Quotes About Science

Science progresses. Ideology tends to linger unchanged, and often unquestioned.

Given the power and influence that science increasingly has in our daily lives, it is important that we as citizens of an open and democratic society learn to separate good science from bunk. This is not just a matter of intellectual curiosity, as it affects where large portions of our tax money go, and in some cases even whether people's lives are lost as a result of nonsense.

the boundaries separating science, nonscience, and pseudoscience are much fuzzier and more permeable than Popper (or, for that matter, most scientists) would have us believe. There is, in other words, no litmus test.

British astronomer royal Richard Woolley, who in 1956 said, "All this talk about space travel is utter bilge, really."10 Yuri Gagarin was the first human to orbit the earth just five years later.

the nature of science is not that of a steady, linear progression toward the Truth, but rather a tortuous road, often characterized by dead ends and U-turns, and yet ultimately inching toward a better, if tentative, understanding of the natural world.

Secular humanism rightly looks to reason and science, but lingering there is not enough. Religions hasten to tie secularism down to materialism, and link materialism with egoism, nihilism, and anarchy. Compared to that portrayal, spirituality or even supernaturalism might look sane and safe.

These and similar examples are easy enough to uncover, and they make two crucial points: first, good science does not require experiments, it can be done with an intelligent use of observational evidence; second, there is more than one way to do science, depending on the nature of the questions and the methods typical of the field.

Para decidir cuál es la mejor forma de vivir (ética), hay que entender cómo funciona el mundo (física) y razonar adecuadamente sobre ello (lógica).

What these cases of success in the hard sciences have in common is that they really do lend themselves to a straightforward logical analysis: there is a limited number of options, and they are mutually exclusive. Just like logical trees work very well in classic Aristotelian logic (where the only values that can be attached to a proposition are true or false), so strong inference works well with a certain type of scientific question.

Popper rightly believed that the public-not just scientists or philosophers-needs to understand and appreciate that distinction, because science is too powerful and important, and pseudoscience too common and damaging, for an open society to afford ignorance on the matter.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.-Adam Smith

science makes progress not by proving its theories right-because that's impossible-but by eliminating an increasing number of wrong theories. Pseudoscience, however, does not make progress because its "theories" are so flexible that they can accommodate any observation whatsoever, which means that pseudoscientific theories do not actually have any explanatory teeth.

are we going to teach the best of what we currently know about the world (however provisional such knowledge may be), or shall we decide if the earth is flat or round by majority consensus?

TEKELI-LI. Tekeli-li, Tekeli-li. I got that from Pym. I got that from Poe. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe, specifically. Pym that is maddening, Pym that is brilliance, Pym whose failures entice instead of repel. Pym that flows and ignites and Pym that becomes so entrenched it stagnates for hundreds of words at a time. A book that at points makes no sense, gets wrong both history and science, and yet stumbles into an emotional truth greater than both.

los pigmentos reales, las pinturas de tubo, no tenían nada que ver con los colores de la luz. Mezclar colores reales, es decir, añadirles o sumarles tonos, siempre da como resultado el color negro mientras que la suma de colores de luz siempre da como resultado el blanco. Son efectos totalmente opuestos.

Bueno, la teoría de Darwin no deja de ser sólo una teoría —comenté—. Si, a estas alturas, hubieran podido demostrarla, sería la ley de Darwin.

runners throughout the first half of the twentieth century generally avoided drinking anything during long races because they believed that submitting to their thirst would cause them to become "waterlogged" and slow down. One expert of the time wrote, "Don't get in the habit of drinking and eating in a Marathon race; some prominent runners do, but it is not beneficial.

Science has shown that mass below the knee is very costly in terms of its effect on running economy.

The human body produces an estimated 2,709 enzymes that facilitate approximately 896 chemical reactions.

while coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to be able, under whatever pressure, to become a diamond. According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.

So most of what we know now will be disproved or reassessed in the future. That is how science works, not through blind faith, but continual doubt.

That is how science works, not through blind faith, but continual doubt.

If you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again.

The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that – and we shall – there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is.