John Desmond Bernal Quotes about Science

It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence by the percipient scientist long in advance of any possible proof.

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.

The very bulk of scientific publications is itself delusive. It is of very unequal value; a large proportion of it, possibly as much as three-quarters, does not deserve to be published at all, and is only published for economic considerations which have nothing to do with the real interests of science.

Men will not be content to manufacture life: they will want to improve on it.

We academic scientists move within a certain sphere, we can go on being useless up to a point, in the confidence that sooner or later some use will be found for our studies. The mathematician, of course, prides himself on being totally useless, but usually turns out to be the most useful of the lot. He finds the solution but he is not interested in what the problem is: sooner or later, someone will find the problem to which his solution is the answer.

So many of the chemical reactions occurring in living systems have been shown to be catalytic processes occurring isothermally on the surface of specific proteins, referred to as enzymes, that it seems fairly safe to assume that all are of this nature and that the proteins are the necessary basis for carrying out the processes that we call life.

The beauty of life is, therefore, geometrical beauty of a type that Plato would have much appreciated.

In England, more than in any other country, science is felt rather than thought. ... A defect of the English is their almost complete lack of systematic thinking. Science to them consists of a number of successful raids into the unknown.

The greater the man, the more he is soaked in the atmosphere of his time; only thus can he get a wide enough grasp of it to be able to change substantially the pattern of knowledge and action.

We are still too close to the birth of the universe to be certain about its death.

The region of the mysterious is rapidly shrinking.

Pauling was shocked by the freedom with which the X-ray crystallographers of the time, including particularly Astbury, played with the intimate chemical structure of their models. They seemed to think that if the atoms were arranged in the right order and about the right distance apart, that was all that mattered, that no further restrictions need to be put on them.

Published papers may omit important steps and the memory of men of science, even the greatest, is sadly fallible.

Her [Rosalind Franklin] devotion to research showed itself at its finest in the last months of her life. Although stricken with an illness which she knew would be fatal, she continued to work right up to the end.