Quotes on Scientific Research

Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.

These four policy prescriptions - strengthening educational opportunities, revamping immigration rules for highly skilled workers, increasing federal funding for basic scientific research, and providing incentives for private-sector R&D - should in my view be top priorities as Congress and the Administration consider how to maintain the nation's leadership in science, technology, and innovation.

Scientific research was much like prospecting: you went out and you hunted, armed with your maps and instruments, but in the ened your preparations did not matter, or even your intuition. You needed your luck, and whatever benefits accrued to the diligent, through sheer, grinding hard work.

Conventional measures of mental ability, such as intelligence tests and scholarship, show some of the very highest records belong to INFP and INFJ types, who relegate thinking to last place or next to last. The preference for thinking appears to have far less intellectual effect than the preference for intuition, even in some technical fields, such as scientific research, where its influence was expected to be most important.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.

Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

The third class consists of men to whom nothing seems great but reason. If force interests them, it is not in its exertion, but in that it has a reason and a law. For men of the first class, nature is a picture; for men of the second class, it is an opportunity; for men of the third class, it is a cosmos, so admirable, that to penetrate to its ways seems to them the only thing that makes life worth living. These are the men whom we see possessed by a passion to learn.

The wealthiest Americans often live as though they and their children had nothing to gain from investments in education, infrastructure, clean-energy, and scientific research.

Science is simply common sense at its best.

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

Although I know of no reference to Christ ever commenting on scientific work, I do know that He said, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Thus I am certain that, were He among us today, Christ would encourage scientific research as modern man's most noble striving to comprehend and admire His Father's handiwork. The universe as revealed through scientific inquiry is the living witness that God has indeed been at work.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

Basic scientific research is scientific capital.