Quotes About Science

He was the world-renowned tamer of lightning, the man who had disarmed the heavens, who had vanquished superstition with reason.

The Franklin known to the French, the Franklin who had briefly visited Paris in 1767 and 1769 was—in Voltaire's description—the discoverer of electricity, a man of genius, a first name in science, a successor to Newton and Galileo.

Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind.

Solaristics, wrote Muntius, is a substitute for religion in the space age. It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science; contact, the goal for which we are striving, is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah.

One of the most incredible secrets of science fiction (although one not too closely guarded) is the fact that 99 percent of its authors do not know even the titles and authors of today's learned works, but still they want to top these scholars with their knowledge of the year 6000.

Human anatomy is horribly unsuited for outer space. The astroengineers lost sleep over this but not the science fiction writers, who being artists simply didn't mention it.

even the most seemingly abstract, sublimely theoretical, mathematicized achievements of science have in reality moved only a step or two away from a prehistoric, coarsely sensory-based, anthropomorphic understanding of the world around us.

And Trurl began to catch atoms, peeling their electrons and mixing their protons with such nimble speed, that his fingers were a blur, and he stirred the subatomic dough, stuck all the electrons back in, then on to the next molecule.

Just as it is impossible to predict with complete accuracy the path of a single electron, so too you cannot know with certainty the future behavior of a single potato. Thus far observations show that man has mashed potatoes millions of times, but it is not inconceivable that one time in a billion the situation could reverse itself, that a potato could mash a man.

It is the premise of science fiction that anything shown shall in principle be interpretable empirically and rationally. In science fiction there can be no inexplicable marvels, no transcendences, no devils or demons—and the pattern of occurrences must be verisimilar.

ignoramus et ignorabimus

Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it. What do we really know about the origin of the Universe? A blank so wide can be filled with myths and legends.

A physicist never thinks that Someone has set the electrons in their orbits for the express purpose of making him, the physicist, rack his brains over orbital configurations.

the old doctrine of ignoramus et ignorabimus—"we do not know and will not know.

Nauka obja?nia ?wiat, ale pogodzi? z nim mo?e jedynie sztuka.

One has only to look through the history of science to reach the most probable conclusion: that the shape of things to come is determined by things we do not know today, and by what is unforeseeable.

What poets they were, those anatomists, my dear sir, what names they gave to all those parts, the purposes of which they didn't understand at all: the hippocampus . . . Ammon's horn . . . the corpora quadrigemina . . . the calcarine fissure . . .

Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind: astronomy has its caricaturist in astrology, chemistry used to have alchemy. So

among others—the Oofs (not the "Oops," as the text gives)

To on (lecz znów nie pamiÄ™tam, który) udowodniÅ' matematycznie mo?liwo?? przeksztaÅ'cania siÄ™ kwarków w akwarki, a tych- w akwaria. W naszym WszechÅ›wiecie nie jest to mo?liwe, ale w innych niechybnie tak, i tym samym teoria ta wykroczyÅ'a poza granice naszego Uniwersum.

In his most important and most extraordinary work, a mere dozen or so pages long, he sought to demonstrate that even the most seemingly abstract, sublimely theoretical, mathematicized achievements of science have in reality moved only a step or two away from a prehistoric, coarsely sensory-based, anthropomorphic understanding of the world around us.

In science, restraint was necessary: there were questions that one was not allowed to put to the world - and he who nevertheless put them was like one who complained about a mirror whose reflection repeated his every movement but refused to reveal to him the volitional reason behind those movements.

Cada vez hay más científicos y menos sabios.

cybernetician.