Quotes About Science

much of the writing of physicists barely reaches the level of prose.

In a famous article,8 the physicist Eugene Wigner has written of "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.

Descartes y Bacon son solo dos de los filósofos que a lo largo de los siglos intentaron formular reglas para la investigación científica, algo que nunca funciona. Aprendemos a practicar la ciencia no imponiendo reglas acerca de cómo practicarla, sino a partir de la experiencia de trabajar en ella, impulsados por la satisfacción que obtenemos cuando nuestros métodos consiguen explicar algo.

Nos proporciona un intenso placer conseguir explicar algo con éxito, al igual que cuando Newton explicó las leyes del movimiento planetario de Kepler, junto con otras muchas cosas. Las teorías y los métodos científicos que sobreviven son aquellos que proporcionan esa satisfacción, encajen o no con ningún modelo preexistente sobre cómo habría que practicar la ciencia.

Ni en el mundo antiguo ni en el medieval se concebía como una meta nada parecido a la ciencia moderna. De hecho, si nuestros predecesores pudieran haber imaginado la ciencia como es en la actualidad, no les habría gustado mucho. La ciencia moderna es impersonal, no deja espacio a la intervención sobrenatural ni a los va lores humanos; no tiene ningún propósito, y tampoco ofrece esperanzas de certezas.

What is important in science (I leave philosophy to others) is not the solution of some popular scientific problems of one's own day, but understanding the world. In the course of this work, one finds out what sort of explanations are possible, and what sort of problems can lead to those explanations. The progress of science has been largely a matter of discovering what questions should be asked.

I chose "Discovery" instead of "Invention" to suggest that science is the way it is not so much because of various adventitious historic acts of invention, but because of the way nature is. With all its imperfections, modern science is a technique that is sufficiently well tuned to nature so that it works—it is a practice that allows us to learn reliable things about the world. In this sense, it is a technique that was waiting for people to discover it.

Science and technology benefit each other, but at its most fundamental level science is not undertaken for any practical reason.

after all, our purpose in theoretical physics is not just to describe the world as we find it, but to explain — in terms of a few fundamental principles — why the world is the way it is.

Science and technology benefit each other, but at its most fundamental level science is not undertaken for any practical reason. Though science has nothing to say one way or the other about the existence of God or an afterlife, its goal is to find explanations of natural phenomena that are purely naturalistic. Science is cumulative; each new theory incorporates successful earlier theories as approximations, and even explains why these approximations work, when they do work.

Though mathematics is used in the formulation of physical theories and in working out their consequences, science is not a branch of mathematics

Democritus wrote books on ethics, natural science, mathematics, and music, of which many fragments survive. One of these fragments expresses the view that all matter consists of tiny indivisible particles called atoms (from the Greek for "uncuttable"), moving in empty space: "Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention; atoms and Void [alone] exist in reality.

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 reading their writings, one continually wants to ask, "How do you know?

Los hombres no se contentan con consolarse mediante cuentos de dios y gigantes, o limitando sus pensamientos a los asuntos cotidianos de la vida. También construyen telescopios, satélites y aceleradores, y se sientan en sus escritorios durante horas interminables tratando de descifrar el significado de los datos que reúnen.

When I die, I'm going to leave my body to science fiction.

I put instant coffee in a microwave oven and almost went back in time.

Support bacteria - they're the only culture some people have.

What is the speed of dark?

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.

I worked in a health food store once. A guy asked me, 'If I melt dry ice, can I take a bath without getting wet?

Do radioactive cats have eighteen half-lives?

They say the universe is expanding. That should help ease the traffic.

I donated my body to science...fiction.

I'm donating my body to science...fiction.