Quotes About Science

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20–20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination—"unstuckness," in other words—are completely outside its domain.

If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you. It does it often enough anyway even when you don't give it opportunities.

The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one's work so as to obtain an objective, true picture of reality.

What we have here is a conflict of visions of reality. The world as you see it right here, right now, is reality, regardless of what the scientists say it might be. That's the way John sees it. But the world as revealed by its scientific discoveries is also reality, regardless of how it may appear

Real science and real philosophy are not guided by preconceptions of what subjects are important to consider. That

They contain no matter," I continue, "and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people's minds.

A man conducting a gee-whiz science show with fifty thousand dollars' worth of Frankenstein equipment is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his efforts are going to be. A motorcycle mechanic, on the other hand, who honks the horn to see if the battery works is informally conducting a true scientific experiment. He is testing a hypothesis by putting the question to nature.

The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are "value free," that is, "quality free," has got to go.

that when the Platypus was discovered, scientists said it was a paradox. But Pirsig's point was it was never a paradox or an oddity. It didn't make sense only to the scientists because they viewed the nature of animals according to their own classification, when nature did not have any.

A very strong case can be made for the statement that science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answers.

The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself. And what Phaedrus saw in the isolation of his own laboratory work years ago is now seen everywhere in the technological world today. Scientifically produced antiscience—chaos.

1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments.

The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know.

The ideas, the things I was saying about science and ghosts, and even that idea this afternoon about caring and technology—they are not my own. I haven't really had a new idea in years.

One must be extremely careful and rigidly logical when dealing with Nature: one logical slip and an entire scientific edifice comes tumbling down. One false deduction about the machine and you can get hung up indefinitely.

Science works with chunks and bits and pieces of things with the continuity presumed, and DeWeese works only with the continuities of things with the chunks and bits and pieces presumed.

If subjectivity is eliminated as unimportant, he said, then the entire body of science must be eliminated with it.

The dualistic mind tends to think of mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but mu is found throughout all scientific investigation, and nature doesn't cheat

the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can't escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don't get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It's that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, it's just that that doesn't make it bad. Or ghosts either.

Science provides us with some of the most elegant, stimulating puzzles that life has to offer. It throws some of the most provocative ideas into our arenas of moral debate. Occasionally, it improves our lives. I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means that you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.

Parts of the book describe work carried out in my own laboratory, and these studies have been made possible by funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Klingenstein Fund, the Alzheimer's Association, and the Adler Foundation.

you can't begin to understand things like aggression, competition, cooperation, and empathy without biology; I say this for the benefit of a certain breed of social scientist who finds biology to be irrelevant and a bit ideologically suspect when thinking about human social behavior.

Cuando haya acabado de leer este libro, verá que, al hablar de los distintos aspectos de un comportamiento, no tiene sentido distinguir entre los que son «biológicos» y aquellos que podrían ser descritos por ejemplo como «psicológicos» o «culturales». Están totalmente entrelazados.

Perhaps the best moral is that when doing science (or perhaps when doing anything at all in a society as judgmental as our own), be very careful and very certain before pronouncing something to be the norm—because at that instant, you have made it supremely difficult to ever again look objectively at an exception to that supposed norm.