Quotes on Science

Chance... in the accommodation peculiar to sensorimotor intelligence, plays the same role as in scientific discovery. It is only useful to the genius and its revelations remain meaningless to the unskilled.

Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck, And yet methinks I have astronomy. But not to tell of good or evil luck, Of plagues, of dearths, or season's quality; Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell ... Or say with princes if it shall go well.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore; we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.

[About reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, age 14, in the back seat of his parents' sedan. I almost threw up. I got physically ill when I learned that ospreys and peregrine falcons weren't raising chicks because of what people were spraying on bugs at their farms and lawns. This was the first time I learned that humans could impact the environment with chemicals. [That a corporation would create a product that didn't operate as advertised] was shocking in a way we weren't inured to.

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.

I think chemistry is being frittered away by the hairsplitting of the organic chemists; we have new compounds discovered, which scarcely differ from the known ones and when discovered are valueless-very illustrations perhaps of their refinements in analysis, but very little aiding the progress of true science.

Consciousness ... is the phenomenon whereby the universe's very existence is made known.

Forces of nature act in a mysterious manner. We can but solve the mystery by deducing the unknown result from the known results of similar events.

To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge.

We must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.

We have three approaches at our disposal: the observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation serves to assemble the data, reflection to synthesise them and experimentation to test the results of the synthesis. The observation of nature must be assiduous, just as reflection must be profound, and experimentation accurate. These three approaches are rarely found together, which explains why creative geniuses are so rare.

Understanding science and pushing the boundaries of science is what makes me immensely satisfied.

Outside our consciousness there lies the cold and alien world of actual things. Between the two stretches the narrow borderland of the senses. No communication between the two worlds is possible excepting across the narrow strip. For a proper understanding of ourselves and of the world, it is of the highest importance that this borderland should be thoroughly explored.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

Extra dimensional theories are sometimes considered science fiction with equations. I think that's a wrong attitude. I think extra dimensions are with us, they are with us to stay, and they entered physics a long time ago. They are not going to go away.

To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.

I venture to define science as a series of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiment and observation and fruitful of further experiments and observations. The test of a scientific theory is, I suggest, its fruitfulness.

The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined.

The scientist finds his reward in what Henri Poincare calls the joy of comprehension, and not in the possibility of application to which any discovery may lead.