Quotes About Science

The scientist is motivated primarily by curiosity and a desire for truth.

The question, then, is not "Is story telling science?" but "Can science learn to tell good stories?" (p. 50)

The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress.

There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today -- but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It's a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match. And this works, not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life. I should think people would want to know that what they know is truly what the universe is like, or at least as close as they can get to it.

There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.

All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men.

Science can be introduced to children well or poorly. If poorly, children can be turned away from science; they can develop a lifelong antipathy; they will be in a far worse condition than if they had never been introduced to science at all.

Science is a mechanism, a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe, and seeing whether they match.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion.

That one body should act upon another through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else is so great an absurdity that no man suited to do science...can ever fall into it,.....Gravity must be caused by an agent...but whether that agent be material or immaterial I leave to my readers.

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

Hypotheses non fingo (Latin for "I feign no hypotheses", "I frame no hypotheses", or "I contrive no hypotheses")

I can calculate the motion of heavily bodies , but not the madness of people.

Isaac Newton

I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.

Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.

Citizens expect solutions from science for all sorts of social problems: unemployment, depleted oil reserves, pollution, cancer … the path that leads to the answers to these questions is not as direct as a programmatic vision of research would have us believe …

To preserve our absolute categories or ideals at the expense of human lives offends equally against the principles of science and of history; it is an attitude found in equal measure on the right and left wings in our days, and is not reconcilable with the principles accepted by those who respect the facts.

las ciencias naturales no eran el paradigma del conocimiento.

Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.