Quotes About Science

More and more, as I think about history," he pondered, "I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever." *

With all his amateurish fumbling, Martin had one characteristic without which there can be no science: a wide-ranging, sniffing, snuffling, undignified, unselfdramatizing curiosity, and it drove him on.

I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.

É arriscado especular antes de ter dados na mão...inconscientemente começa-se a torcer os factos para os acomodar às teorias, em vez de fazer as teorias coincidirem com os factos.

The Greeks, who gave us history, philosophy and political science, never managed to solve the problems posed by their political disunity;

Life became a science when interest shifted from the dissection of dead bodies to the study of action in living beings and the nature of the environment they live in.

A scientist is in a sense a learned small boy. There is something of the scientist in every small boy. Others must outgrow it. Scientists can stay that way all their lives.

The hypothesis that life has developed from inorganic matter is, at present, still an article of faith.

With Charles Woods, it was the first time I had ever seen tissue from a dead person used to save a human life. It piqued my curiosity.

When I was a grad student at MIT, I had a chance to become friends with the Viking Mission's chief scientist, Dr. Gerald Soffen. Viking was the first Mars lander looking for signs of life on Mars.

Not so the scientist. The very essence of his life is the service of truth.

Life is a DNA software system.

Neuron is to Consciousness, what D.N.A. is to Life. Thus, Biology of Mind is to the twenty-first century, what Biology of Life was to the twentieth century.

Philosophy is to religion as psychoanalysis is to pseudoscience

How is it that food STILL contains calories that make you gain weight in the 21st CENTURY?! It's like scientists aren't even trying!

I've put a lot of my life into making it possible to fly in space at all.

There are few aspects of everyday life that aren't touched by the technologies developed for space travel.

Does light go faster when it goes downhill?

Never question the conviction of a scientist, based on mere scriptures.

The X chromosome does most of the heavy developmental lifting, while the little Y has been shedding its associated genes at a rate of about five every one million years, committing suicide in slow motion. It's now down to less than 100 genes. By comparison, the X chromosome carries about 1,500 genes, all necessary participants in embryonic construction projects. These are not showing any signs of decay.

Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other.

There's a rich irony, in other words, in the insistence that magical thinking is less useful than scientific thinking, because magical thinking is exactly the form of human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and goals that scientific thinking handles so poorly.

The British general election of 2010 returned only three MPs to the Commons who described their professions as "science or research" (compared with thirty-eight barristers).

Physics is imagination in a straight jacket.