Quotes About Science

The First Law simply states that the change in total energy equals the work performed on, plus the heat supplied to, the system (measured in suitable units).

heat "always shows a tendency to equalize temperature differences and therefore to pass from hotter to colder bodies" [15]. A

The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.

The ability to understand something before it's observed is at the heart of scientific thinking.

We are all in the depths of a cave, chained by our ignorance, by our prejudices, and our weak senses reveal to us only shadows. If we try to see further, we are confused; we are unaccustomed. But we try. This is science. Scientific

Science is a continual exploration of ways of thinking. Its strength is its visionary capacity to demolish preconceived ideas, to reveal new regions of reality, and to construct new and more effective images of the world. This adventure rests upon the entirety of past knowledge, but at its heart is change.

The most credible answers are the ones given by science, because science IS the search for the most credible answers available, not for answers pretending to certainty.

Those who criticize the usefulness of philosophy for science, Aristotle has noticed, are not doing science: they are doing philosophy.

I believe that we need to adapt our philosophy to our science, and not our science to our philosophy.

Quantum theory is of no direct help in understanding the mind.

In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. This is the nature of science. The

The border is porous. Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth. But the value of knowledge remains. If we find the antelope, we can eat.

Scientific answers are not definitive: they are, almost by definition, the best ones that we have at any given time. Consider

Science is not reliable because it provides certainty. It is reliable because it provides us with the best answers we have at present. Science is the most we know so far about the problems confronting us. It is precisely its openness, the fact that it constantly calls current knowledge into question, which guarantees that the answers it offers are the best so far available: if you find better answers, these new answers become science.

Clues put us on the right path toward a correct theory. Strong evidence is that which subsequently allows us to trust whether the theory we have built is a good one or not. Without

Poetry and science are both manifestations of the spirit that creates new ways of thinking the world, in order to understand it better. Great science and great poetry are both visionary, and sometimes may arrive at the same insights. The culture of today that keeps science and poetry so far apart is essentially foolish, to my way of thinking, because it makes us less able to see the complexity and the beauty of the world as revealed by both.

Too often scientists sell hypothetical theories to the large public, as if they were established theories. I have seen this often done, for instance, with string theory. I think this is a great mistake, because it questions the credibility itself of science. We scientists live out of public money and it is our duty to be fully honest in reporting what we know and what we do not know. We are paid to dream, but we must not sell our dreams for established realities.

Probability does not refer to the evolution of matter in itself. It relates to the evolution of those specific quantities we interact with.

That which seems intuitive to us now is the result of scientific and philosophical elaborations in the past.

A science that closes its ears to philosophy fades into superficiality; a philosophy that pays no attention to the scientific knowledge of its time is obtuse and sterile. It betrays its own deepest roots, which are evident in the etymology of philosophy: the love of knowledge.

Any description of a system is therefore always a description of the information a system has about another system, that is to say, the correlation between the two systems.

Richard Feynman, who more than anyone has known how to juggle with the theory, has written: "I think I can state that nobody really understands quantum mechanics.

Scientists are not immune from talking nonsense.

What does what we know or don't know have to do with the laws that govern the world?