Quotes on Science

In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism-beetle, moss, and so forth, is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Mozart symphony, or any other great work of art.

If words were invented to conceal thought, newspapers are a great improvement of a bad invention

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

The Universe is populated by innumerable suns, innumerable earths, and perhaps, innumerable forms of life. That thought expresses the essence of the Copernican revolution. No revelation more striking has ever come from the scientific mind.

Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day?

Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians.

Astronomy would not provide me with bread if men did not entertain hopes of reading the future in the heavens.

Spots are on the surface of the solar body where they are produced and also dissolved, some in shorter and others in longer periods. They are carried around the Sun; an important occurrence in itself.

By getting to smaller and smaller units, we do not come to fundamental or indivisible units. But we do come to a point where further division has no meaning.

The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.

The Sun, the stars and the seasons as they pass, some can gaze upon these with no strain of fear.

In the Universe the difficult things are done as if they were easy.

A day is a miniature eternity.

I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, "My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark" ... In some astonishment I asked him, "A bulwark-against what?" To which he replied, "Against the black tide of mud"-and here he hesitated for a moment, then added of occultism.

We hear in these days of scientific enlightenment a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of Prayer. Many reasons are given why we should not pray. Others give reasons why we should pray. Very little is said of the reason we do pray. The reason is simple: We pray because we cannot help praying.

We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?

The electric age ... established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system.