Quotes About Science

The purpose of high-level sciences is to enable us to understand emergent phenomena, of which the most important are, as we shall see, life, thought and computation.

This is why the Royal Society (one of the earliest scientific academies, founded in London in 1660) took as its motto 'Nullius in verba', which means something like 'Take no one's word for it.

Testability is now generally accepted as the defining characteristic of the scientific method. Popper called it the 'criterion of demarcation' between science and non-science.

I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.

Neville Chamberlain, the only British prime minister until Margaret Thatcher to have had a university education in science and the only university-educated twentieth-century prime minister to have studied entirely outside Oxbridge.

On the whole, their message to their students remained steady: that science was good and metaphysics was bad. As Neurath put it to Feigl in 1938, "what we have in common will remain; as products of their time, the differences will fade.

Science cannot promise eternal truths; only the elimination of false hypotheses and the establishment of what is currently the most likely explanation of an aspect of reality

At present, we have a policy-response (to climate change) shaped by sophisticated climate science, brilliant technology and pop behaviourism, based on simple assumptions about carrot-and-stick incentives.

The claim that industrial agriculture is the only way of feeding a large population is about as scientific as a belief in Creationism - and far more damaging.

Science can contribute toward assisting with techniques of stress reduction — and research already shows that our survival and sustainability depends on our global cooperation as interdependent beings — but by itself, science cannot provide the values for a moral, meaningful life.

Understanding the laws of nature does not mean that we are immune to their operations.

Scientists in 2020 are not (as readers of mid-twentieth-century science fiction might have hoped) encountering alien civilizations in distant star systems; but they are encountering radically different forms of society under their own feet, some forgotten and newly rediscovered, others more familiar, but now understood in entirely new ways.

We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It's never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say?

In 1929, as a young man, British biologist J. D. Bernal wrote a book entitled "The World, The Flesh and the Devil" that Arthur C. Clarke called, "the most brilliant attempt at scientific prediction ever made.

Science has repeatedly revealed to us that we are not unique or special — except, guess what. We are.

early twentieth century seemed to see what was coming. In 1873, Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani proposed that the growing influence of humans was causing the "Anthropozoic era," but this was largely ignored by scientists of his day. In 1877, physiologist Joseph LeConte described a similar concept, calling it the Psychozoic era. In the 1920s the French Jesuit priest Tielhard de Chardin spoke of

From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics and determined to become a theoretical physicist. I had no real idea what that meant, but it seemed incredibly exciting to spend one's life attempting to find the secrets of the universe by using one's mind.

Those who think 'Science is Measurement' should search Darwin 's works for numbers and equations.

Mathematical science is in my opinion an indivisible whole, an organism whose vitality is conditioned upon the connection of its parts.

Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom - that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself.

How thoroughly it is ingrained in mathematical science that every real advance goes hand in hand with the invention of sharper tools and simpler methods which, at the same time, assist in understanding earlier theories and in casting aside some more complicated developments.

If one were to bring ten of the wisest men in the world together and ask them what was the most stupid thing in existence, they would not be able to discover anything so stupid as astrology.

Human Nature is the only science of man and yet has been hitherto the most neglected.