Science Quotes - Page 141

Why the hell shouldn't I run away with the circus?

The mathematicians are well acquainted with the difference between pure science, which has only to do with ideas, and the application of its laws to the use of life, in which they are constrained to submit to the imperfections of matter and the influence of accidents.

Shut your eyes to the medical columns of the newspapers, and you will save yourself many forebodings and symptoms.

We know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.

For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, they arrive at their conclusions, largely inarticulate. Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; but sometimes in a smoking room, one learns why things were done.

What is the shape of space? Is it flat, or is it bent? Is it nicely laid out, or is it warped and shrunken? Is it finite, or is it infinite? Which of the following does space resemble more: (a) a sheet of paper, (b) an endless desert, (c) a soap bubble, (d) a doughnut, (e) an Escher drawing, (f) an ice cream cone, (g) the branches of a tree, or (h) a human body?

'Science in itself' is nothing, for it exists only in the human beings who are its bearers. 'Science for its own sake' usually means nothing more than science for the sake of the people who happen to be pursuing it.

The task of science, therefore, is not to attack the objects of faith, but to establish the limits beyond which knowledge cannot go and found a unified self-consciousness within these limits.

The fundamental laws of the universe which correspond to the two fundamental theorems of the mechanical theory of heat. 1. The energy of the universe is constant. 2. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.

The best causes tend to attract to their support the worst arguments, which seems to be equally true in the intellectual and in the moral sense.

Butterflies may be better indicators of the health of our environment than birds.

Prejudice for regularity and simplicity is a source of error that has only too often infected philosophy.

Were it not for gravity one man might hurl another by a puff of his breath into the depths of space, beyond recall for all eternity.

Experimental science is the queen of knowledge.

Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable--th e rise of science was achieved by deeply religious Christian scholars.

There is a great deal of emotional satisfaction in the elegant demonstration, in the elegant ordering of facts into theories, and in the still more satisfactory, still more emotionally exciting discovery that the theory is not quite right and has to be worked over again, very much as any other work of art-a painting, a sculpture has to be worked over in the interests of aesthetic perfection. So there is no scientist who is not to some extent worthy of being described as artist or poet.

Traditional dinosaur theory is full of short circuits. Like the antiquated wiring in an old house, the details sputter and burn out when specific parts are tested.

Science fiction is very healthy in its form.

Equations seem like treasures, spotted in the rough by some discerning individual, plucked and examined, placed in the grand storehouse of knowledge, passed on from generation to generation. This is so convenient a way to present scientific discovery, and so useful for textbooks, that it can be called the treasure-hunt picture of knowledge.

The Universe is populated by innumerable suns, innumerable earths, and perhaps, innumerable forms of life. That thought expresses the essence of the Copernican revolution. No revelation more striking has ever come from the scientific mind.

The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa.

A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" - find out how he feels about astrology.

But the real glory of science is that we can find a way of thinking such that the law is evident.

If there is something very slightly wrong in our definition of the theories, then the full mathematical rigor may convert these errors into ridiculous conclusions.

The organism cannot be regarded as simply the passive object of autonomous internal and external forces; it is also the subject of its own evolution.