Quotes About Science

In 1955, amid the great fanfare that accompanied the initial release of the [polio] vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk was asked who owned the patent. He replied, "Well, the people, I would say. Could you patent the sun?

A study indicates that whether or not a department has a mathematics or a statistics requirement is the most important single determinant of where a woman will attend graduate school to study political science.

I'm not being evasive but I am saying I'm not a scientist and I'm not directly involved in the consultation however the science must be sound, it must be agreed and the consultation must be of a high quality or no one will have any confidence in the process.

Physicists love this number not just because it is dimensionless, but also because it is a combination of three fundamental constants of nature. Why do these constants come together to make the particular number 1/137.036 and not some other number?

My background is basically scientific math. My Dad was a physicist, so I have it in my blood somewhere. Scientific method is very important to me. I think anything that contradicts it is probably not true.

The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.

I think, however, that so long as our present economic and national systems continue, scientific research has little to fear.

Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.

I heard that Jesus had a pet dinosaur. Evolution must be a myth then.

The sciences paint an impersonal and objective account of the world, deliberately devoid of "meaning", telling us about origins and mechanics of life, by revealing nothing of the joys and sorrows of living.

All knowledge is conjectural and ... science progresses through new theories coming to replace older ones when it becomes clear that a new theory is able to make sense of a greater circle of phenomena than are comprehended and explained by the older one and is able to predict new phenomena more accurately.

Now there is nothing unscientific in utilising, for the interpretation of data, any model that seems promising; and there is therefore nothing unscientific either in Freud's introduction of his model or in his own or others' employment of it. Nevertheless, the question arises whether there may by now be an alternative better suited for the purpose in hand.

Science has produced such powerful weapons that in a war between great powers there would be neither victor nor vanquished. Both would be overwhelmed in destruction.

In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2 000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods.

As I have tried to show, science, in producing the airplane and the wireless, has created a new international political environment to which governments must adjust their foreign policies.

From my informal surveys, it is very uncommon knowledge that the part of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to us is less than a ten-trillionth of it.

Publication bias is the tendency to not publish "negative," or nonconfirmatory, results.

Our conscious experience arises out of the laws of nature, the states of our brain, and our entanglement with the world.

Science, then, is the reliable acquisition of knowledge about anything, whether it be the vagaries of human nature, the role of great figures in history, or the origins of life itself.

Cancer will be understood properly only by positioning it within the great sweep of evolutionary history.

Can it be that all of physics—and, indeed, all of science—is based on creating all the matter in the universe from a dozen objects with totally random mass values, while no one has the faintest idea about their origin?

What's more, random events can mimic nonrandom ones. Even the most sophisticated scientists can have difficulty telling the difference between a real effect and a random fluke. Randomness can make placebos seem like miracle cures, or harmless compounds appear to be deadly poisons, and can even create subatomic particles out of nothing.

The most important scientific concept is that an assertion is often an empirical question, settled by collecting evidence. The plural of anecdote is not data, and the plural of opinion is not facts. Quality peer-reviewed scientific evidence accumulates into knowledge. People's stories are stories, and fiction keeps us going. But science should settle policy.

it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.