Quotes on Science

Ever since Newton, we've done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we're now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.

Time... is an essential requirement for effective research. An investigator may be given a palace to live in, a perfect laboratory to work in, he may be surrounded by all the conveniences money can provide; but if his time is taken from him he will remain sterile.

We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance.

It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.

Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things. But to use and apply that language, we must be able fully to appreciate, to feel, to seize the unseen, the unconscious.

Science now finds itself in paradoxical strife with society: admired but mistrusted; offering hope for the future but creating ambiguous choice; richly supported yet unable to fulfill all its promise; boasting remarkable advances but criticized for not serving more directly the goals of society.

At its heart, engineering is about using science to find creative, practical solutions. It is a noble profession.

Unless we make computer science a priority, we risk making gender, class, and racial disparities worse as jobs flow to those with a computer science background.

In the past, there was active discrimination against women in science. That has now gone, and although there are residual effects, these are not enough to account for the small numbers of women, particularly in mathematics and physics.

Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works.

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.

I am fascinated by the engineering. The science of constructing and understanding why it stands. And I am drawn by the madness, the beauty, the theatricality, the poetry and soul of the wire. And you cannot be a wire-walker without mingling those two ways of seeing life.

The brain is one of the richest green fields of science. There's so much yet to be discovered.

I claim that all those who think they can cherry-pick science simply don't understand how science works. That's what I claim. And if they did, they'd be less prone to just assert that somehow scientists are clueless.

My parents didn't know much science; in fact, they didn't know science at all. But they could recognize a science book when they saw it, and they spent a lot of time at bookstores, combing the remainder tables for science books to buy for me. I had one of the biggest libraries of any kid in school, built on books that cost 50 cents or a dollar.

Physics is often stranger than science fiction, and I think science fiction takes its cues from physics: higher dimensions, wormholes, the warping of space and time, stuff like that.

There is an ever-widening gap between what science allows and what we should actually do. There are many doors science can open that should be kept closed, on prudential or ethical grounds.

Travel stories teach geography; insect stories lead the child into natural science; and so on. The teacher, in short, can use reading to introduce her pupils to the most varied subjects; and the moment they have been thus started, they can go on to any limit guided by the single passion for reading.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.

My father, Donald, came from Jamaica to study economics. My mother, Shyamala, came from India to study the science of fighting disease.

Widening the talent pipeline sufficiently will require a generational commitment to teaching math and science, providing technical training, and mentoring young people of all backgrounds so they understand the full range of possibilities that a career in technology affords.