Quotes About Science

it attempts to show that the necessary conditions of logical and mathematical reasoning, which undergird the natural sciences as a human activity, require the rejection of all broadly materialist worldviews. Reppert

Scientists used to think that whatever the very early universe might have been like, given sufficient time and some luck, intelligent life forms would eventually evolve somewhere. As a result of discoveries over the last fifty years or so, we now know that that assumption was wrong; in fact, quite the opposite is true.

Conclusion On the basis, therefore, of both philosophical and scientific evidence, we have good grounds for believing that the universe began to exist. Since whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning, it follows that the universe has a cause of its beginning.

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

The latest edition of a work of science is the most valuable; of literature, the earliest.

There are two kinds of observers in science: splitters and lumpers. I've never been much of a splitter; in my heart of hearts, I'm a lumper.) In

What matters, though, is not the space you're put in to work; what matters is the work you do in it. The Manhattan Project, the World War II race to develop the atomic bomb, also started out under a football stadium. Beneath the stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, a team of physicists led by Enrico Fermi built a crude fission reactor, brought its uranium fuel to critical mass, and set off a chain reaction that changed the world. We

I can't give people back their loved ones. I can't restore their happiness or innocence, can't give back their lives the way they were. But I can give them the truth. Then they will be free to grieve for the dead, and then free to start living again. Truth like that can be a humbling and sacred gift for a scientist to give.

Science by itself has no moral dimension. But it does seek to establish truth. And upon this truth morality can be built.

Art is wood that has fewer branches than science but its roots are deeper than in science.

The rational alternative to Darwin's theory is intelligent uncertainty.

E=mc2 is even better than the best poetry: "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

The Private Life of the Brain (New York: John Wiley, 2000); John McCrone's Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness (London: Faber and Faber, 1999) is a more easygoing, detailed exploration. David Hubel's Eye, Brain and Vision (San Francisco: Scientific American Library, 1988) is a fine vision of what seeing entails, presented by the scientist who did much to reveal

And why does England thus persecute the votaries of her science? Why does she depress them to the level of her hewers of wood and her drawers of water? Is it because science flatters no courtier, mingles in no political strife? ... Can we behold unmoved the science of England, the vital principle of her arts, struggling for existence, the meek and unarmed victim of political strife? [Reviewing Charles Babbage's Book, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830)]

A mere inference or theory must give way to a truth revealed; but a scientific truth must be maintained, however contradictory it may appear to the most cherished doctrines of religion.

But honestly, if you do a rigorous survey of my work, I'll bet you'll find that biology is a theme far more often than physical science.

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.

Predicting has a spotty record in science fiction. I've had some failures. On the other hand, I also predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of fundamentalist Islam... and I'm not happy to be right in all of those cases.

science demands a terrible price - that we accept what experiments tell us about the universe, whether we like it or not.

where were answers to the truly deep questions? Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don't look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and Crick, always retreating with great dignity before the latest scientific advance, then drawing the next holy perimeter at the shadowy rim of knowledge.

If we wish to do justice to the historical enterprise, we must take past for what it was. And that means that we must resist the temptation to scour the past for examples or precursors of modern science. We must respect the way earlier generations approached nature, acknowledging that although it may differ from the modern way, it is nonetheless of interest because it is part of our intellectual ancestry.

Sociobiology, then, is a religion: one which has genes as its gods. Yet

Sociobiology is not incomprehensible, but it is one of the religions which are obviously false. The

Nor have any Darwinians ever given, to this day, any such reconciliation of their theory with the teleological language which they employ as freely as though they were disciples, not of Darwin, but of Paley. Presumably