Quotes About Science

Then there are revolutions. A new science arises out of one that has reached a dead end. Often a revolution has an interdisciplinary character—its central discoveries often come from people straying outside the normal bounds of their specialties. The problems that obsess these theorists are not recognized as legitimate lines of inquiry.

The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing

Small nonlinearities were easy to disregard. People who conduct experiments learn quickly that they live in an imperfect world.

As an element in the world revealed by computer exploration, the strange attractor began as a mere possibility, marking a place where many great imaginations in the twentieth century had failed to go. Soon, when scientists saw what computers had to show, it seemed like a face they had been seeing everywhere, in the music of turbulent flows or in clouds scattered like veils across the sky. Nature was constrained. Disorder was channeled, it seemed, into patterns with some common underlying theme.

Order in chaos. It was science's oldest cliché. The idea of hidden unity and common underlying form in nature had an intrinsic appeal, and it had an unfortunate history of inspiring pseudoscientists and cranks. When Feigenbaum came to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1974, a year shy of his thirtieth birthday, he knew that if physicists were to make something of the idea now, they would need a practical framework, a way to turn ideas into calculations.

They had talked about turbulence, but time passed, and even Carruthers was no longer sure where Feigenbaum was headed. "I thought he had quit and found a different problem. Little did I know that this other problem was the same problem. It seems to have been the issue on which many different fields of science were stuck—they were stuck on this aspect of the nonlinear behavior of systems.

The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks. They behave.

The sky is blue because the molecules of the atmosphere scatter the blue wavelengths more than the others; the blue seems to come from everywhere in the sky.

Weather forecasting was the beginning but hardly the end of the business of using computers to model complex systems.

The microscopic pieces were perfectly clear; the macroscopic behavior remained a mystery. The tradition of looking at systems locally—isolating the mechanisms and then adding them together—was beginning to break down.

biology has become an information science

In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes.

Scientists marching under Newton's banner actually waved another flag that said something like this: Given an approximate knowledge of a system's initial conditions and an understanding of natural law, one can calculate the approximate behavior of the system. This assumption lay at the philosophical heart of science.

the distinction between nerves and vessels was not demonstrated until the Third Century B.C., when it was made clear by Erasistratos.

In the field of Egyptian mathematics Professor Karpinski of the University of Michigan has long insisted that surviving mathematical papyri clearly demonstrate the Egyptians' scientific interest in pure mathematics for its own sake. I have now no doubt that Professor Karpinski is right, for the evidence of interest in pure science, as such, is perfectly conclusive in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus.

The willful amnesia afflicting the sciences in general contrasts sharply with the importance given to memory by the humanities. Literature, philosophy, politics, and the visual arts, including photography and filmmaking, feed on memory. Practitioners of the humanities need memory to deepen and refine their thinking.

As Jung pointed out, our ancestors believed in gods; we believe in vitamins—both invisible.

even the most devout creationist today will not walk into an emergency room and insist that he or she be given "only the treatment available to Moses, or Jesus, or Mohammed, and of course, don't bother with that anesthetic stuff. And, while I am here, why not trepan my brain and let those evil spirits out?

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

The tall form of the young professor of mental science discussing on the landing a case of conscience with his class like a giraffe cropping high leafage among a herd of antelopes

Attaching epistemic significance to metaphysical intuitions is anti-naturalist for two reasons. First, it requires ignoring the fact that science, especially physics, has shown us that the universe is very strange to our inherited conception of what it is like. Second, it requires ignoring central implications of evolutionary theory, and of the cognitive and behavioural sciences, concerning the nature of our minds.

proficiency in inferring the large-scale and small-scale structure of our immediate environment, or any features of parts of the universe distant from our ancestral stomping grounds, was of no relevance to our ancestors' reproductive fitness. Hence, there is no reason to imagine that our habitual intuitions and inferential responses are well designed for science or for metaphysics.

I don't work for the Republic, and I'm certainly not about to work for Count Dooku." "Science doesn't take sides, is that it?

Mathematics isn't just science, it is poetry – our efforts to crystallise the unglimpsed connections between things. Poetry that bridges and magnifies the mysteries of the galaxy. But the signs and symbols and equations sentients employ to express these connections are not discoveries but the teasing out of secrets that have always existed.