Science Quotes - Page 220

Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.

Indeed, we need not look back half a century to times which many now living remember well, and see the wonderful advances in the sciences and arts which have been made within that period. Some of these have rendered the elements themselves subservient to the purposes of man, have harnessed them to the yoke of his labors and effected the great blessings of moderating his own, of accomplishing what was beyond his feeble force, and extending the comforts of life to a much enlarged circle, to those who had before known its necessaries only.

What men of science want is only a fair day's wages for more than a fair day's work.

The errors of a wise man are literally more instructive than the truths of a fool. The wise man travels in lofty, far-seeing regions; the fool in low-lying, high-fenced lanes; retracing the footsteps of the former, to discover where he diviated, whole provinces of the universe are laid open to us; in the path of the latter, granting even that he has not deviated at all, little is laid open to us but two wheel-ruts and two hedges.

For the world, I count it not an inn, but a hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.

Practical sciences proceed by building up; theoretical science by resolving into components.

I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of.

Science could not fill the hole in my soul.

It appears that anything you say about the way that theory and experiment may interact is likely to be correct, and anything you say about the way that theory and experiment must interact is likely to be wrong.

The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought.

Theory and fact are equally strong and utterly interdependent; one has no meaning without the other. We need theory to organize and interpret facts, even to know what we can or might observe. And we need facts to validate theories and give them substance.

God not only plays dice, he throws them in the corner where you can't see them.

That's all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory?

Dilbert: You joined the "Flat Earth Society?" Dogbert: I believe the earth must be flat. There is no good evidence to support the so-called "round earth theory." Dilbert: I think Christopher Columbus would disagree. Dogbert: How convenient that your best witness is dead.

Dogbert gazing at night sky No matter how bad the day is, the stars are always there. Dilbert Actually, many of them burned out years ago, but their light is just now reaching earth. DogbertThank you for shattering my comfortable misconception. DilbertIt's the miracle of science.

For five hundred dollars, I'll name a subatomic particle after you. Some of my satisfied customers include Arthur C. Quark and George Meson.

[Coleridge] selected an instance of what was called the sublime, in DARWIN, who imagined the creation of the universe to have taken place in a moment, by the explosion of a mass of matter in the womb, or centre of space. In one and the same instant of time, suns and planets shot into systems in every direction, and filled and spangled the illimitable void! He asserted this to be an intolerable degradation -referring, as it were, all the beauty and harmony of nature to something like the bursting of a barrel of gunpowder! that spit its combustible materials into a pock-freckled creation!

Then assuredly the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.

To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.

Doctors have been exposed-you always will be exposed-to the attacks of those persons who consider their own undisciplined emotions more important than the world's most bitter agonies-the people who would limit and cripple and hamper research because they fear research may be accompanied by a little pain and suffering.

Someone has said that all the great jugglers are dead.

I love science fiction. I read a lot of science fiction.

While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice.

Science differs from politics or religion, in precisely this one discipline: we agree in advance to simply reject our own findings when they have been shown to be in error.

The unprecedented development of science and technology... so rapid that it is said that 90 per cent of the scientists which this country has ever produced are still living today.