Quotes About Science

What the mediocrity principle tells us is that our state is not the product of intent, that the universe lacks both malice and benevolence, but that everything does follow rules—and that grasping those rules should be the goal of science. THE POINTLESS UNIVERSE SEAN CARROLL Theoretical physicist, Caltech; author, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time THE WORLD CONSISTS of things, which obey rules.

Karl Popper famously suggested the criterion of "falsifiability": A theory is scientific if it makes clear predictions that can be unambiguously falsified.

Some places in the world, such as Ramsar, Iran, have a tenfold higher background radiation

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

new ideas take over a vacuum formerly occupied by no well-articulated idea at all. That happens for either of two reasons: new ideas responding to new information made possible by new measurements, or else responding to new "outlooks." (Among historians of science, the term used rather than the inadequate English term "outlook" is the German Fragestellung—literally, the posing of a question, but more broadly meaning a worldview from which that question can arise.)

Perhaps the greatest pleasure in science comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way. These

new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

in its quest to prove itself as the supreme form of secular knowledge, science has inadvertently elevated itself into a theology.

Science is not a practice so much as an ideology.

The human microbiome in our gut, mouth, skin, and elsewhere, harbors three thousand kinds of bacteria with 3 million distinct genes. (Our own cells struggle by on only eighteen thousand genes or so.)

RIDLEY Science writer; founding chairman, International Centre for Life; author, The Rational Optimist

The famous Canadian physician William Osler once wrote, "In science the credit goes to the man who convinced the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.

CAPTURE CHARLES SEIFE Professor of journalism, NYU; former staff writer, Science; author, Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception

In 1900, Lord Kelvin, the great British physicist, put it clearly: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

optimization under constraints," and many Nobel prizes have been awarded in this area. Using the concept of bounded rationality

The science of morality requires us to, in the end, get beyond the myth of a perfectly objective scientific morality.

If the evidence says you're wrong, you don't have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.

Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.

If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the miraculous universe.

Do you have anything—a cross, a bible?" I asked him. "Course not! I'm a man of science." "And if the shadow that wields the Great Fear manifests here?" "I'll hide behind you and cry like a girl, as befits a man of science.

We regard promissory materialism as superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists . . . who often confuse their religion with their science.

contrary to an all-too-common misjudgement, it is not the case that theology and science are chalk and cheese, a matter of airy opinion compared with solid fact. Nor does the essential difference between them lie in a contrast between belief on the basis of submission to an unquestionable authority and belief based on grounds of rational motivation.