Quotes About Science

Many a man thinks he has given proof of wisdom when he says, "There is nothing new under the sun." There is nothing more false. Modern science shows that nothing is stationary, that in society, just as in external nature, a continuous development is discoverable.

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

Science is spectrum analysis. Art is Photosynthesis.

Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology.

Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.

The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.

[D]rugs being tested on animals. That sort of thing, well, it depends, doesn't it? If the drug's aspirin and the monkey's got a headache, is it tight?

They keep saying that sea levels are rising an' all this. It's nowt to do with the icebergs melting, it's because there's too many fish in it. Get rid of some of the fish and the water will drop. Simple. Basic science.

Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.

A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.

The method of learning by trial and error—of learning from our mistakes—seems to be fundamentally the same whether it is practised by lower or by higher animals, by chimpanzees or by men of science.

There can be no ultimate statements science: there can be no statements in science which can not be tested, and therefore none which cannot in principle be refuted, by falsifying some of the conclusions which can be deduced from them.

Criticism, I said, is an attempt to find the weak spots in a theory, and these, as a rule, can be found only in the more remote logical consequences which can be derived from it. It is here that purely logical reasoning plays an important part in science.

Science is most significant as one of the greatest spiritual adventures that man has yet known.

Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testabilty: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.

Science can be viewed from various standpoints, not only from that of epistemology; for example, we can look at it as a biological or as a sociological phenomenon. As such it might be described as a tool, or an instrument, comparable perhaps to some of our industrial machinery. Science may be described as a means of production - as the last word in 'roundabout production.

Every 'good' scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.

while I felt that the Marxist attitude towards their theory was not at all admirable but was typically dogmatic and had all these properties which the Marxists usually said were characteristic of the churches. So I realized fairly early that Marxism was more of a church than of a science.

Popper was already working towards his 'fallibilist' view that theories can never be proved, although they can be decisively disproved—but it had survived a severe test, and had emerged as a theory worth embracing.

Science is a 'trial and error' learning process, and one of the virtues of an open society is its ability to learn from experience. Closed societies resist novelty and therefore pass up the chance to learn from experience.

Popper espoused what became known as 'falsificationism', the doctrine that what we are interested in the sciences is the conditions under which we should reject a proposed law or theory; the proposition that 'all swans are white' is decisively refuted by one black swan, no matter how often it has been 'verified' by sightings of white swans.

In the empirical sciences, which alone can furnish us with information about the world we live in, proofs do not occur, if we mean by 'proof' an argument which establishes once and for ever the truth of a theory.

The wrong view of science betrays itself in the craving to be right; for it is not his possession of knowledge, of irrefutable truth, that makes the man of science, but his persistent and recklessly critical quest for truth.