Science Quotes - Page 266

What promotes math progress even more than new ideas are new technical tools and habits of thought that encapsulate existing ideas, so that insights of one generation become the instincts of the next.

In a sense Shapley's telling me that space was transparent, which I shouldn't have believed, illustrates a fundamental problem in science, believing what people tell you. Go and find it out for yourself. That same error has persisted in my life and in many other people's. Authorities are not always authorities on everything; they often cling to their own mistakes.

I described to my patent lawyer our new algorithm-that I was hoping to patent- about detecting clustering, that involved three probabilities α , β, γ that add-up to 1, and mentioned that it is like "a three-sided coin". A few days later he came up with a patent application for a "three-sided-coin".

Theoretical Computer Science is just as useless as everything we mathematicians do.

Combinatorialists and analysts always have different names for everything, in order to keep themselves from interacting.

I don't know whether guys are more promiscuous or just bigger liars.

Always try to innovate. If you lose your old fitness, you lose out to Bose-Einstein condensation. I am sure that companies that go under would feel better if they knew that they were victims of Bose-Einstein condensation.

I sleep better at night knowing that scientists can clone sheep.

It will be contributing to bring forward the moment in which, seeing clearer into the nature of things, and having learnt to distinguish real knowledge from what has only the appearance of it, we shall be led to seek for exactness in every thing.

What scientist would not long to go on living, if only to see how the little truths he has brought to light will grow up?

Art is science made flesh.

Conscience serves us especially to judge of the actions of others.

How many wells of science there are in whose depths there is nothing but clear water!

The most exacting jailer is our own conscience.

We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.

But now I've got a young son and his interest is in science and now when I talk to him, I see that in the science sphere of our lives there is new, there is progress.

Some humans are mathematicians-others aren't.

Louis [Leakey] was anxious to initiate a scientific study of these chimpanzees. It would be difficult, he emphasized, for nothing was known; there were no guidelines for such a field study; and the habitat was remote and rugged. Dangerous wild animals would be living there, and chimpanzees themselves were considered at least four times stronger than humans. I remember wondering what kind of scientist he would find for such a herculean task.

Unfortunately, there is something of a flaw in this idealized picture of the way the scientific community discovers truth. And the flaw is that most scientific work never gets noticed. Study after study has shown that most scientific papers are read by almost no one, while a small number of papers are read by many people.

We cannot but think there is something like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals.

In the earliest ages science was poetry, as in the later poetry has become science.

When you have really solid biology and medical science at the core of an issue, it makes it much easier to identify what potential solutions may be.

I am aware that those hateful persons called Original Researchers now maintain that Raleigh was not the man; but to them I turn a deaf ear.

No one who has experienced the intense involvement of computer modeling would deny that the temptation exists to use any data input that will enable one to continue playing what is perhaps the ultimate game of solitaire.

...nature seems very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics, as our own mathematicians have formulated them in their studies, out of their own inner consciousness and without drawing to any appreciable extent on their experience of the outer world.