Quotes About Science

Anti-vaccination movements are high-pressure, highly conformist organizations in which dissenting views are discouraged. To the extent that people reject science because they wish to present a self-image as critical and skeptical, it can be useful to communicate to them the inherently skeptical nature of science and to portray antiscientific thinking as an example of unthinking conformity (Hornsey & Fielding, 2017).

Perhaps science was a retarded child because its parent was philosophy rather than engineering, because, we might say, it put Aristotle above Archimedes.

Recognize, though, that graphs and equations provide an economical and effective way of expressing things that torture the tongue.

The search for predictive and explanatory general rules—that's the crux of our game.

Reductionism describes the scheme, and it has a long history of successes.

Electrons and photons are still worse. In graduate school I roomed for a time with a particle physicist. He ended one attempt to explain the essence of an exciting lecture by admitting, with uncommon candor, that he could think of no explanation, not even an analogy, that wasn't unacceptably misleading.

Science is taking over magic's place in the world, and magic is fighting back.

once one invokes the supernatural, anything can be explained, and no explanation can be verified.

at its most fundamental level science is not undertaken for any practical reason.

Once again I repeat: the aim pf physics at its most fundamental level is not just to describe the world but ti explain why it is the way it is.

Mathematics is the means by which we deduce the consequences of physical principles. More than that, it is the indispensable language in which the principles of physical science are expressed.

Einstein occasionally used "God" as a metaphor for the unknown fundamental laws of nature.

Nothing about the practice of modern science is obvious to someone who has never seen it done.

There is no principle, built into the laws of nature, that says that theoretical physicists have to be happy.

The proper measure of a philosophical system or a scientific theory is not the degree to which it anticipated modern thought, but its degree of success in treating the philosophical and scientific problems of its own day.

I want to show how difficult was the discovery of modern science, how far from obvious are its practices and standards.

The distinction between mathematics and science is pretty well settled. It remains mysterious to us why mathematics that is invented for reasons having nothing to do with nature often turns out to be useful in physical theories. In a famous article,8 the physicist Eugene Wigner has written of "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.

Con todas sus imperfecciones, la ciencia moderna es una técnica que se amolda lo suficiente a la naturaleza como para funcionar: una práctica que nos permite aprender cosas fiables acerca del mundo. En este sentido, se trata de una técnica que esperaba a que la gente la descubriera.

La ciencia es acumulativa; cada nueva teoría incorpora las teorías anteriores válidas como aproximaciones, e incluso explica por qué esas aproximaciones funcionan, caso de que así sea.

intelligent design" ideology being promoted today is not science—it is rather the abdication of science.

La diferencia fundamental entre la ciencia de Aristarco y la nuestra no son los errores de sus observaciones. Algunos errores esporádicos graves siguen afectando a la observación astronómica y la física experimental[...]. La verdadera diferencia entre Aristarco y los astrónomos y físicos de la actualidad no es que los datos de sus observaciones fueran erróneos, sino que jamás los puso en duda, y ni siquiera reconoció que pudieran ser imperfectos.

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians

There is an important feature of modern science that is almost completely missing in all the thinkers I have mentioned, from Thales to Plato: none of them attempted to verify or even (aside perhaps from Zeno) seriously to justify their speculations. In

El gran éxito de Newton consistió en explicar los movimientos de los planetas, no simplemente en describirlos. Newton no explicó la gravitación, y sabia que no lo había hecho, pero es lo que ocurre siempre con las explicaciones, que siempre queda algo para una futura explicación.