Science Quotes - Page 161

But beyond the bright searchlights of science, Out of sight of the windows of sense, Old riddles still bid us defiance, Old questions of Why and of Whence.

The successive series of stratified formations are piled on one another, almost like courses of masonry.

But, as Bacon has well pointed out, truth is more likely to come out of error, if this is clear and definite, than out of confusion, and my experience teaches me that it is better to hold a well-understood and intelligible opinion, even if it should turn out to be wrong, than to be content with a muddle-headed mixture of conflicting views, sometimes miscalled impartiality, and often no better than no opinion at all.

With old inflation riding the headlines, I have read till I am bleary-eyed, and I can't get head from tails of the whole thing. ... Now we are living in an age of explanations-and plenty of 'em, too-but no two things that's been done to us have been explained twice the same way, by even the same man. It's and age of in one ear and out the other.

Coolidge is a better example of evolution than either Bryan or Darrow, for he knows when not to talk, which is the biggest asset the monkey possesses over the human.

It is sometimes asserted that a surgical operation is or should be a work of art ... fit to rank with those of the painter or sculptor. ... That proposition does not admit of discussion. It is a product of the intellectual innocence which I think we surgeons may fairly claim to possess, and which is happily not inconsistent with a quite adequate worldly wisdom.

This is an age of science. ... All important fields of activity from the breeding of bees to the administration of an empire, call for an understanding of the spirit and the technique of modern science. The nations that do not cultivate the sciences cannot hold their own.

Science is not gadgetry.

We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance.

One should avoid carrying out an experiment requiring more than 10 per cent accuracy.

No effect that requires more than 10 percent accuracy in measurement is worth investigating.

Engineers use knowledge primarily to design, produce, and operate artifacts. ... Scientists, by contrast, use knowledge primarily to generate more knowledge.

As he approached the place where a meeting of doctors was being held, he saw some elegant limousines and remarked, "The surgeons have arrived." Then he saw some cheaper cars and said, "The physicians are here, too." ... And when he saw a row of overshoes inside, under the hat rack, he is reported to have remarked, "Ah, I see there are laboratory men here."

I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand years; it is middling well as far as it goes - but is that all?

In size the electron bears the same relation to an atom that a baseball bears to the earth. Or, as Sir Oliver Lodge puts it, if a hydrogen atom were magnified to the size of a church, an electron would be a speck of dust in that church.

Foreshadowings of the principles and even of the language of [the infinitesimal] calculus can be found in the writings of Napier, Kepler, Cavalieri, Pascal, Fermat, Wallis, and Barrow. It was Newton's good luck to come at a time when everything was ripe for the discovery, and his ability enabled him to construct almost at once a complete calculus.

De Morgan was explaining to an actuary what was the chance that a certain proportion of some group of people would at the end of a given time be alive; and quoted the actuarial formula, involving p [pi], which, in answer to a question, he explained stood for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. His acquaintance, who had so far listened to the explanation with interest, interrupted him and exclaimed, 'My dear friend, that must be a delusion, what can a circle have to do with the number of people alive at a given time?'

How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve.

Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.

Apparently there are three levels of brain activity. Level 1 is the lowest level - the amount of concentration required to, say, delete emails or serve in congress.

There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics.

Lately we have been getting facts pointing to the "oceanic" nature of the floor of so-called inland seas. Through geological investigations it has been definitely established that in its deepest places, for instance, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, the Earth's crust is devoid of granite stratum. The same may be said quite confidently about the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Could the interpretation of these data be that inland seas were the primary stage of the formation of oceanic basins?

Civilization is in no immediate danger of running out of energy or even just out of oil. But we are running out of environment-that is, out of the capacity of the environment to absorb energy's impacts without risk of intolerable disruption-and our heavy dependence on oil in particular entails not only environmental but also economic and political liabilities.

Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?

Who then can calculate the path of the molecule? how do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by the fall of grains of sand?