Quotes About Science

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel

James A. Connor

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I'll thank you to remember that not so many years ago men were burned at the stake just for saying the earth went round the sun!

Type and typography—what you do and how you do it—are both science and art.

No sé que quereís decir con vuestras alusiones a los artes cruentos de la guerra. A otros dejo el honor, si de honor se trata, de tan semejantes ciencias bélicas.

chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

to call the study of chaos "nonlinear science" was like calling zoology "the study of non elephant animals.

For Wiener, entropy was a measure of disorder; for Shannon , of uncertainty. Fundamentally, as they were realizing, these were the same.

During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists' understanding of mutations in DNA.

Nullius in verba was the Royal Society's motto. Don't take anyone's word for it.

In reality, a river's basic shape... is not a line but a tree. A river is, in its essence, a thing that branches... Although it flows inward toward its trunk, in geological time it grew, and continues to grow, outward, like an organism, from its ocean outlet to its many headwaters. In the vernacular of a new science, it is fractal, its structure echoing itself on all scales, from river to stream to brook to creek to rivulet, branches too small to name and too many to count.

Gregor Mendel's years of research with green and yellow peas showed that such a thing must exist. Colors and other traits vary depending on many factors, such as temperature and soil content, but something is preserved whole; it does not blend or diffuse; it must be quantized. Mendel had discovered the gene, though he did not name it. For him it was more an algebraic convenience than a physical entity.

So the second law is merely probabilistic. Statistically, everything tends toward maximum entropy.

Mandelbrot saw a seemingly smooth boundary resolve itself into a chain of spirals like the tails of sea horses. The irrational fertilized the rational.

God plays dice with the universe," is Ford's answer to Einstein's famous question. "But they're loaded dice. And the main objective of physics now is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how can we use them for our own ends.

The spirit of Edison, not Einstein, still governed their image of the scientist. Perspiration, not inspiration. Mathematics was unfathomable and unreliable.

They meant to bring back together, as a unified subject, the discipline that had been subdivided for undergraduates into mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and optics.

By the time Carl was four, Feynman was actively lobbying against a first-grade science book proposed for California schools. It began with pictures of a mechanical wind-up dog, a real dog, and a motorcycle, and for each the same question: "What makes it move?" The proposed answer—"Energy makes it move"—enraged him.

Chaos has become not just theory but also method, not just a canon of beliefs but also a way of doing science.

The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract—a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. It is insubstantial, yet as scientists have finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence.

Entropy—already a difficult and poorly understood concept—is a measure of disorder in thermodynamics, the science of heat and energy.

Hugo Gernsback invented pulp magazines and the grandfather paradox. Not bad for a charlatan.

He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of knowing. The alternative to uncertainty is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.