Science Quotes - Page 274

When we try to imagine a chaos we fail. ... In its very fiber the mind is an order and refuses to build a chaos.

A tree nowhere offers a straight line or a regular curve, but who doubts that root, trunk, boughs, and leaves embody geometry?

Evolution pays and that is why there is evolution

Error held as truth has much the effect of truth. In politics and religion this fact upsets many confident predictions.

Is any knowledge worthless? Try to think of an example.

A calculating engine is one of the most intricate forms of mechanism, a telegraph key one of the simplest. But compare their value.

Truth is better disengaged from error than torn from it.

Discovery begins by finding the discoverer.

Ten builders rear an arch, each in turn lifting it higher; but it is the tenth man, who drops in the keystone, who hears our huzzas.

'It's this accursed Science,' I cried. 'It's the very Devil. The mediaeval priests and persecutors were right, and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it-and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way.'

Some make a conscience of spitting in the Church, yet robbe the Altar.

If we can possibly avoid wrecking this little planet of ours, we will, But-there must be risks! There must be. In experimental work there always are!

Mathematicians do not write for the circulating library.

Metaphysical ghosts cannot be killed, because they cannot be touched; but they may be dispelled by dispelling the twilight in which shadows and solidities are easily confounded. The Vital Principle is an entity of this ghostly kind; and although the daylight has dissipated it, and positive Biology is no longer vexed with its visitations, it nevertheless reappears in another shape in the shadowy region of mystery which surrounds biological and all other questions.

Every one who has seriously investigated a novel question, who has really interrogated Nature with a view to a distinct answer, will bear me out in saying that it requires intense and sustained effort of imagination.

Science is not addressed to poets.

Human judgment is notoriously fallible and perhaps seldom more so than in facile decisions that a character has no adaptive significance because we do not know the use of it.

Our consciences are not all of the same pattern.

Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects.

You know something I could really do without? The Space Shuttle. ... It's irresponsible. The last thing we should be doing is sending our grotesquely distorted DNA out into space.

I've never owned a telescope, but it's something I'm thinking of looking into.

I had made considerable advance ... in calculations on my favourite numerical lunar theory, when I discovered that, under the heavy pressure of unusual matters (two transits of Venus and some eclipses) I had committed a grievous error in the first stage of giving numerical value to my theory. My spirit in the work was broken, and I have never heartily proceeded with it since.

You propound a complicated arithmetical problem: say cubing a number containing four digits. Give me a slate and half an hour's time, and I can produce a wrong answer.

[...] any fool can make a discovery. Every baby has to discover more in the first years of its life than Roger Bacon ever discovered in his laboratory.

Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.