Science Quotes - Page 171

Please live a healthy life - medicine is an imperfect science.

Ere land and sea and the all-covering sky Were made, in the whole world the countenance Of nature was the same, all one, well named Chaos, a raw and undivided mass, Naught but a lifeless bulk, with warring seeds Of ill-joined elements compressed together.

The Governor was strong upon The Regulation Act: The Doctor said that Death was but A scientific fact: And twice a day the Chaplain called, And left a little tract.

It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.

The cell, this elementary keystone of living nature, is far from being a peculiar chemical giant molecule or even a living protein and as such is not likely to fall prey to the field of an advanced chemistry. The cell is itself an organism, constituted of many small units of life.

The more we learn of science, the more we see that its wonderful mysteries are all explained by a few simple laws so connected together and so dependent upon each other, that we see the same mind animating them all.

[Science is] piecemeal revelation.

Nature gropes and blunders and performs the crudest acts. There is no steady advance upward. There is no design.

Ohm (a distinguished mathematician, be it noted) brought into order a host of puzzling facts connecting electromotive force and electric current in conductors, which all previous electricians had only succeeded in loosely binding together qualitatively under some rather vague statements. Even as late as 20 years ago, "quantity" and "tension" were much used by men who did not fully appreciate Ohm's law.

There is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that has not at some time been said by some philosopher. Fontenelle says he would undertake to persuade the whole public of readers to believe that the sun was neither the cause of light or heat, if he could only get six philosophers on his side.

[T]here are depths of thousands of miles which are hidden from our inquiry. The only tidings we have from those unfathomable regions are by means of volcanoes, those burning mountains that seem to discharge their materials from the lowest abysses of the earth.

There is no logical staircase running from the physics of 10-28 cm. to the physics of 1028 light-years.

The nineteenth century will ever be known as the one in which the influences of science were first fully realised in civilised communities; the scientific progress was so gigantic that it seems rash to predict that any of its successors can be more important in the life of any nation.

It is the doctors who desert the dying and there is so much to be learned about pain.

Computers are here to stay. It is a major challenge for the future to use computers efficiently in combinatorics without losing its special appeal.

How do I define God? I don't.... People who find such conceptions important for themselves have every right to frame them as they like. Personally, I don't.

Prediction is difficult, especially the future.

The present state of atomic theory is characterized by the fact that we not only believe the existence of atoms to be proved beyond a doubt, but also we even believe that we have an intimate knowledge of the constituents of the individual atoms.

Yet the widespread planetary theories, advanced by Ptolemy and most other astronomers, although consistent with the numerical data, seemed likewise to present no small difficulty. For these theories were not adequate unless they also conceived certain equalizing circles, which made the planet appear to move at all times with uniform velocity neither on its deferent sphere nor about its own epicycle's center.

I do not believe there is anything useful which men can know with exactitude that they cannot know by arithmetic and algebra.

As was the case for Nobel's own invention of dynamite, the uses that are made of increased knowledge can serve both beneficial and potentially harmful ends. Increased knowledge clearly implies increased responsibility. We reject the notion advocated in some quarters that man should stop eating from the tree of knowledge, as if that were humanly possible.

I built the solenoid and with great expectations late one evening I pressed the switch which sent a current of 40 amperes through the coil. The result was spectacular-a deafening explosion, the apparatus disappeared, all windows were blown in or out, a wall caved in, and thus ended my pioneering experiment on liquid hydrogen cooled coils!

In considering God's power, we must not look for a God of the Gaps, a god who is called in for those phenomena for which there is yet no scientific explanation.

I'm sure there's an alternate universe where I got to become a pulpy science fiction writer.

And extracting one molecule's signature in spectral analysis from the rest of the signatures is hard work, sort of like picking out the sound of your toddler's voice in a roomful of screaming children during playtime. It's hard, but you can do it.