Quotes About Science

United States Weather Bureau concluded that over 8,000 square miles,* 9 trillion gallons of water fell, weighing 33 billion tons.

Christianity has both spurred and retarded the sciences and social sciences. Indeed, most of the modern debates of profound significance were originally dialogues with or within Christianity.

Dismissing the idea that female choice could influence the direction of evolution began to look both sexist and unscientific. By drawing attention to the evolution of social and sexual behavior in animals, the sociobiology of the 1970s did for the study of animal sexuality what feminism did for the study of human sexuality. It empowered thinkers to ask "Why does sex work like this, instead of some other way?

The lesson is clear: neither science nor data are democratic. Science is meritocratic and not all data are equal.

If you tell me the size of a mammal, I can use the scaling laws to tell you almost everything about the average values of its measurable characteristics: how much food it needs to eat each day, what its heart rate is, how long it will take to mature, the length and radius of its aorta, its life span, how many offspring it will have, and so on. Given the extraordinary complexity and diversity of life, this is pretty amazing.

TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CITIES

Only in very recent times has a perspective inspired by science and "rationality" been brought to bear on these profound questions in the hope of providing a complementary framework for understanding their origins and providing possibly new insights and answers.

Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

Nothing is more inimical to the progress of science than the belief that we know what we do not yet know.

Man findet Spuren aller Wissenschaften in den Sprachen, und umgekehrt vieles in den Sprachen das in den Wissenschaften nützen kann.

A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.

Since fresh examples and proofs could always be found of the alleged relation between guilt and punishment: if you behave in such and such a way, it will go badly with you. Now, as it generally does go badly, the allegation was constantly confirmed; and thus popular morality, a pseudo- science on a level with popular medicine, continually gained ground.

My father was a lawyer and to my best knowledge nobody in my family before had interest in science.

Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.

Everything I eat has been proved by some doctor or other to be a deadly poison, and everything I don't eat has been proved to be indispensable for life. But I go marching on.

We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.

There is a common ground upon which all sincere votaries of truth may meet, exchanging with each other the language of Flamsteed's appeal to Newton, "The works of the Eternal Providence will be better understood through your labors and mine.

After the war, liberal theology, the emergence of the Social Gospel, and a growing faith in science competed with a rising fundamentalism.22

Almost every cost estimate made by a physicist is wildly wrong, and the better the physicist the worse it is (Herb York).

The digital universe and the hydrogen bomb were brought into existence at the same time. "It is an irony of fate," observes Françoise Ulam, "that much of the high-tech world we live in today, the conquest of space, the extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred on by one man's monomania and the need to develop electronic computers to calculate whether an H-bomb could be built or not.

The laws of adult development are nowhere near as well known as the laws of the solar system or even the laws of child development, which were only discovered in the last century.

religion arises from culture; spirituality arises from biology.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.