Quotes About Science

To be a true explorer in science—to follow the unprejudiced lead of pure scientific inquiry—is to be unafraid to propose the unthinkable, and to prove friends, colleagues, and scientific paradigms wrong.

Robert Goddard, the father of American rocket science,

The remarkable discoveries of these scientists suggested

1940s by neuroanatomist Harold S. Burr from Yale University, who studied and measured electrical fields around living things, specifically salamanders. Burr discovered that salamanders possessed an energy field shaped like an adult salamander, and that this blueprint even existed in an unfertilized egg.13

When he heard the news, Luftwaffe General Walter Dornberg, the director of the Peenemünde center, exultantly crowed to his staff, "This afternoon, the spaceship was born." But, as Dornberg knew, this first successful test flight of the V-2 rocket—the world's first long-range ballistic missile—had a much more immediate importance

Knowledge will teach candour, she who aims at attainment of it will find her countenance improved as her mind is informed and her looks enabled as her heart is elevated, thus may she become a pleasing companion to the main of science, sensibility, enabled to form the minds of her kids to virtue, knowledge, not less capable or willing to superintend domestic economy of her family for having wandered beyond the limits of kitchen.

In science, foundation-free opinions by self-proclaimed experts are rejected as ipse dixit (roughly translated, "It is so because I say so").

Essentially, the Marx opinion created an "eyeball test" for in-court evaluation of forensic evidence, shifting the responsibility of exposing flawed expert testimony to defense attorneys—through the "crucible" of cross-examination—and relying on lay jurors to separate science from nonsense.

Predictions are nice, if you can make them. But the essence of science lies in explanation, laying bare the fundamental mechanisms of nature.

Why is it that simple particles obeying simple rules will sometimes engage in the most astonishing, unpredictable behavior?

They believe that they are forging the first rigorous alternative to the kind of linear, reductionist thinking that has dominated science since the time of Newton—and that has now gone about as far as it can go in addressing the problems of our modern world.

William B. Shockley, coinventor of the transistor,

M. Mitchell Waldrop

first personal computer—that was the LINC of Wes Clark

he had to find out what was important about self-reproduction, independent of the detailed biochemical machinery.

The royal road to a Nobel Prize has generally been through the reductionist approach,

Prigogine's principle

M. Mitchell Waldrop

Babbage's Analytical Engine in the 1830s through ENIAC in the 1940s,

Project Lincoln—or Lincoln Laboratory, as it was renamed in 1952—they sound a lot like veterans of the Manhattan Project, or the Radiation Lab, or even the Apollo moon program of the 1960s.

M. Mitchell Waldrop

My people are going to learn the principles of democracy the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will, every man can follow his own conscience provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow men.

not the quickest bunny in the centrifuge?

Most important, it seems Stalin wanted to use the example of Shostakovich to scold and worry all of the Soviet Union's cultural leaders, rebuking them for turning away from "real art, real science, and real literature." He wanted to assert the infinite power of his regime and to show them that no one was safe.