quotations about science
Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it's not the destination, it's the journeyto get there. It's a way of thinking and it's an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it. I think once we stop asking questions like "what is the age of the universe," or "how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level," once we stop asking questions like that, we're dead.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"An Interview with Dr. Alan Lightman: At the Intersection of the Sciences and Humanities", aegis, spring 2006
Everything aspires to the light. You don't have to chase down a fly to get rid of it -- you just darken the room, leave a crack of light in a window, and out he goes. Works every time. We all have that instinct, that aspiration. Science can't dim that. All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home.
TOBIAS WOLFF
Old School
Science is a subordinate category. When science offers itself as the final stage or form of knowing, it is guilty of a false quantity, in that it puts the accent, which belongs elsewhere, upon the penultimate.
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
lecture at Columbia University, March 4, 1908
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
attributed, Clarke Foundation
Understanding science is necessary to make informed decisions on issues both private and public -- from individual health care to national defense.
JOHN DURANT
"John Durant plans a new era for the MIT Museum", MIT News, September 27, 2017
Science is truth for life
Watch religion fall obsolete
Science Will be truth for life
Technology as nature
10,000 MANIACS
"Planned Obsolescence"
I consider it an error in scientific communication that, most of the time, merely the polished and flawless results of natural research are displayed, as in an art show. And exhibit of the finished product alone has many drawbacks and dangers for both its creator and its users. The creator of the product will be only too ready to demonstrate perfection and flawlessness while concealing gaps, uncertainties and discordant contradictions of his insight into nature. He thus belittles the meaning of the real process of natural research. The user of the product will not appreciate the rigorous demands made on the natural scientist when the latter has to reveal and describe the secrets of nature in a practical way. He will never learn to think for himself and to cope by himself.
WILHELM REICH
Ether, God and Devil
Every science owns kin with its sister science.
HYPATIA
attributed, Day's Collacon
The most exciting thing about being a scientist is not knowing and being wrong. Because that means there is a lot left to learn.
LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
"Cosmic Connections", 2011
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance -- the idea that anything is possible.
RAY BRADBURY
Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1976
Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts.
JEAN ROSTAND
The Substance of Men
For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable. Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right.
GREGORY BENFORD
Timescape
Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.
EDWIN H. LAND
attributed, QFINANCE: The Ultimate Resource
It was good that there should be a more diffused knowledge of the material world; and it was good, therefore, that there should be partisans of matter, believers in particles, zealots for tissue, who were ready to incur any odium and any labour that a few more men might learn a few more things.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Biographical Studies
There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Adding a Dimension
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The World As I See It
All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Out of My Later Years
Weird Science
Plastic tubes and pots and pans
Bits and pieces and
Magic from the hand
We're makin'
Things I've never seen before
Behind bolted doors
Talent and imagination
Not what teacher said to do
Makin' dreams come true
OINGO BOINGO
"Weird Science"
Weird Science
Weird, ooo!
Magic and technology
Voodoo dolls and chants
Electricity We're makin'
Fantasy and microchips
Shooting from the hip
Something different
OINGO BOINGO
"Weird Science"
Science is not the total answer; this I know, this I have learned in my lifetime. And that leaves me with the belief that miracles, no matter how inexplicable or unbelievable, are real and can occur without regard to the natural order of things.
NICHOLAS SPARKS
The Notebook