Quotes About Science

I am now convinced that it is better to work from science into literature than to try the reverse, though many have done so with distinction. To understand the scientific culture deeply and, even more, to express the emotions that attend scientific exploration require that the writer inhabit science for a substantial part of his life, intent upon making important discoveries and placing them within the canon.

Ethical philosophers intuit the deontological canons of morality by consulting the emotive centers of their own hypothalamic-limbic system... Only by interpreting the activity of the emotive centers as a biological adaptation can the meaning of the ethical canons be deciphered.

One of its most distinguished practitioners, Alexander Rosenberg, has recently argued that philosophy in fact addresses just two issues: the questions that the sciences—physical, biological, and social—cannot answer, and the reasons for that incapacity.

For every problem in a given discipline of science, there exists a species or other entity or phenomenon ideal for its solution. (Example: a kind of mollusk, Aplysia, proved ideal for exploring the cellular base of memory.) Conversely, for very species or other entity or phenomenon, there exist important problems for the solution of which it is ideally suited. (Example: bats were logical for the discovery of sonar.)

The early stages of a creative thought, the ones that count, do not arise from jigsaw puzzles of specialization. The most successful scientist thinks like a poet—wide-ranging, sometimes fantastical—and works like a bookkeeper. It is the latter role that the world sees.

HISTORY MAKES LITTLE SENSE WITHOUT PREHISTORY, AND PREHISTORY MAKES LITTLE SENSE WITHOUT BIOLOGY. KNOWLEDGE OF PREHISTORY AND BIOLOGY IS INCREASING RAPIDLY, BRINGING INTO FOCUS HOW HUMANITY ORIGINATED AND WHY A SPECIES LIKE OUR OWN EXISTS ON THIS PLANET.

An estimated hundred billion star systems make up the Milky Way galaxy, and astronomers believe that all are orbited by an average of at least one planet.

The unknown and prodigious are drugs to the scientific imagination, stirring insatiable hunger with a single taste.

more efficient than vegetable food.

The best of science doesn't consist of mathematical models and experiments, as textbooks make it seem. Those come later. It springs fresh from a more primitive mode of thought, wherein the hunter's mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors and the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen. To move forward is to concoct new patterns of thought, which in turn dictate the design of the models and experiments. Easy to say, difficult to achieve.

A great deal remains to be learned about the genetic control of brain development

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

Science and technology are what we can do; morality is what we agree we should or should not do.

The modern mind tends to be more and more critical and analytical in spirit, hence it must devise for itself an engine of expression which is logically defensible at every point and which tends to correspond to the rigorous spirit of modern science.

The great power of adopting a scientific approach to human behavior is the ability to unmask deep puzzles about human existence that otherwise hide in plain sight.

At best, we base our thinking on disconnected facts or snippets of scientific knowledge uninformed by a broader evolutionary perspective.

The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler.

Today's science is tomorrow's technology.

The scientist is not responsible for the laws of nature. It is his job to find out how these laws operate. It is the scientist's job to find the ways in which these laws can serve the human will. However, it is not the scientist's job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used. This responsibility rests with the American people and with their chosen representatives.

Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery's being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880's, science played almost no role in the advances of technology. For example, James Watt developed the first efficient steam engine long before science established the equivalence between mechanical heat and energy.

Science attempts to find logic and simplicity in nature. Mathematics attempts to establish order and simplicity in human thought.

The scientist is not responsible for the laws of nature. It is his job to find out how these laws operate...Hydrogen bombs will not produce themselves.

Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology.

Psychology is the science of the intellects, characters and behavior of animals including man.