Science Quotes - Page 47

The purpose of science is to develop, without prejudice or preconception of any kind, a knowledge of the facts, the laws, and the processes of nature. The even more important task of religion, on the other hand, is to develop the consciences, the ideals, and the aspirations of mankind.

A designer must always think about the unfortunate production engineer who will have to manufacture what you have designed; try to understand his problems.

Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliché. When you try to prove a theorem, you don't just list the hypotheses, and then start to reason. What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork.

Every human activity, good or bad, except mathematics, must come to an end.

Hopes are always accompanied by fears, and, in scientific research, the fears are liable to become dominant.

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.

Live in the serene peace of laboratories and libraries

Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly.

It has cost them but a moment to cut off that head; but a hundred years will not be sufficient to produce another like it.

Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed: It is safe, and you can't get safer than safe.

'Tis the witching hour of night, Orbed is the moon and bright. And the stars they glisten, glisten, Seeming with bright eyes to listen- For what listen they?

On our planet, all objects are subject to continual and inevitable changes which arise from the essential order of things. These changes take place at a variable rate according to the nature, condition, or situation of the objects involved, but are nevertheless accomplished within a certain period of time. Time is insignificant and never a difficulty for Nature. It is always at her disposal and represents an unlimited power with which she accomplishes her greatest and smallest tasks.

[It] is the little causes, long continued, which are considered as bringing about the greatest changes of the earth.

In your letter you apply the word imponderable to a molecule. Don't do that again. It may also be worth knowing that the aether cannot be molecular. If it were, it would be a gas, and a pint of it would have the same properties as regards heat, etc., as a pint of air, except that it would not be so heavy.

Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.

We need to substitute for the book a device that will make it easy to transmit information without transporting material.

Yoga is the art and science of living.

Who could believe in the prophecies ... that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds.

A good simulation, be it a religious myth or scientific theory, gives us a sense of mastery over experience. To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it one's own. But with this appropriation comes the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion.

I ran into the gigantic and gigantically wasteful lumbering of great Sequoias, many of whose trunks were so huge they had to be blown apart before they could be handled. I resented then, and I still resent, the practice of making vine stakes hardly bigger than walking sticks out of these greatest of living things.

There was a young fellow from Trinity, Who took the square root of infinity. But the number of digits, Gave him the fidgets; He dropped Math and took up Divinity.

Gentlemen, now you will see that now you see nothing. And why you see nothing you will see presently.

I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.

You all have learned reliance On the sacred teachings of Science, So I hope, through life, you will never decline In spite of philistine Defiance To do what all good scientists do. Experiment. Make it your motto day and night. Experiment. And it will lead you to the light.

Nature seems to take advantage of the simple mathematical representations of the symmetry laws. When one pauses to consider the elegance and the beautiful perfection of the mathematical reasoning involved and contrast it with the complex and far-reaching physical consequences, a deep sense of respect for the power of the symmetry laws never fails to develop.