Quotes on Science

I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.

The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.

To the scientist, nature is always and merely a 'phenomenon,' not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them.

What I perceive in science fiction is that it's more about how everything looks than what's going on, which I think is just difficult if you're an action character. I think they are about character, not about what it looks like.

Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but ... hypotheses may not.

Man does not limit himself to seeing; he thinks and insists on learning the meaning of phenomena whose existence has been revealed to him by observation. So he reasons, compares facts, puts questions to them, and by the answers which he extracts, tests one by another. This sort of control, by means of reasoning and facts, is what constitutes experiment, properly speaking; and it is the only process that we have for teaching ourselves about the nature of things outside us.

We must never make experiments to confirm our ideas, but simply to control them.

We must alter theory to adapt it to nature, but not nature to adapt it to theory.‎

As, pricked out with less and greater lights, between the poles of the universe, the Milky Way so gleameth white as to set very sages questioning.

Emotions are a source of power, and that's what science tells us. But many people I encounter have been led to think of emotions as a source of weakness.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

When I went to my local grammar school, Lurgan College, girls were not encouraged to study science. My parents hit the roof and, along with other parents, demanded a curriculum change.

You know something I could really do without? The Space Shuttle. ... It's irresponsible. The last thing we should be doing is sending our grotesquely distorted DNA out into space.

Every generation has the right to build its own world out of the materials of the past, cemented by the hopes of the future.

Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do. You've got to have standards.

The Nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

Non-violence ... is the only thing that the atom bomb cannot destroy.

It's often better to read first-rate science fiction than second-rate science - it's far more stimulating, and perhaps no more likely to be wrong.

The eye, the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding can most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature; and the ear is second.

Science is complex and chilling. The mathematical language of science is understood by very few. The vistas it presents are scary-an enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal rules, empty and uncaring, ungraspable and vertiginous. How comfortable to turn instead to a small world, only a few thousand years old, and under God's personal; and immediate care; a world in which you are His peculiar concern.

A mathematician's work is mostly a tangle of guesswork, analogy, wishful thinking and frustration, and proof, far from being the core of discovery, is more often than not a way of making sure that our minds are not playing tricks.