Quotes About Science

I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different, when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.

Los maestros modernos prometen muy poco. Saben que los metales no pueden transmutarse y que el elixir de la vida es sólo una quimera. Pero estos filósofos, cuyas manos parecen hechas sólo para escarbar en la suciedad y cuyos ojos parecen sólo destinados a escudriñar en el microscopio o en el crisol, en realidad han conseguido milagros.

Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.

Modern research divides nature into tiny pieces and conducts tests that conform neither with natural law nor with practical experience. The results are arranged for the convenience of research, not according to the needs of the farmer.

Science gradually yielded to propaganda, and as a result propaganda tended more and more to represent itself as science.

Mindless performance may be especially helpful in endurance sports because of the supreme importance of the capacity to suffer. The more science and technical detail an athlete incorporates into the training process, the more distracted he becomes from the only thing that really matters: getting out the door and going hard.

A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

The genome is as complicated and indeterminate as ordinary life, because it is ordinary life. This should come as a relief. Simple determinism, whether of the genetics or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.

The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view. [...] A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed. The forest is more interesting than the clearing.

In fact the discoveries of Gregor Mendel, which became known to the world in 1900, ought to have killed eugenics stone dead.

All that determinists are asking you to accept is that there cannot be effect without cause.

the whole point of science, the whole thrust of the Enlightenment, is the rejection of arguments from authority.

Let's give a bit less credit to creationists, while we encourage and celebrate the evolution of everything.

We now know that Lamarckism cannot work because bodies are built from cakelike recipes, not architectural blueprints, and it is simply impossible to feed information back into the recipe by changing the cake.

Just like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience, even – perhaps especially – in the hands of elite experts, and especially when predicting the future and when there's lavish funding at stake.

Brink Lindsey has pointed out. 'Despite the obvious successes of unplanned markets, despite the spectacular rise of the Internet's decentralized order, and despite the well-publicized new science of "complexity" and its study of self-organizing systems, it is still widely assumed that the only alternative to central authority is chaos.

A month after the Watson-Crick structure was published, Britain crowned a new queen and a British expedition conquered Mount Everest on the same day. Apart from a small piece in the News Chronicle, the double helix did not make the newspapers. Today most scientists consider it the most momentous discovery of the century, if not the millennium.

Ä°ki prion uzman?n yazd??? gibi, ''kiÅŸisel trajedilerin, etnik felaketlerin ve ekonomik y?k?mlar?n asl?, küçük bir molekülün haylazca yanl?? katlanmas?nda aranabilir.

Many modern accounts of the history of eugenics present it as an example of the dangers of letting science, genetics especially, out of control. It is much more an example of the danger of letting government out of control.

Suppose, for instance, that a gene appeared on the X chromosome that specified the recipe for a lethal poison that killed only sperm carrying Y chromosomes. A man with such a gene would have no fewer children than another man. But he would have all daughters and no sons.

Nancy Wexler fears that science is now in the position of Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes.

Karl Popper – that any theory that is incapable of falsification cannot be considered scientific.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britain and the United States made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public funding, achieved no greater results either in science or in economics. 'The industrialised nations whose governments invested least in science did best economically,' says Kealey, 'and they didn't do so badly in science either.

In 2003, the OECD published a paper on 'sources of growth in OECD countries' between 1971 and 1998, finding to its explicit surprise that whereas privately funded research and development stimulated economic growth, publicly funded research had no economic impact whatsoever. None. This earthshaking result has never been challenged or debunked. Yet it is so inconvenient to the argument that science needs public funding that it is ignored.