Quotes About Science

Do you think we're making a mistake? snapped the Bishop. Not at all, said Dom Cristao. I think we've taken a step toward something truly magnificent. But humankind almost never forgives true greatness. Fortunately, said the Bishop, humankind isn't the judge that matters. And now I intend to pray for this boy, since medical science has obviously reached the boundary of its competence.

I understand that you believe that it works,' said Thrower patiently. 'But everything in the world is either science or miracles. Miracles came from God in the ancient times, but those times are over. Today if we wish to change the world, it isn't magic but science that will give us our tools.

Watch closely, folks, here it is: Science, the ugly little beast that devours itself!)

By deciding that they would study only that which could be verified under controlled conditions, they had merely limited their field of endeavor. Most truth lay outside the neat confines of science....

Most scientists believe in God," said Sel. "Certainly most of us here.

Not that science is particularly pure, except compared to politics.

Anthropology is never an exact science; the observer never experiences the same culture as the participant. But these are natural limitations inherent to the science. It is the artificial limitations that hamper us—and, through us, you.

He doubts everything, and contests each point of theology as if it were required to meet the same tests of logic and consistency that prevail in the world of science." "In other words, he expects your doctrines to make sense.

If you have people do some magic, impossible thing by stroking a talisman or praying to a tree, it's fantasy; if they do the same thing by pressing a button or climbing inside a machine, it's science fiction.

Isaac Asimov's Foundation

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.

The Greek word clepsydra, given to ancient water clocks, comes from the amalgamation of the Greek words for water and to steal.

Water dissolves more substances than any other liquid, even acid.

Don't they know science doesn't work like that? You can't just order scientific breakthroughs. They happen when you are looking at something you've been working on for years and suddenly see a connection you never noticed before, or when you're looking for something else altogether. Sometimes they even happen by accident. Don't they know you can't get a scientific breakthrough just because you want one?

It's all right to say that the reason we cant fully grasp the quantum world is because we didnt evolve in that world.

The world you live in is shored up by a collective of agreements. Is that something you think about? The hope is that the truth of the world somehow lies in the common experience of it. Of course the history of science and mathematics and even philosophy is a good bit at odds with this notion. Innovation and discovery by definition war against the common understanding. One should be wary.

Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.

And so everything is supposed to hang on the speed of light but nobody wants to talk about the speed of dark.

The ugly truth is that other than Feynman's sum-over theories there is no believable explanation of quantum mechanics that does not involve human consciousness. Of course this raises the questions as to how it managed to get along without us.

The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop.

If they'd thought a bit more about biological evolution and spent less time cooking up nutty theories they might have uncovered a few simple truths.

If our world is regulated by reductionist, narrow, sophomoric versions of Darwin; or reductionist, narrow, sophomoric versions of religious dogma; you end up being childishly anti-scientific, and childishly anti-religious, and you miss the very complex interaction [they share]

The scientists that present at TED confabs needn't affirm free-market capitalism directly… so long as the implication of their thinking have free-market "consilience"… In fact, TED has become a spectacularly influential force in part through its conciliation of science and libertarian economics, which it then sells to us as entertainment.