Quotes About Science

The history of science is everywhere speculative. It is a marvelous hiatory. It makes you proud to be a human being.

The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.

The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities — perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there.

In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.

Our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. Once we realize that human knowledge is fallible, we realize also that we can never be completely certain that we have not made a mistake.

Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.

The way of science is paved with discarded theories which were once declared self-evident;

The question of the acceptance of theories should, I propose, be demoted to the status of a minor problem. For science may be regarded as a growing system of problems, rather than as a system of beliefs. And for a system of problems, the tentative acceptance of a theory or a conjecture means hardly more than that it is considered worthy of further criticism.

in contrast to the Hegelians of the right-wing, Marx made an honest attempt to apply rational methods to the most urgent problems of social life. The value of this attempt is unimpaired by the fact that it was, as I shall try to show, largely unsuccessful. Science progresses through trial and error. Marx tried, and although he erred in his main doctrines, he did not try in vain. He opened and sharpened our eyes in many ways.

The Vienna Circle was empiricist and phenomenalist, Popper was a critical rationalist.

Scientific' Marxism is dead. Its feeling of social responsibility and its love for freedom must survive.

The method of science depends upon our attempts to describe the world with simple theories: theories that are complex may become untestable , even if they happen to be true. Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification–the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

Moreover, if we could show, on general logical grounds, that the scientific quest is likely to succeed, one could not understand why anything like success has been so rare in the long history of human endeavours to know more about our world.

I conjecture that the origin of life and the origin of problems coincide.

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification — the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

Those among us who are unwilling to expose their ideas to the hazard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game.

For myself, I am interested in science and in philosophy only because I want to learn something about the riddle of the world in which we live, and the riddle of man's knowledge of that world. And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from an obscurantist faith in the expert's special skill and in his personal knowledge and authority.

It seems as though a happy dispensation from my scientific guiding star allowed me to discover this error myself. But let younger investigators be warned by this example, as they strive impatiently to publish their results after long years of frustration. Let them test their findings doubly and trebly before they regard any interpretation as certain. For often nature reaches her goal by another path, where man cannot see his way

Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year.

Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric.

Science, like nothing else among the institutions of mankind, grows like a weed every year. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion, religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself, law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

Any time a magnet wiggles, no matter how small it is, or how fast or slow it wiggles, it makes some kind of light. Most light is made by little magnets called molecules, and our eyes are tuned to a very narrow range of it.

When the National Institutes of Health makes an announcement through one of its many spokespeople, who

If there is something in my food that somebody says is a poison, I want to have the chemistry explained and decide for myself whether or not I want to eat it.