Quotes About Science

More than any previous work, Galileo's Dialogue showed that if Copernicus wasn't right on every detail of the working of the solar system, Aristotle and Ptolemy were both very clearly wrong. The first printing sold out almost at once.

Over time Ficino, Colet, and their colleagues raised the art of recovering a corrupt text's lost meaning to a science, which they called philology. Cleaning up and clearing up the written works of antiquity became an Italian, and Florentine, specialty, as philology uncovered new or startling meanings in even the most familiar documents

the version of technology we live with most closely resembles the one that Scots such as James Watt organized and perfected. It rests on certain basic principles that the Scottish Enlightenment enshrined: common sense, experience as our best source of knowledge, and arriving at scientific laws by testing general hypotheses through individual experiment and trial and error.

This steadfast devotion to Latin and Greek as the basis of a liberal education instead of science or math, however, did not start as willful blindness or upper-class bias.24 It simply reflected the fact that in Erasmus's time, both languages were essential for reading the printed books of the day and for understanding Scripture as the first step toward reforming an intellectually bankrupt Church.

This was perhaps the final irony. Galileo the obedient Roman Catholic became an overnight Protestant hero. He would be remembered as a champion not only of science, but of the principle of free inquiry versus papist tyranny, in Milton's words "a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscans and Dominicans licensed.

Greek science on Aristotle's terms, which had already fallen into decrepitude under the late Roman Empire, will take a long hiatus during the Middle Ages.

Galileo soon saw it was easier to explain phenomena like tides if you assumed the earth was not stationary, as Aristotle and Ptolemy had taught, but actually in motion.

In effect, Aristotle's logic offered the possibility of creating a universally true science out of anything—or of deconstructing claims of being a science.

The philosophy wars in Athens between 300 and 200 BCE weary readers and scholars alike. What matters here is that they knocked mathematics and science out from the pride of place they had occupied in Plato's Academy. Plato had wanted all his students to be master mathematicians and astronomers, as well as exemplars of virtue, especially since he believed knowledge of the one pointed the way to understanding of the other.

The seventeenth century would be the great "century of genius" in science. It was the age of Galileo, Harvey, Boyle, and of course Newton. The political and social systems of Europe, however, seemed to have stalled out. Through his dark reading of Aristotle, Machiavelli had left behind a dilemma and a paradox.

Strato the Physicist. His appointment sent a clear signal that the natural and physical sciences would be the Lyceum's focus in the future, just as ethics and formal philosophy would be the future focus at the Academy.

And both were working on the same problem from different ends. This was figuring out how human beings fit into an infinite universe—and how we can salvage our freedom from the forces of blind necessity, in either the physical or the political realms. The answer they found was the nature of nature itself, as the product of a Beneficent Creator. Like Newton, behind nature and reason Locke always recognized the person and voice of God.

Strato's arrival in that thriving port city was a landmark event in the history of Greek science. At one stroke Strato was leaving Athens, the ancient city of philosophers, intellectuals, and cosmopolitan aristocrats, for Alexandria, a new city of international businessmen, mathematicians, and engineers.

Aristotle is the true father of science and scientific method, by which we still mean a methodical process of observation, classification, and discovery.

One could say that Aristotle had turned Plato on his head. Instead of the individual being a pale copy of a more real abstract form, the universal is less real (indeed only a copy) of the individual.15 This reversal left Aristotle's philosophy with a built-in bias in favor of the individual: in science, in metaphysics, in ethics, and later in politics.

If co-operation, is thus the lifeblood of science and technology, it is similarly vital to society as a whole.

To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher.

Spreken over iets wat je niet begrijpt is onnozel, ernaar vragen slim. Wat is wetenschap anders dan uitkomen voor je onwetendheid? Je kunt immers alleen iets leren waar je nog geen weet van hebt.

My personal conviction is that science is concerned wholly with truth, not with ethics.

Just the Human Genome Project alone is the Full Employment Act for bioethicists.

The use of fetuses as organ and tissue donors is a ticking time bomb of bioethics.

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.

He had always told her that there was only one existence, one science, one religion, that the external world was but a variegated shadow which might either conceal or reveal the truth; and now she believed. He had shewn her that bodily rapture might be the ritual and expression of the ineffable mysteries, of the world beyond sense, that must be entered by the way of sense; and now she believed.

The two most common elements in the world are hydrogen and stupidity.