Quotes About Science

We now witness the constructive work on a foundation that will endure through the ages. That foundation is the god of science - revealed to us in terms that will harmonize with our intelligence.

The most important thing we can do is inspire young minds and to advance the kind of science, math and technology education that will help youngsters take us to the next phase of space travel.

the best things in science are both beautiful and simple, a fact that all too many teacher conceal from their students, by accident or design.

true story of quantum mechanics, a truth far stranger than any fiction.

It isn't just that Bohr's atom with its electron "orbits" is a false picture; all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.

Sir Arthur Eddington summed up the situation brilliantly in his book The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1929. "No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron," he said, and our best description of the atom boils down to "something unknown is doing we don't know what".

From this", says Schrödinger, "I learned many things, but not religion." His favourite question was, "Sir, do you really believe that?

If the business of physics is ever finished, the world will be a much less interesting place in which to live . . .

At one point, Einstein had commented: 'It is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe.

Reality' is the idea that there is a real world that exists whether or not anyone is looking at it, or measuring it.

The lack of solutions to the Three-Body Problem is not caused by our human deficiencies as mathematicians, it is build into the laws of mathematics.

There is no absolute truth at the quantum level

The goal of science is to make the wonderful and complex understandable and simple—but not less wonderful. —Herb Simon, Sciences of the Artificial

This reading of the biblical text has not been imposed on it by the demands of science, but science has prompted a more careful examination of precisely what the text is claiming.

Genesis is not metaphysically neutral—it mandates an affirmation of teleology (purpose), even as it leaves open the descriptive mechanism for material origins.

If God were intent on making his revelation correspond to science, we have to ask which science. We

We gain nothing by bringing God's revelation into accordance with today's science. In contrast, it makes perfect sense that God communicated his revelation to his immediate audience in terms they understood.

The objective is for public education to inform students of scientifically plausible mechanisms without straying from empirical science into metaphysical teleology or dysteleology

The idea that people think with their hearts describes physiology in ancient terms for the communication of other matters; it is not revelation concerning physiology. Consequently we need not try to come up with a physiology for our times that would explain how people think with their entrails. But a serious concordist would have to do so to save the reputation of the Bible. Concordists believe the Bible must agree—be in concord with—all the findings of contemporary science.

Convergence assumes that scientific discoveries matter to faith.

The principal aim of this book has been to reveal something of the complexity of the relationship between science and religion as they have interacted in the past. Popular generalizations about that relationship, whether couched in terms of war or peace, simply do not stand up to serious investigation. There is no such thing as the relationship between science and religion.

The possibilities of Evolution as an alternative religion were similarly perceived by a later popularizer, Wilhelm Bölsche, who spoke of the scientific movement as having effected a "Second Reformation." There had been an Old and a New Testament; now there was a third, the testament of science, which transcended both.

By the time I finally finished writing The End of Science , I'd concluded that people don't give a shit about science.... They don't give a shit about quantum mechanics or the Big Bang. As a mass society, our interest in those subjects is trivial. People are much more interested in making money, finding love, and attaining status and prestige. So I'm not really sure if a post-science world would be any different than the world of today.

At heart I'm still a straight-laced, fuddy-duddy science journalist who believes, knows, that science can discover true facts about the world. But my view of truth has become more expansive lately.