Quotes About Science

And yet, by three incorrect steps and their even more correct defence, Kepler stumbled on the correct law. It is perhaps the most amazing sleep-walking performance in the history of science-except for the manner in which he found his First Law, to which we now turn.

The problem of the planetary orbits had been hopelessly bogged down in its purely geometrical frame of reference, and when Kepler realized that he could not get it unstuck, he tore it out of that frame and removed it into the field of physics. This operation of removing a problem from its traditional context and placing it into a new one, looking at it through glasses of of a different colour as it were, has always seemed to me of the very essence of the creative process.

Theoretical physics is no longer concerned with things, but with the mathematical relations between abstractions which are the residue of the vanished things.

What made Newton's postulate nevertheless a modern Law of Nature, was his mathematical formulation of the mysterious entity to which it referred. And that formulation Newton deduced from the discoveries of Kepler - who had intuitively glimpsed gravity, and shied away from it. In such crooked ways does the tree of science grow.

Philosophy is the gaseous state of thought, Science its liquid state, Religion its rigid state. In all three states doubts are expressed regarding the necessity, and even the possibility, of absolute death. We shall discuss this doubt only in its liquid state. . . .

there are no frontiers where the realm of science ends and that of art begins, and the uomo universale of the Renaissance was a citizen of both.

I merely wish to point out that some of the major break-throughs in the history of science represent such dramatic tours de force, that 'ripeness' seems a very lame explanation, and 'chance' no explanation at all. Einstein discovered the principle of relativity 'unaided by any observation that had not been available for at least fifty years before'; the plum was overripe, yet for half a century nobody came to pluck it.

The creative act of the humorist consisted in bringing about a momentary fusion between two habitually incompatible matrices. Scientific discovery, as we shall presently see, can be described in very similar terms-as the permanent fusion of matrices of thought previously believed to be incompatible.

In his later years Faraday withdrew almost completely from social contacts, refusing even the presidency of the Royal Academy because of its too worldly disposition. The inhuman self-denials imposed by his creed made Faraday canalize his ferocious vitality into the pursuit of science, which he regarded as the only other permissible form of divine worship.

Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.

Lack of the power to discriminate is no less evident in the sciences, namely in the tenacious life of false and refuted theories. Once come into general credit, they continue to defy truth for centuries. - On Various Subjects

The possibilities and probabilities are all we have to work with in medicine, though. What we are drawn to in this imperfect science, what we in fact covet in our way, is the alterable moment-the fragile but crystalline opportunity for one's know-how, ability, or just gut instinct to change the course of another's life for the better.

sometime over the last several decades—and it is only over the last several decades—science has filled in enough knowledge to make ineptitude as much our struggle as ignorance.

Indeed, the scientific effort to improve performance in medicine—an effort that at present gets only a miniscule portion of scientific budgets—can arguably save more lives in the next decade than bench science, more lives than research on the genome, stem cell therapy, cancer vaccines, and all the other laboratory work we hear about in the news.

My third answer for becoming a positive deviant: Count something. Regardless of what one ultimately does in medicine—or outside medicine, for that matter—one should be a scientist in the world....If you count something you find interesting, you will learn something interesting.

MODERN SCIENTIFIC CAPABILITY has profoundly altered the course of human life. People live longer and better than at any other time in history. But scientific advances have turned the processes of aging and dying into medical experiences, matters to be managed by health care professionals. And we in the medical world have proved alarmingly unprepared for it.

Medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered. The

the studies show no connection.

Two professors who study the science of complexity—Brenda Zimmerman of York University and Sholom Glouberman of the University of Toronto—have proposed a distinction among three different kinds of problems in the world: the simple, the complicated, and the complex.

In this work against sickness, we begin not with genetic or cellular interactions, but with human ones. They are what make medicine so complex and fascinating. How

A team at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles had actually gotten far enough along to begin human trials of a temporary, bioengineered liver.

We know less and less about our patients but more and more about our science.

Surgery has, essentially, four big killers wherever it is done in the world: infection, bleeding, unsafe anesthesia, and what can only be called the unexpected. For the first three, science and experience have given us some straightforward and valuable preventive measures we think we consistently follow but don't. These misses are simple failures—perfect for a classic checklist.

Medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity.