Science Quotes - Page 275

Medical science is as yet very imperfectly differentiated from common cure-mongering witchcraft

Certainly he who can digest a second or third fluxion need not, methinks, be squeamish about any point in divinity.

Colour, Figure, Motion, Extension and the like, considered only so many Sensations in the Mind, are perfectly known, there being nothing in them which is not perceived. But if they are looked on as notes or Images, referred to Things or Archetypes existing without the Mind, then are we involved all in Scepticism.

In my view, using technology too soon is definitely detrimental to education. I have often used the analogy 'it's like wine-tasting for first-graders'. One can be both a strong advocate of first-graders and wine-tasting, but strongly opposed to wine-tasting for first-graders.

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

How might letters be most efficiently copied so that the blind might read them with their fingers?

Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.

To see every day how people get the name 'genius' just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name 'millipede'-not because they have that many feet, but because most people don't want to count to 14-this has had the result that I don't believe anyone any more without checking.

The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of the plant.

We have to believe that everything has a cause, as the spider spins its web in order to catch flies. But it does this before it knows there are such things as flies.

The natural scientists of the previous age knew less than we do and believed they were very close to the goal: we have taken very great steps in its direction and now discover we are still very far away from it. With the most rational philosophers an increase in their knowledge is always attended by an increased conviction of their ignorance.

It is astonishing how much the word infinitely is misused: everything is infinitely more beautiful, infinitely better, etc. The concept must have something pleasing about it, or its misuse could not have become so general.

Non cogitant, ergo non sunt.

Facts speak louder than statistics.

Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.

Why are you so sure parallel lines exist? Believe nothing, merely because you have been told it, or because it is traditional, or because you have imagined it.

Bell's theorem...proves that quantum theory requires connections that appear to resemble telepathic communication.

In the year of chan yan..., Jupiter was in [the Zodiacal Division of] Zi, it rose in the morning and went under in the evening together with the Lunar Mansions Xunu, Xu and Wei. It was very large and bright. Apparently, there was a small reddish (chi) star appended (fu) to its side. This is called "an alliance" (tong meng).

When the moon is ninety degrees away from the sun it sees but half the earth illuminated (the western half). For the other (the eastern half) is enveloped in night. Hence the moon itself is illuminated less brightly from the earth, and as a result its secondary light appears fainter to us.

Spots are on the surface of the solar body where they are produced and also dissolved, some in shorter and others in longer periods. They are carried around the Sun; an important occurrence in itself.

I propose to put forward an apology for mathematics; and I may be told that it needs none, since there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy.

It is rather astonishing how little practical value scientific knowledge has for ordinary men, how dull and commonplace such of it as has value is, and how its value seems almost to vary inversely to its reputed utility.

The primes are the raw material out of which we have to build arithmetic, and Euclid's theorem assures us that we have plenty of material for the task.

Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.

The Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations have perished; Hammurabi, Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar are empty names; yet Babylonian mathematics is still interesting, and the Babylonian scale of 60 is still used in Astronomy.