Science Quotes - Page 160

These earthly godfathers of Heaven's lights, that give a name to every fixed star, have no more profit of their shining nights than those that walk and know not what they are.

And teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night.

Oh God! that one might read the book of fate, And see the revolution of the times Make mountains level, and the continent, Weary of solid firmness, melt itself Into the sea.

Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, Pale in her anger washes all the air, That rheumatic diseases do abound; And through this distemperature we see The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose.

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But bad mortality o'ersways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.

At the outset do not be worried about this big question-Truth. It is a very simple matter if each one of you starts with the desire to get as much as possible. No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition. In this unsatisfied quest the attitude of mind, the desire, the thirst-a thirst that from the soul must arise!-the fervent longing, are the be-all and the end-all.

Now of the difficulties bound up with the public in which we doctors work, I hesitate to speak in a mixed audience. Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education.

Fed on the dry husks of facts, the human heart has a hidden want which science cannot supply.

Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.

An atom must be at least as complex as a grand piano.

Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.

Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.

We [may] answer the question: "Why is snow white?" by saying, "For the same reason that soap-suds or whipped eggs are white"-in other words, instead of giving the reason for a fact, we give another example of the same fact. This offering a similar instance, instead of a reason, has often been criticised as one of the forms of logical depravity in men. But manifestly it is not a perverse act of thought, but only an incomplete one. Furnishing parallel cases is the necessary first step towards abstracting the reason imbedded in them all.

When Galileo discovered he could use the tools of mathematics and mechanics to understand the motion of celestial bodies, he felt, in the words of one imminent researcher, that he had learned the language in which God recreated the universe. Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, the wonder of God's most devine and sacred gift.

The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.

One important object of this original spectroscopic investigation of the light of the stars and other celestial bodies, namely to discover whether the same chemical elements as those of our earth are present throughout the universe, was most satisfactorily settled in the affirmative. (1909)

One's intelligence may march about and about a problem, but the solution does not come gradually into view. One moment it is not. The next it is there.

O that the gods would bring to a miserable end such fictitious, crazy, deformed labours, with which the minds of the studious are blinded!

[I] could see how nervous everybody was in the beginning and how silent it was when we had trouble with the artificial heart [during the surgery, but later in the operation, when it was working, there were moments] of loud and raucous humor.

Probably our atomic weights merely represent a mean value around which the actual atomic weights of the atoms vary within certain narrow limits... when we say, the atomic weight of, for instance, calcium is 40, we really express the fact that, while the majority of calcium atoms have an actual atomic weight of 40, there are not but a few which are represented by 39 or 41, a less number by 38 or 42, and so on.

To trace in Nature's most minute design The signature and stamp of power divine. ... The Invisible in things scarce seen revealed, To whom an atom is an ample field.

I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections.

There seems no limit to research, for as been truly said, the more the sphere of knowledge grows, the larger becomes the surface of contact with the unknown.