Quotes on Science

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

The birth of science was the death of superstition.

The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science.

It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human invention; it is only the application of them that is human.

It is ... a sign of the times-though our brothers of physics and chemistry may smile to hear me say so-that biology is now a science in which theories can be devised: theories which lead to predictions and predictions which sometimes turn out to be correct. These facts confirm me in a belief I hold most passionately-that biology is the heir of all the sciences.

Indeed, the most important part of engineering work-and also of other scientific work-is the determination of the method of attacking the problem, whatever it may be, whether an experimental investigation, or a theoretical calculation. ... It is by the choice of a suitable method of attack, that intricate problems are reduced to simple phenomena, and then easily solved.

A man of science rises ever, in seeking truth; and if he never finds it in its wholeness, he discovers nevertheless very significant fragments; and these fragments of universal truth are precisely what constitutes science.

At their best, at their most creative, science and engineering are attributes of liberty-noble expressions of man's God-given right to investigate and explore the universe without fear of social or political or religious reprisals.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

I would teach the world that science is the best way to understand the world and that for any set of observations, there is only one correct explanation. Also, science is value-free, as it explains the world as it is. Ethical issues arise only when science is applied to technology - from medicine to industry.

Method means that arrangement of subject matter which makes it most effective in use. Never is method something outside of the material.

HOMOEOPATHY, n. A school of medicine midway between Allopathy and Christian Science. To the last both the others are distinctly inferior, for Christian Science will cure imaginary diseases, and they can not.

ORTHOGRAPHY, n. The science of spelling by the eye instead of the ear.

The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale. We have killed thousands of our fellow human beings because we believed they had signed a contract with the devil, and had become witches. We still kill more than a thousand people each year for witchcraft. In my view, there is only one hope for humankind to emerge from what Carl Sagan called "the demon-haunted world" of our past. That hope is science.

We have spent the best part of the past century enthusiastically testing the world to utter destruction; not looking closely enough at the long-term impact our actions will have.

It is no part of a physician's business to use either persuasion or compulsion upon the patients.

Plasma seems to have the kinds of properties one would like for life. It's somewhat like liquid water--unpredictable and thus able to behave in an enormously complex fashion. It could probably carry as much information as DNA does. It has at least the potential for organizing itself in interesting ways.

But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

But the power of science lies in open publication, which, with the rise of the Internet, is no longer constrained by the price of paper.

Our world faces a crisis as yet unperceived by those possessing power to make great decisions for good or evil. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

All significant breakthroughs are break -“withs” old ways of thinking.