Quotes on Science

You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10-12 to 1.

Do not become archivists of facts. Try to penetrate to the secret of their occurrence, persistently search for the laws which govern them.

The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.

It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.

Science...is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.

We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.

Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.

The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.

The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.

Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be ``Seek simplicity and distrust it.''

Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

[Science is] a great game. It is inspiring and refreshing. The playing field is the universe itself.

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.

The usual rejoinder to someone who says 'They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Galileo' is to say 'But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown'.

Round numbers are always false.

I love only nature, and I hate mathematicians.

One of the chief triumphs of modern mathematics consists in having discovered what mathematics really is.