Quotes About Science

It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works.

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them.

It is remarkable, Hardin, how the religion of science has grabbed hold.

I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the Universe.

The Three Theorems of Psychohistorical Quantitivity: The population under scrutiny is oblivious to the existence of the science of Psychohistory. The time periods dealt with are in the region of 3 generations. The population must be in the billions (±75 billions) for a statistical probability to have a psychohistorical validity.

Pyscho-history dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.

You see, proteins, as I probably needn't tell you, are immensely complicated groupings of amino acids and certain other specialized compounds, arranged in intricate three-dimensional patterns that are as unstable as sunbeams on a cloudy day. It is this instability that is life, since it is forever changing its position in an effort to maintain its identity--in the manner of a long rod balanced on an acrobat's nose.

If a conclusion is not poetically balanced, it cannot be scientifically true.

All knowledge is one. When a light brightens and illuminates a corner of a room, it adds to the general illumination of the entire room. Over and over again, scientific discoveries have provided answers to problems that had no apparent connection with the phenomena that gave rise to the discovery.

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

With the destruction of our social fabric, science will be broken into a million pieces. Individuals will know much of exceedingly tiny facets of what there is to know.

I suppose there's no way of putting the mushroom cloud back into that nice, shiny uranium sphere.

Scientist are human. Unraveling the knots of Nature's mysteries is a reward in itself; but even so, scientists like to hear the applause of the audience

Space, man, have you no respect for science?

Mr Baley, said Quemot, you can't treat human emotions as though they were built about a positronic brain. I'm not saying you can. Robotics is a deductive science and sociology an inductive one. But mathematics can be made to apply in either case.

Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one—Marie, the famous Madame Curie—and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.

I believe that only scientists can understand the universe. It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

Zeroth Law...

The theory of universal gravitation is not cast-iron. No theory is, and there is always room for improvement. Isn't that so? Science is constructed out of approximations that gradually approach the truth. . . Well, that means all theories are subject to constant testing and modification, doesn't it? And if it eventually turns out that they're not quite close enough to the truth, they need to be replaced by something that's closer. Right?

So far, scientists have not uncovered any evidence that would hint that the workings of the Universe require the action of a divine being. On the other hand, scientists have uncovered no evidence that indicates that a divine being does not exist.

Science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

A mathematician, however, who could back his prophecy with mathematical formulas and terminology, might be understood by no one and yet believed by everyone.

Psychohistory was the quintessence of sociology; it was the science of human behavior reduced to mathematical equations. The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs, Seldon found, could be treated statistically.