Science Quotes - Page 121

There are as many species as the infinite being created diverse forms in the beginning, which, following the laws of generation, produced many others, but always similar to them: therefore there are as many species as we have different structures before us today.

I am coming more and more to the conviction that the necessity of our geometry cannot be demonstrated, at least neither by, nor for, the human intellect. . . Geometry should be ranked, not with arithmetic, which is purely aprioristic, but with mechanics.

For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes-as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.

We may not be able to get certainty, but we can get probability, and half a loaf is better than no bread.

The best way to study Mars is with two hands, eyes and ears of a geologist, first at a moon orbiting Mars... and then on the surface.

Few things are as bad as a guilty conscience.

The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.

There's so few people in this town with a conscience.

The Chinese are clearly inculcating the idea that science is exciting and important, and that's why they, as a whole-they're graduating four times as many engineers as we are, and that's just happened over the last 20 years.

Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians.

The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interest of the desire to know.

Change is scientific; progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.

There are no such things as incurables. There are only things for which man has not found a cure.

If you assume continuity, you can open the well-stocked mathematical toolkit of continuous functions and differential equations, the saws and hammers of engineering and physics for the past two centuries (and the foreseeable future).

What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern: the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men the useful has succeeded to the beautiful. Instead of the city of the Violet Crown, a Lancashire village has expanded into a mighty region of factories and warehouses. Yet, rightly understood, Manchester is as great a human exploit; as Athens.

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws.

If you are too fond of new remedies, first you will not cure your patients; secondly, you will have no patients to cure.

I have made many mistakes myself; in learning the anatomy of the eye I dare say, I have spoiled a hatfull; the best surgeon, like the best general, is he who makes the fewest mistakes.

There is only one law of Nature-the second law of thermodynamics-which recognises a distinction between past and future more profound than the difference of plus and minus. It stands aloof from all the rest. ... It opens up a new province of knowledge, namely, the study of organisation; and it is in connection with organisation that a direction of time-flow and a distinction between doing and undoing appears for the first time.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties are, if it is desired greatly enough.

The physician heals, Nature makes well.

The least deviation from truth will be multiplied later.

I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.

The first thing to realize about physics ... is its extraordinary indirectness.... For physics is not about the real world, it is about "abstractions" from the real world, and this is what makes it so scientific.... Theoretical physics runs merrily along with these unreal abstractions, but its conclusions are checked, at every possible point, by experiments.