Quotes About Science

Perhaps the biggest of these unsolved problems is to establish human history as a historical science, on a par with recognized historical sciences such as evolutionary biology, geology, and climatology. The study of human history does pose real difficulties, but those recognized historical sciences encounter some of the same challenges. Hence the methods developed in some of these other fields may also prove useful in the field of human history.

Hence the greatly increased life expectancy brought by modern medicine may have contributed to the recently accelerating pace of invention.

The scientific outlook is a unique feature of post-Renaissance European society that has contributed heavily to its modern technological preeminence.

THE DISCIPLINE OF history is generally not considered to be a science, but something closer to the humanities. At best, history is classified among the social sciences, of which it rates as the least scientific.

These days a scientist is not supposed to detect intelligence in the miracle of cosmos or beauty in a bird of paradise, though he's always quick to be excited by beauty in his own theories.

One way of thinking about science is that it's a check against the natural human tendency to see patterns that might not be there. It's a way of knowing when a pattern is real and when it's a trick of your mind.

El cambio es tanto un arte como una ciencia

Marxism claims, above all, to be a 'scientific' philosophy, one which applies the principles of science to politics and society.

We were developing a machine that used egg white, heat and sugar to synthesize methanol when a power surge caused an implosion. Owens was meringued. By the time we chipped him out the poor chap had expired.

We're in a psuedoscientific technobabble.

Ninjas are far more important to science than anyone realises. If we could capture one to study, I think most of science's biggest puzzles might be resolved.

It's important to collect evidence,' she said, 'even if disproved. That's how science works. Being proved wrong and then advancing. If I'm proved wrong a lot, I must be making headway, right?

I had sequenced Pickwick at home using nothing more complex than average kitchen utensils and cultivated her in a denucleated goose egg.

It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, or a rich country inhabited by starving people... Who indeed could afford to ignore science today? At every turn we have to seek its aid... The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.

Professor Bullfinch had taken up the obsidian ax, and he hefted it thoughtfully. "I should hate to have to turn this against a person," he said. "Still, a scientist should not shrink from new experiences

Boy! There are times when I get the feeling that science develops things that are supposed to be good for us, but that just make trouble." Dr. Tresselt's blue eyes seemed to throw out sparks of amusement. "I know how you feel, Joe," he said. "But my stars, boy, nobody can be alive and never have any trouble! Being alive is just meeting troubles every day and overcoming them. Just to stand up straight against the pull of gravity is a fight, isn't it?

In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being 'discovered' and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it.

Why are criminal acts and anomalies imputed to a chemical or biological process, but never virtues and good deeds? It does indeed seem that only Evil has a right to an 'objective' explanation. Which suggests that scientific rationality might itself be merely a deeper form of this principle of Evil.

One of the variants of this lethal accomplishment, of this acting-out, is the realization of all metaphors - the collapse of the metaphor into the real. Here, again, we have the phantasm of materializing all that is parable, myth, fable and metaphor. Romain Gary: 'All humanity's metaphors end up becoming realities. I am coming to wonder whether the real aim of science is not a validation of metaphors.

We discovered primitive societies, America, the atom, the unconscious, viruses. But the consequences of this expansion of the field of knowledge escape us. We believe we discovered these things innocently in the peaceful realm of science. But they, too, discovered us and have broken in on our world - just deserts for our breaking in on theirs.

Formal logic, or logistics, is simply the axiomatics of states of equilibrium of thought, and the positive science corresponding to this axiomatics is none other than the psychology of thought.

In fact, objects are known only through the subject, while the subject can know himself or her- self only by acting on objects materially and mentally. Indeed, if objects are innumerable and science indefinitely diverse, all knowledge of the subject brings us back to psychology, the science of the subject and the subject's actions.

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn't. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say 'I think' we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction – don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.