Quotes on Science

I have been much amused at ye singular phenomena resulting from bringing of a needle into contact with a piece of amber or resin fricated on silke clothe. Ye flame putteth me in mind of sheet lightning on a small-how very small-scale.

There is only one thing worse than coming home from the lab to a sink full of dirty dishes, and that is not going to the lab at all!

Descartes constructed as noble a road of science, from the point at which he found geometry to that to which he carried it, as Newton himself did after him. ... He carried this spirit of geometry and invention into optics, which under him became a completely new art.

Men are rather beholden ... generally to chance or anything else, than to logic, for the invention of arts and sciences.

Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought.

Frege has the merit of ... finding a third assertion by recognising the world of logic which is neither mental nor physical.

What is a good definition? For the philosopher or the scientist, it is a definition which applies to all the objects to be defined, and applies only to them; it is that which satisfies the rules of logic. But in education it is not that; it is one that can be understood by the pupils.

If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.

The truth of a theory can never be proven, for one never knows if future experience will contradict its conclusions.

Chimpanzees are an evolutionary hair's-width from us.... Now imagine a species on Earth, or anywhere else, as smart compared with humans as humans are compared with chimpanzees. How much of the universe might they figure out?

I don't know all the reasons for these achievements, but I know that I love what I do and I have never wanted to rest on my laurels.

Instruction ends in the schoolroom, but education ends only with life. A child is given to the universe to be educated.

When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odour that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid. What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid? Then no matter how strapping and vigourous it might be, it is carried kicking and screaming out of the hive.

A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers.

The brain is a three pound mass you can hold in your hand that can conceive of a universe a hundred billion light-years across.

Chaos theory, a more recent invention, is equally fertile ground for those with a bent for abusing sense. It is unfortunately named, for 'chaos' implies randomness. Chaos in the technical sense is not random at all. It is completely determined, but it depends hugely, in strangely hard-to-predict ways, on tiny differences in initial conditions.

It may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena.

I am mindful that scientific achievement is rooted in the past, is cultivated to full stature by many contemporaries and flourishes only in favorable environment. No individual is alone responsible for a single stepping stone along the path of progress, and where the path is smooth progress is most rapid. In my own work this has been particularly true.