Quotes About Science

microbial resistance to antibiotics…

Une philosophie du vice Passa pour science des délices

Philosophy cannot be taught; it is the application of the sciences to truth.

My son, philosophy as I understand it, is reducible to no rules by which it can be learned; it is the amalgamation of all the sciences, the golden cloud which bears the soul to heaven.

Magick is the science and art of causing change (in consciousness) to occur in conformity with will, using means not currently understood by traditional Western science . . ." In this case "will" is understood not in terms of the individual's petty wants and desires, but rather as an intention that is in harmony with the fundamental essence of the individual's Higher Self, and also in full accord with natural or cosmic law.

I think there is a tendency in science to measure what is measurable and to decide that what you cannot measure must be uninteresting.

When historian of science Naomi Oreskes surveyed all peer-reviewed papers on climate change published between 1993 and 2003 in the world's leading scientific journal, Science, she found that there were 980 supporting the idea of human-induced global warming and none opposing it.

Ours is a time of space telescopes, electron microscopes, supercomputers, and the worldwide web. This is not a time for parsing the lessons given to a few goatherds, tentmakers, and camel drivers. Rev. Michael Dowd, Thank God for Evolution!

The fossil record quietly accounts for me...

As Marion Montgomery, summarizing Etienne Gilson, puts it, "We know, and know that we know, that life and meaning have real existence, though science cannot substantiate that reality because the reality at issue lies in a dimension of immateriality."4

All those "why" questions are rooted in culture, which is to say, in ethical beliefs. I emphasize the point not to denigrate the achievements of scientists, but only to remind that natural science cannot by itself fathom the sources of the crisis it has identified, for the sources lie not in the nature that scientists study but in the human nature and, especially, in the human culture that historians and other humanists have made their study.

Too often science seems oblivious to the fact that human beings have been interacting with nature over a long period of time ... and that what we mean by nature is, to some extent, a product of that history.

Giving all due respect to the present generation of scientists who have worked hard to give us the most reliable account of nature they can, historians nonetheless find the scientific ideas of other eras intrinsically interesting, often as interesting as those of our own day, and for all we know, they are valid in their own way.

So we are making a pathway across the levee that separates nature from culture, science from history, matter from mind.

Storing information means increasing the complexity of the mechanism.

If current predictions of population growth prove accurate and patterns of human activity on the planet remain unchanged, science and technology may not be able to prevent either irreversible degradation of the environment or continued poverty for much of the world. —ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON AND U.S. NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, 1992

If we profess to be teaching Yoga, which is a science and art of living, we must practice that way of living ourselves. If we wish only to teach poses or postures, it would be better to call what we do by a name other than Yoga.

Just six hours of meditation training and eleven hours of practice have been shown to strengthen the white matter tracks in brain regions that help to govern our emotional reactivity.

Cooper Jax had, basically, proposed to her. Then he'd walked all up and down a kelp-covered, low-tide seashore and listened to her enumerate the reasons why they couldn't even contemplate such a union. Right before kissing her in a way that defied science and made her wonder if she might need a pregnancy test, before pretty much declaring he was going to spend the next four weeks making it as impossible for her to say no to his doing that again, and maybe more, as he could.

The difference between science and philosophy is that the scientist learns more and more about less and less until she knows everything about nothing, whereas a philosopher learns less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything. There is truth in this clever crack, but, as Niels Bohr impressed, while the opposite of a trivial truth is false, the opposite of a great truth is another great truth.

I could not understand scientific truths, why should I worry about understanding spiritual truths of religion? I wanted to say yes, this is true.

scientists are using advanced genomic theories and technologies to create a new racial science that claims to divide the human species into natural groups without the taint of racism.

Traditional Blackfeet saw the natural world in terms of awe and mystery. Animals lived in metaphorical relationships to them; the creatures were other nations. Every plant and animal passed coded information to man. Part of the price western science has paid for analytical power is that it has transformed the natural world into something alien.

All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.