenclature, the other foundation of botany, should provide the names as soon as the classification is made… If the names are unknown knowledge of the things also perishes… For a single genus, a single name.
But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.
At its heart, engineering is about using science to find creative, practical solutions. It is a noble profession.
Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible.
Real numbers are good if you add the word ‘random’.
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.
We hail science as man’s truest friend and noblest helper.
…learning chiefly in mathematical sciences can so swallow up and fix one’s thought, as to possess it entirely for some time; but when that amusement is over, nature will return, and be where it was, being rather diverted than overcome by such speculations.
One curious result of this inertia, which deserves to rank among the fundamental ‘laws’ of nature, is that when a discovery has finally won tardy recognition it is usually found to have been anticipated, often with cogent reasons and in great detail.
It may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come when men control the destinies of stars.
It is a lot better to come from an evolved monkey than from a fallen angel.
When a man finds a conclusion agreeable, he accepts it without argument, but when he finds it disagreeable, he will bring against it all the forces of logic and reason.
First… a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.
I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest are details.
I find the attempt to find things out, which scientists are possessed by, to be as human as breathing, or feeding, or sex. And so the science has to be in the novels as science and not just as metaphors.
Science and technology are going to be the basis for many of the solutions to social problems.
Let the experiment be made.
Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
It is a custom often practiced by seafaring people to throw a bottle overboard, with a paper, stating the time and place at which it is done. In the absence of other information as to currents, that afforded by these mute little navigators is of great value.
Physics is to mathematics what sex is to masturbation.
Facts mean nothing when they are preempted by appearance. Do not underestimate the power of impression over reality.
From my numerous observations, I conclude that these tubercle bacilli occur in all tuberculous disorders, and that they are distinguishable from all other microorganisms.
Langmuir is a regular thinking machine. Put in facts, and you get out a theory.
So Einstein was wrong when he said, “God does not play dice.” Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen.
The first steps in the path of discovery, and the first approximate measures, are those which add most to the existing knowledge of mankind.
Knowledge-it excites prejudices to call it science-is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.
To quit religion is to start walking in the space! Don’t be afraid, you don’t fall into the void, because you can hold onto God and science!
Some blessings have been ours in the past, and these may be repeated or even multiplied.
The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer.
For all things come from earth, and all things end by becoming earth.
[In my home workshop,] generally I’m mending things, which is interesting because you learn a lot about why they broke.
… it is impossible to explain honestly the beauties of the laws of nature in a way that people can feel, without their having some deep understanding of mathematics. I am sorry, but this seems to be the case.
The discovery which has been pointed to by theory is always one of profound interest and importance, but it is usually the close and crown of a long and fruitful period, whereas the discovery which comes as a puzzle and surprise usually marks a fresh epoch and opens a new chapter in science.
Life itself is but the expression of a sum of phenomena, each of which follows the ordinary physical and chemical laws.
Technology… the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.
Nothing perhaps has so retarded the reception of the higher conclusions of Geology among men in general, as … [the] instinctive parsimony of the human mind in matters where time is concerned.
There is no […] higher than the truth.
There is one class of mind that loves to lean on rules and definitions, and another that discards them as far as possible. A faddist will generally ask for a definition of faddism, and one who is not a faddist will be impatient of being asked to give one.
Great moments in science: Einstein discovers that time is actually money.
The conflict of theories, leading, as it eventually must, to the survival of the fittest, is advantageous.
Only by ignorance is science threatened.
The biggest benefit of Apollo was the inspiration it gave to a growing generation to get into science and aerospace.
I strongly believe in the existence of God, based on intuition, observations, logic, and also scientific knowledge.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Science is practical philosophy.
I have no trouble publishing in Soviet astrophysical journals, but my work is unacceptable to the American astrophysical journals.
Understanding what and why did not work may be more instructive than celebrating our successes.
Science has its being in a perpetual mental restlessness.
Society rests upon conscience, not upon science.
Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.
…people today are so accustomed to pretentious nonsense that they see nothing amiss in reading without understanding, and many of them at length discover that they can without difficulty write in like manner themselves and win applause for it. And so it perpetuates itself.
Extra dimensional theories are sometimes considered science fiction with equations. I think that’s a wrong attitude. I think extra dimensions are with us, they are with us to stay, and they entered physics a long time ago. They are not going to go away.
Abel has left mathematicians something to keep them busy for five hundred years.
One of the chief peculiarities of this treatise is the doctrine that the true electric current, on which the electromagnetic phenomena depend, is not the same thing as the current of conduction, but that the time-variation of the electric displacement must [also] be taken into account.
Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics.
It is hard to hide our genes completely. However devoted someone may be to the privacy of his genotype, others with enough curiosity and knowledge can draw conclusions from the phenotype he presents and from the traits of his relatives.
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
Very few [doctors] are men of science in any very serious sense; they’re men of technique.
Our past affects us, our present affects us, and even our future can affect us. We live in the relative world of time and space.
To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.
The credulous … advance the authority of hearsay in place of reasons for possible success or facts that can be demonstrated.
Mathematics is not about numbers, equations, computations, or algorithms: it is about understanding.
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.
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
Astronomy is … the only progressive Science which the ancient world produced.
Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes.
A conceptual scheme is never discarded merely because of a few stubborn facts with which it cannot be reconciled; a conceptual scheme is either modified or replaced by a better one, never abandoned with nothing left to take its place.
Above, far above the prejudices and passions of men soar the laws of nature. Eternal and immutable, they are the expression of the creative power they represent what is, what must be, what otherwise could not be. Man can come to understand the: he is incapable of changing them.
Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.
Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.
I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her.
Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them.
The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman–Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and greatest deity of all, the Virgin.
Man is slightly nearer to the atom than to the star. … From his central position man can survey the grandest works of Nature with the astronomer, or the minutest works with the physicist. … [K]nowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.
The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.
Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation where we build on top of the work of others rather than redoing so much of it in a trivially different way.
The decisive step in evolution, the first step toward macroevolution, the step from one species to another, requires another evolutionary method than that of sheer accumulation of micromutations.
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
In America we can say what we think, and even if we can’t think, we can say it anyhow.
At the Egyptian city of Naucratis there was a famous old god whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis was sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.
Science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science.
Dr. Johnson … sometimes employed himself in chymistry, sometimes in watering and pruning a vine, and sometimes in small experiments, at which those who may smile, should recollect that there are moments which admit of being soothed only by trifles.
At extremely high processing speeds we are able to find patterns of order in what other people would perceive as chaos.
In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life.
Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!
The discovery of natural law is a meeting with God.
science progresses by trial and error, and when it is forbidden to admit error there can be no progress.
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
Just like a single cell, the character of our lives is determined not by our genes but by our responses to the environmental signals that propel life.
The Russian Federation and the United States of America, the two biggest nuclear powers in the world, but apart from nuclear-wise, we have a lot in common. We have huge territories, natural resources, technologies, science, education, and of course human capital.
Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress.
An attempt to study the evolution of living organisms without reference to cytology would be as futile as an account of stellar evolution which ignored spectroscopy.
It would seem to me… an offense against nature, for us to come on the same scene endowed as we are with the curiosity, filled to overbrimming as we are with questions, and naturally talented as we are for the asking of clear questions, and then for us to do nothing about, or worse, to try to suppress the questions.
Politics is no exact science.
