Quotes About Science

It is not allowable in science to make a statement of fact based solely on your own opinion.

We accept the proclamations of scientists in their lab coats with the same faith once reserved for priests.

But if you could tell science like a story, I'd pay attention." -Lucy

Why are we doing the? I asked. Because looking aat a dead shark will tell us something about the ones that are still alive, Robin said.

She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.

Radium was a clever poison. It masked its way inside its victims' bones; it foxed the most experienced physicians. And like the expert serial killer it was, it had now evolved its modus operandi.

the founding fathers of political economy were unabashed to talk of what they thought mattered and to articulate their views on the economy's purpose. But when political economy was split up into political philosophy and economic science in the late nineteenth century, it opened up what the philosopher Michael Sandel has called a 'moral vacancy' at the heart of public policymaking.

not until this stage, implantation, that medical science says pregnancy begins—because medical science sees pregnancy as the changes a woman's body undergoes to produce a baby, not as a notional, theoretical mini-child that no one knows is there. But the blastocyst is still not a person, if that word means anything at all.

When the Viennese doctor Ignaz Semmelweis insisted that delivery room doctors and medical students wash their hands before attending their patients, he was ridiculed, even though the practice dramatically reduced death from puerperal sepsis. In 1865, when Semmelweis died, his simple but radical idea was still discounted.

For the seventeenth century, clean linen was not a substitute for washing the body with water—it was better than that, safer, more reliable and based on scientific principles. White linen, learned men believed, attracted and absorbed sweat. As one wrote, with mystifying confidence, "We understand why linen removes the perspiration from our bodies, because the sweat is oleaginous or salty, it impregnates these dead plants [the

Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.

It's possible that they had a slight allergic reaction to a preservative in the vaccine.

Tradition is not a childish and outmoded mythology but a science that is terribly real. (...la tradition n'est pas une mythologie puérile et désuète, mais une science terriblement réelle.)

The science of our time knows how to measure galaxies and split atoms, but it is incapable of the least investigation beyond the sensible world, so much so that outside its self-imposed but unrecognized limits it remains more ignorant than the most rudimentary magic

Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue. They may lead us - to put it in extreme terms - to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take.

In the words of Heisenberg, "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

There are solutions to the major problems of our time; some of them even simple. But they require a radical shift in our perceptions, our thinking, our values. And, indeed, we are now at the beginning of such a fundamental change of worldview in science and society, a change of paradigms as radical as the Copernican revolution. Unfortunately, this realization has not yet dawned on most of our political leaders, who are unable to "connect the dots," to use a popular phrase.

Albert Einstein, for one, repeatedly expressed these feelings, as in the following celebrated passage (Einstein, 1949, p. 5): The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science…the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvellous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.

This state of affairs is not inevitable. Humans were able to employ science and law to transform common holdings into a commodity and then into capital; we also have the ability to reverse this path, transforming some of our now overabundant capital into renewed commons.

Leonardo did not pursue science and engineering in order to dominate nature, as Francis Bacon would advocate a century later, but always tried to learn as much as possible from nature. He was in awe of the beauty he saw in the complexity of natural forms, patterns, and processes, and aware that nature's ingenuity was far superior to human design. Accordingly, he often used natural processes and structures as models for his own designs.

Thoughts are dangerous, he told himself, and thoughts against all science, all sanity, all civilized intelligence, are the most dangerous of all. He felt their presence here and there in his brain, like pockets of poison, harmless as long as you left them encysted and did not prick them.

The entire economy of the Western world is built on things that cause cancer.

We may say, roughly, that a mathematical idea is 'significant' if it can be connected, in a natural and illuminating way, with a large complex of other mathematical ideas. Thus a serious mathematical theorem, a theorem which connects significant ideas, is likely to lead to important advances in mathematics itself and even in other sciences.

We must guard against a fallacy common among apologists of science, the fallacy of supposing that the men whose work most benefits humanity are thinking much of that while they do it, that physiologists, for example, have particularly noble souls.