Quotes About Science

While at Windsor Castle looking at the swirling power of the "Deluge drawings" that he made near the end of his life, I asked the curator, Martin Clayton, whether he thought Leonardo had done them as works of art or of science. Even as I spoke, I realized it was a dumb question. "I do not think that Leonardo would have made that distinction," he replied.

macrocosm analogy began with his curiosity about why water, which should in theory tend to settle on the earth's surface, emerges from springs and flows into rivers at the top of mountains. The veins of the earth, he wrote, carry "the blood that keeps the mountains alive.

There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution

The skeptical Silberstein came up to Eddington and said that people believed that only three scientists in the world understood general relativity. He had been told that Eddington was one of them. The shy Quaker said nothing. "Don't be so modest, Eddington!" said Silberstein. Replied Eddington, "On the contrary. I'm just wondering who the third might be."30

Like many aspects of the digital age, this idea that innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact.

The fifteenth century of Leonardo and Columbus and Gutenberg was a time of invention, exploration, and the spread of knowledge by new technologies. In short, it was a time like our own. That is why we have much to learn from Leonardo. His ability to combine art, science, technology, the humanities, and imagination remains an enduring recipe for creativity. So, too, was his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical.

Human ingenuity," wrote Leonardo da Vinci, whose Vitruvian Man became the ultimate symbol of the intersection of art and science, "will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does.

Finally, I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences.

Thus he became the archetype of the Renaissance Man, an inspiration to all who believe that the "infinite works of nature," as he put it, are woven together in a unity filled with marvelous patterns.2 His ability to combine art and science, made iconic by his drawing of a perfectly proportioned man spread-eagle inside a circle and square, known as Vitruvian Man, made him history's most creative genius.

Great inventions come from understanding basic science. Nature is beautiful that way.

Physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.

think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.

For a scientist, altering your doctrines when the facts change is not a sign of weakness.

An engineer's engineer, Eckert felt that people like himself were necessary complements to physicists such as Mauchly. "A physicist is one who's concerned with the truth," he later said. "An engineer is one who's concerned with getting the job done.

unexpected results drove new theories.

When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.

By exalting the interplay between art and science, Leonardo wove an argument that was integral to understanding his genius: that true creativity involves the ability to combine observation with imagination, thereby blurring the border between reality and fantasy. A great painter depicts both, he said.

using analogy to discover nature's patterns.

LISP, which was designed to facilitate artificial intelligence research.

Einstein would not, as it turned out, ever win a Nobel for his work on relativity and gravitation, nor for anything other than the photoelectric effect.

The branches of the leafless tree merge into the man's body, then into the conical geometrical pattern, and finally into the mountainous landscape. What Leonardo probably began as four distinct elements ended up woven together in a way that illustrates a fundamental theme in his art and science: the interconnectedness of nature, the unity of its patterns, and the analogy between the workings of the human body and those of the earth.

What is imagination?" she asked in an 1841 essay. "It is the Combining faculty. It brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions in new, original, endless, ever-varying combinations. . . . It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science."25

The invention of CRISPR and the plague of COVID will hasten our transition to the third great revolution of modern times. These revolutions

Concern for making life better for ordinary humans must be the chief object of science.