Quotes About Science

You are mistaken there, my dear child," said Madame de Godollo. "Pascal, who was himself a great example of the falseness of your point of view, says, if I am not mistaken, that a little science draws us from religion, but a great deal draws us back to it.

We talked about Friedrich Miescher and Oswald Avery, and Chargaff modulated from philippic to elegiac. Then he said, "I am against the over-explanation of science, because I think it impedes the flow of scientific imagination and associations. My main objection to molecular biology is that by its claim to be able to explain everything, it actually impedes the flow of free scientific explanation. But there is not a scientist I have met who would share my opinion.

Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.

It is not opinions that man needs: it is TRUTH. It is not theology; it is God. It is not religion: it is Christ. It is not literature and science; but the knowledge of the free love of God in the gift of His only-begotten Son.

one of the first assemblies of smart molecules had been the crew of that ingenious unit called the gene.† An even grander molecular fusion had been the chromosome—a knottily twisted rope of genes which not only worked together,* but fused so tightly that they formed a massive mega-molecule.

Both science and history are moving targets. Scholars in the twenty-first century are much more aware than those of earlier generations that scientists operate under the influence of powerful metaphors (science as exploration, discovery, documentation, thrust and counterthrust), and that both the scope and the tools of history undergo continual changes.

I think that physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up and they keep their curiosity. Once you are sophisticated, you know too much-far too much.

Although it is not as famous as Kuhn's SSR, Bas van Fraassen's book The Scientific Image (1980) has certainly had a profound effect on the philosophy of science

The story of the Copernican Revolution never has been and probably never will be better told than in Thomas Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (New York: MJF Books, 1985)

Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970) and Greek Science after Aristotle (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973)

The Beginnings of Western Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Geocentric cosmology seems

Alexander Bird's Thomas Kuhn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000

Though outdated, Carl G. Hempel's Philosophy of Natural Science has never been surpassed (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966)

I think the best general discussion of scientific rationality is W. H. Newton-Smith's The Rationality of Science (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)

Another outstanding work dealing with the rationality of science is Marcello Pera's The Discourses of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994

recent popular biography by a fine science writer is James Gleick's Isaac Newton (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003)

I offer Nicholas Humphrey's Leaps of Faith: Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation (New York: Copernicus

Michael Ruse's The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979

Most of these take a strong stand and present a case either for or against impact theory. In my opinion, the best of the pro-impact books is James Lawrence Powell's Night Comes to the Cretaceous (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1998). The case against the impact theory is vigorously argued by Charles Officer and Jake Page in The Great Dinosaur Extinction Controversy (Reading, MA: Helix Books, 1996).

The Mass Extinction Debates: How Science Works in a Crisis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

Drawing out Leviathan: Dinosaurs and the Science Wars (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001).

Stephen Jay Gould's 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man is both amusing and horrifying when it recounts how nineteenth century anthropologists pursued craniometry

Icon Books has a fine series called "Revolutions in Science." These works are succinct, highly readable, and authoritative. The series includes John Henry's Moving Heaven and Earth: Copernicus and the Solar System (Duxford, Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001). Henry's book can be read in an afternoon, and, while not as detailed as Kuhn's classic, it tells the story with verve and lucidity.

David Young, in his excellent book The Discovery of Evolution, strikes just the right note of balance in our interpretation of science; his words can serve as a coda for this chapter: