Science Quotes - Page 185

[Newton's calculations] entered the marrow of what we know without knowing how we know it.

All science is full of statements where you put your best face on your ignorance, where you say: ... we know awfully little about this, but more or less irrespective of the stuff we don't know about, we can make certain useful deductions.

If you walk along the street you will encounter a number of scientific problems. Of these, about 80 per cent are insoluble, while 19½ per cent are trivial. There is then perhaps half a per cent where skill, persistence, courage, creativity and originality can make a difference. It is always the task of the academic to swim in that half a per cent, asking the questions through which some progress can be made.

Generation by male and female is a law common to animals and plants.

A function to each organ, and each organ to its own function, is the law of all organization.

Engineering training deals with the exact sciences. That sort of exactness makes for truth and conscience. It might be good for the world if more men had that sort of mental start in life even if they did not pursue the profession.

There is a stability in the Universe because of the orderly and balanced process of change, the same measure coming out as going in, as if reality were a huge fire that inhaled and exhaled equal amounts.

It is the triumph of civilization that at last communities have obtained such a mastery over natural laws that they drive and control them. The winds, the water, electricity, all aliens that in their wild form were dangerous, are now controlled by human will, and are made useful servants.

Great Power, capable of everything and only temporarily handicapped by economic difficulties. We are not a great power and never will be again. We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a Great Power we shall soon cease to be a great nation. Let us take warning from the fate of the Great Powers of the past and not burst ourselves with pride .

Science as an intellectual exercise enriches our culture, and is in itself ennobling. ... Though to the layman, the world revealed by the chemist may seem more commonplace, it is not so to him. Each new insight into how the atoms in their interactions express themselves in structure and transformations, not only of inanimate matter, but particularly also of living matter, provides a thrill.

Undeveloped though the science [of chemistry] is, it already has great power to bring benefits. Those accruing to physical welfare are readily recognized, as in providing cures, improving the materials needed for everyday living, moving to ameliorate the harm which mankind by its sheer numbers does to the environment, to say nothing of that which even today attends industrial development. And as we continue to improve our understanding of the basic science on which applications increasingly depend, material benefits of this and other kinds are secured for the future.

And as we continue to improve our understanding of the basic science on which applications increasingly depend, material benefits of this and other kinds are secured for the future.

The benefits of science are not to be reckoned only in terms of the physical.

Science as an intellectual exercise enriches our culture, and is in itself ennobling.

One of the most striking results of modern investigation has been the way in which several different and quite independent lines of evidence indicate that a very great event occurred about two thousand million years ago. The radio-active evidence for the age of meteorites; and the estimated time for the tidal evolution of the Moon's orbit (though this is much rougher), all agree in their testimony, and, what is far more important, the red-shift in the nebulae indicates that this date is fundamental, not merely in the history of our system, but in that of the material universe as a whole.

Energie is the operation, efflux or activity of any being: as the light of the Sunne is the energie of the Sunne, and every phantasm of the soul is the energie of the soul.

Keep a sharp lookout upon your materials; get rid of every pound of material you can do without; put to yourself the question what business has it to be there?, avoid complexities, and make everything as simple as possible.

Twenty years ago many chemists would have defended the theory of bond arms as a satisfactory explanation because they had become accustomed to thinking of it as unique and as ultimate.

The horrors of Vivisection have supplanted the solemnity, the thrilling fascination, of the old unetherized operation upon the human sufferer. Their recorded phenomena, stored away by the physiological inquisitor on dusty shelves, are mostly of as little present use to man as the knowledge of a new comet or of a tungstate of zirconium ... -contemptibly small compared with the price paid for it in agony and torture.

If your news must be bad, tell it soberly and promptly.

You can hardly convince a man of error in a life-time, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grand-children may be. The geologists tell us that it took one hundred years to prove that fossils are organic, and one hundred and fifty more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the Noachian deluge.

Observation is so wide awake, and facts are being so rapidly added to the sum of human experience, that it appears as if the theorizer would always be in arrears, and were doomed forever to arrive at imperfect conclusion; but the power to perceive a law is equally rare in all ages of the world, and depends but little on the number of facts observed.

It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws.

Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are ... rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

A man receives only what he is ready to receive... The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest of what he has observed, he does not observe.