Quotes About Science

lower than Canada, Germany, and Japan. In science, US schoolchildren place just below the mean PISA score (497 versus 501); in reading, they are barely above it (498 versus 496)—and they are far behind all the populous, affluent Western nations. PISA, like any such study, has its weaknesses, but large differences in relative rankings are clear: there is not even a remote indication of any exceptional US educational achievements.

To believe that our understanding of these dynamic, multifactorial realities has reached the state of perfection is to mistake the science of global warming for the religion of climate change.

The second law of thermodynamics, the universal tendency toward heat death and disorder, became perhaps the grandest of all cosmic generalizations – yet also one of which most non-scientists remain ignorant.

The scientific definition of power is simply the rate of energy use: power equals energy per time, or ML2/T3

Without science, there would be no you; without you, the future would offer a much narrower prospect.

where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?

Man has a tyrant, ignorance. I voted for the demise of that particular tyrant. That particular tyrant has engendered royalty, which is authority based on falsehood, whereas science is authority based on truth. Man should be governed by science alone. And conscience, added the bishop. It's the same thing. Conscience is the quota of innate science we each have inside us.

Who can calculate the trajectory of a molecule? How do we know the creation of worlds is not determined by the falling of grains of sand? Who, after all, knows the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely big and the infinitely small, the reverberation of causes in the chasms of a being, the avalanches of creation? A

Die Wissenschaft muss mit glatten Wangen begonnen werden und nicht erst mit runzeligen, wenn man in ihr etwas erreichen will.

All generous social irradiations spring from science, letters, arts, education. Make men, make men. Give them light that they may warm you. Sooner or later the splendid question of universal education will present itself with the irresistible authority of the absolute truth; and

Cuando la ciencia todavía soñaba, la poesía ya actuaba

As Claude Frollo had passed through nearly the entire circle of human learning—positive, exterior, and permissible—since his youth, he was obliged, unless he came to a halt, ubi defuit orbis, to proceed further and seek other aliments for the insatiable activity of his intelligence. The antique symbol of the serpent biting its tail is, above all, applicable to science.

The most amazing part of this science-fiction moment was that her mother actually believed what she just said.

Some old spacers stay away from wrecks. These old-timers believe the wrecks are haunted—not by the dead crew, but by old science, the kind that could kill us because we don't understand it.

By the end of the first year of that first Bush presidency, Sununu had almost single-handedly halted the political momentum in Washington, turned climate change into a partisan issue, and put denial of the science on its way toward Republican orthodoxy.

Shine light on electrons you'll cause them to swerve./ The act of observing disturbs the observed.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Without the ontological assumption which goes with it, what is called science, is nothing but the dreamer's well-ordered dream.

It is instructive, although somewhat disheartening, for the ardent advocate of a purely scientific psychology to contrast the practice and theories of his colleagues with those of the students of the principal physical sciences.

Can we ever hope for a Natural History with colored plates that will show us how the world appears to the faceted eyes of a dragon-fly?

Now I, like that Chinese devotee, must confess myself a very ignorant person, and naturally unable to hear the conversation of Ants. But the Fairy of Science sometimes touches my ears and eyes with her wand; and then, for a little time, I am able to hear things inaudible, and to perceive things imperceptible.

My wife likes to say that the mind is a palace with room for many guests. Perhaps the butler takes care to install the delegates of Science in a different wing from the emissaries of Faith, lest they take up arguing in the passages.

Some things are always simple. Magnets, for example.

No, not like bacteria, like butterflies, and some people's butterflies react to other people's, on a chemical level, like pheromones, so that when they're nearby, your butterflies start to dance. They can't help it - it's chemical.