Quotes About Science

Sharks have everything a scientist dreams of. They're beautiful?God, how beautiful they are! They're like an impossibly perfect piece of machinery. They're as graceful as any bird. They're as mysterious as any animal on earth. No one knows for sure how long they live or what impulses?except for hunger?they respond to. There are more than two hundred and fifty species of shark, and everyone is different from every other one.

Als Leitwissenschaft für eine lebensfähige und lebenswerte menschliche Zukunft kommt mithin nur eine als Humanwissenschaft verstandene Geistes-, Kultur-und Sozialwissenschaft in Frage, die zwar vom Erkenntnis- und Erfahrungsraum der Naturwissenschaften ausgeht, sich jedoch nicht als deren bloßes Anhängsel versteht, sondern vielmehr auf die Selbstdefinitions- und -sublimationsmacht des Menschen als eines Geist-und Sozialwesens vertraut.

Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.

I read a lot of history, biographies, science, and novels,' he says, ushering a reporter out the door with a hint of relief. 'I do not read management or economics.' (from an interview in the Christian Science Monitor , July 26, 1993)

But the order in which these sources will be discussed is not arbitrary. They are listed in descending order of reliability and predictability. For, contrary to almost universal belief, new knowledge – and especially new scientific knowledge – is not the most reliable or most predictable source of successful innovations. For all the visibility, glamour, and importance of science-based innovation, it is actually the least reliable and least predictable one.

Technology" does not necessarily mean "science and engineering." Techne, the Greek word from which "technology" derives, means, after all, "useful knowledge," or "organized skill," rather than "engineering.

The notion that scientific truth directly fosters moral goodness — a legacy of gifted but in this respect misguided amateurs of science like Diderot and Goethe — was receding in the nineteenth century before positivistic procedures which sharply differentiated facts from values.

Is science a fundamentally cooperative enterprise, or is it a fundamentally competitive one in which scientists are out for personal advancement? According to Hull (and also Merton), science runs on a combination of cooperation and competition. Neither is fundamental, and the special features of science are due to an interaction between the two. This interaction arises from the reward system found in science and the context in which the reward system operates.

Hull also argues that the reason why fraud in science is so much more serious a crime than theft, even in cases where public well-being is not affected, has to do with these sorts of factors. In a case of theft or plagiarism, the only person harmed is the one stolen from. But when a case of fraud is discovered, all the scientists who used the fraudulent work will find their work on that topic deemed unreliable, and their work will not be used.

For many philosophers, causation is a suspicious metaphysical concept that we do best to avoid when trying to understand science. This suspicion is, again, common within the empiricist tradition. It derives from the work of Hume. The suspicion is directed especially at the idea of causation as a sort of hidden connection between things, unobservable but essential to the operation of the universe.

But Toulmin and Goodfield's Fabric of the Heavens (1962.), an old book recently reprinted, is my favorite.

There could, in principle, be an institution that looked like what we call science but in which there was no genuine responsiveness to the world. Experiments would be no more than expensive PR exercises, and theories would change via a process of negotiation between factions. How do we know that our own science is not like this?

Science constantly strives to reduce the number of things that we must accept as fundamental. We try to develop general explanatory schemata (explanatory schemes) that can be applied as widely as possible. This proposal certainly makes a lot of sense of how scientists operate. Indeed, it seems clear that what produces an Aha! reaction is often the realization that some odd-looking phenomenon is really a case of something more general.

Science works by taking theoretical ideas and trying to find ways to expose them to observation. The scientific strategy is to construe ideas, to embed them in surrounding conceptual frameworks, and to develop them, in such a way that this exposure is possible even in the case of the most general and ambitious hypotheses about the universe.

The eye of the poet sees less clearly, but sees farther than the eye of the scientist.

Even biologists rank species in a hierarchical order.

In art, the world conforms to the creative idea; in science, the idea conforms to the world.

Science asks what and how, philosophy asks why, myth and religion ask who. Who's

The purpose of arguing is not to win. Arguing is not a game. It's not, I'm cleverer than you are. The purpose of argument is like the purpose of science: to know. It's a means, not the only means, of knowing, of transferring us from ignorance to knowledge, a way of getting out of that cave. Philosophy is, in some obvious ways, not like what we today call science, but in some other less than obvious ways, it's very similar to what we today call science.

Aristotle also believed that a vacuum was impossible.

We are by now well into the eighteenth century, when the Enlightenment identified the search for knowledge as the highest form of human activity. It was a time for scientists to wipe the metaphysical dust from their eyes.

Imagine! In each of us lies the potential to do superhuman things. Feats of great physical daring, art, science. The ability to defy laws of nature.

the future lay in cultivating the scientist in all of us. If science is an unfinished project, the next stage will be about reconnecting and integrating the rigor of scientific method with the richness of direct experience to produce a science that will serve to connect us to one another, ourselves, and the world.

Fortunately there is no need to pin the case for equality to one particular outcome of a scientific investigation.