Science Quotes - Page 102

The theory of the lung as a gland has justified its existence and done excellent service in bringing forward facts, which shall survive any theoretical construction that has been or may hereafter be put upon them.

Building intelligent machines can teach us about our minds - about who we are - and those lessons will make our world a better place. To win that knowledge, though, our species will have to trade in another piece of its vanity.

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

The electron, as it leaves the atom, crystallises out of Schrodinger's mist like a genie emerging from his bottle.

Observation and theory get on best when they are mixed together, both helping one another in the pursuit of truth. It is a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in a theory until it has been confirmed by observation. I hope I shall not shock the experimental physicists too much if I add that it is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they have been confirmed by theory.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

The laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history.

A life spent in the routine of science need not destroy the attractive human element of a woman's nature.

I carried this problem around in my head basically the whole time. I would wake up with it first thing in the morning, I would be thinking about it all day, and I would be thinking about it when I went to sleep. Without distraction I would have the same thing going round and round in my mind.

Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

GOOSE, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These, by some occult process of nature, are penetrated and suffused with various degrees of the bird's intellectual energies and emotional character, so that when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an "author," there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl's thought and feeling. The difference in geese, as discovered by this ingenious method, is considerable: many are found to have only trivial and insignificant powers, but some are seen to be very great geese indeed.

ETHNOLOGY, n. The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots and ethnologists.

MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

Seek simplicity, and distrust it.

I admit that Mendeleev has two wives, but I have only one Mendeleev.

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.

Development of Western science is based on two great achievements: the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systematic experiment (during the Renaissance). In my opinion, one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.

but, in reality, there is no such thing as an exact science.

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.

There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face.

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.

The human mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with a similar energy.

Hence, even in the domain of natural science the aid of the experimental method becomes indispensable whenever the problem set is the analysis of transient and impermanent phenomena, and not merely the observation of persistent and relatively constant objects.

The animal kingdom exhibits a series of mental developments which may be regarded as antecedents to the mental development of man, for the mental life of animals shows itself to be throughout, in its elements and in the general laws governing the combination of the elements, the same as the mental life of man.

It devolves upon the United States to help motorize the world.