Science Quotes - Page 135

I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages.

My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions. It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose

If science is an unfinished project, the next stage will be about reconnecting and integrating the rigor of scientific method with the richness of direct experience to produce a science that will serve to connect us to one another, ourselves and the world.

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. If you take your children for a picnic on a doubtful day, they will demand a dogmatic answer as to whether it will be fine or wet, and be disappointed in you when you cannot be sure.

What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.

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.

Art and science work in quite different ways: agreed. But, bad as it may sound, I have to admit that I cannot get along as an artist without the use of one or two sciences. ... In my view, the great and complicated things that go on in the world cannot be adequately recognized by people who do not use every possible aid to understanding.

To engage in experiments on heat was always one of my most agreeable employments.

A Man of Knowledge like a rich Soil, feeds If not a world of Corn, a world of Weeds.

[To the cultures of Asia and the continent of Africa] it is the Western impact which has stirred up the winds of change and set the processes of modernization in motion. Education brought not only the idea of equality but also another belief which we used to take for granted in the West-the idea of progress, the idea that science and technology can be used to better human conditions. In ancient society, men tended to believe themselves fortunate if tomorrow was not worse than today and anyway, there was little they could do about it.

Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go.

The statistical method is required in the interpretation of figures which are at the mercy of numerous influences, and its object is to determine whether individual influences can be isolated and their effects measured. The essence of the method lies in the determination that we are really comparing like with like, and that we have not overlooked a relevant factor which is present in Group A and absent from Group B. The variability of human beings in their illnesses and in their reactions to them is a fundamental reason for the planned clinical trial and not against it.

I don't quite hear what you say, but I beg to differ entirely with you.

The separate atoms of a molecule are not connected all with all, or all with one, but, on the contrary, each one is connected only with one or with a few neighbouring atoms, just as in a chain link is connected with link.

Nothing that you do in science is guaranteed to result in benefits for mankind. Any discovery, I believe, is morally neutral and it can be turned either to constructive ends or destructive ends. That's not the fault of science.

When the difficulty of a problem lies only in finding out what follows from certain fixed premises, mathematical methods furnish invaluable wings for flying over intermediate obstructions.

I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

But nature flies from the infinite; for the infinite is imperfect, and nature always seeks an end.

Nature does nothing without a purpose. In children may be observed the traces and seeds of what will one day be settled psychological habits, though psychologically a child hardly differs for the time being from an animal.

Here and elsewhere we shall not obtain the best insight into things until we actually see them growing from the beginning.

He who thus considers things in their first growth and origin ... will obtain the clearest view of them.

I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write.

Nothing in science has any value if it is not communicated.