Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.
Interpretation
Science is intriguing, but engineering applies scientific knowledge to create impactful solutions.
In this quote, Isaac Asimov emphasizes the distinction between science and engineering. While science can captivate and stimulate our curiosity about the natural world, it is engineering that utilizes this scientific understanding to drive practical advancements and tangible changes in society. This highlights the importance of both fields, but underscores that true world-altering innovations come from applying scientific principles through engineering.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech at a science fair to inspire young engineers.
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies.
Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process.
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation.
Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.
A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.
During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.
We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics.
My feeling is that scientific method has the power to account for and interlink all phenomena in the universe, including its origin, using the laws of nature. But that still leaves the laws unexplained.
We're going to need a definitive quantum theory of gravity, which is part of a grand unified theory - it's the main missing piece.
Science is composed of laws which were originally based on a small, carefully selected set of observations, often not very accurately measured originally; but the laws have later been found to apply over much wider ranges of observations and much more accurately than the original data justified.
[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.
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