Quotes About Science

One of the great commandments of science is, Mistrust arguments from authority. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.) Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else. This independence of science, its occasional unwillingness to accept conventional wisdom, makes it dangerous to doctrines less self critical, or with pretensions of certitude.

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So

Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is.

is it really true that we can't afford one attack helicopter's worth of seed corn to listen to the stars?

Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding.

Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham's Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good.

If a marker were to be erected today, it might read, in homage to his scientific courage: "He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions.

It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little about it.

There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything.

There were excesses in science and there were excesses in religion. A reasonable man wouldn't be stampeded by either one. There were many interpretations of Scripture and many interpretations of the natural world. Both were created by God, so both must be mutually consistent. Wherever a discrepancy seems to exist, either a scientist or a theologian—maybe both—hasn't been doing his job. Palmer

Demon" means "knowledge" in Greek. "Science" means "knowledge" in Latin. A jurisdictional dispute is exposed, even if we look no further.

Let's see if I got this right, she would say to herself. I've taken an inert gas that's in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires of creation.

The idea of science as a method rather than as a body of knowledge is not widely appreciated outside of science, or indeed in some corridors inside of science.

New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology.

Kepler's second law: A planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times. It takes as long to travel from B to A as from F to E as from D to C; and the shaded areas BSA, FSE and DSC are all equal.

Nearly every scientist has experienced, in a moment of discovery or sudden understanding, a reverential astonishment. Science - pure science, science not for any practical application but for its own sake - is a deeply emotional matter for those who practise it, as well as for those nonscientists who every now and then dip in to see what's been discovered lately.

Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.

Because science carries us toward an understanding of how the world is, rather than how we would wish it to be, its findings may not in all cases be immediately comprehensible or satisfying. It may take a little work to restructure our mindsets. Some of science is very simple. When it gets complicated, that's usually because the world is complicated—or because we're complicated.

If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience.

Huygens was, of course, a citizen of his time. Who of us is not? He claimed science as his religion and then argued that the planets must be inhabited because otherwise God had made worlds for nothing.

Observation: there was absolutely nothing to see on Venus. Conclusion: it must be covered with life.

If we teach only the findings and products of science – no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be – without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience?

Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge.

Perhaps for the first time in any medium, the person teaching you science—Carl Sagan—cared about the tangled mental roadways that can rob a person of rational thought.