Quotes on Science

A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one ever asks the inventor what he thinks of other people.

Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact, it isn't like it, it is it.

To give a causal explanation of an event means to deduce a statement which describes it, using as premises of the deduction one or more universal laws, together with certain singular statements, the initial conditions ... We have thus two different kinds of statement, both of which are necessary ingredients of a complete causal explanation.

His [Erwin Schrödinger's] private life seemed strange to bourgeois people like ourselves. But all this does not matter. He was a most lovable person, independent, amusing, temperamental, kind and generous, and he had a most perfect and efficient brain.

Life ... is a relationship between molecules.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads,_x000D_ _x000D_ Rising thro' the mellow shade,_x000D_ _x000D_ Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies,_x000D_ _x000D_ Tangled in a silver braid.

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !

I feel it is now my duty to speak to young women, to encourage them to have careers and, particularly, careers in science.

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

The application of algebra to geometry ... has immortalized the name of Descartes, and constitutes the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences.

Everyone in the astronaut program has a degree in a science field. The crew are the ones who do the experiments, help to design some of the experiments that come from other primary researchers. So it becomes very important that you have a science background.

Religions are tough. Either they make no contentions which are subject to disproof or they quickly redesign doctrine after disproof. ... near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

The world was full of locked doors, and he had to get his hand on every key.

The existence of these patterns [fractals] challenges us to study forms that Euclid leaves aside as being formless, to investigate the morphology of the amorphous. Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel.

Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician.

A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.