Quotes About Science

Remember, though, that debugging is as much art as it is computer science [..]

There is nothing truthful, wise, humane, or strategic about confusing hostility to injustice and oppression, which is leftist, with hostility to science and rationality, which is nonsense.

The point here is that physics followed the data where it seemed to lead, even though some thought the model gave aid and comfort to religion.

It is often said that science must avoid any conclusions which smack of the supernatural.

The theory of undirected evolution is already dead, but the work of science continues.

Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted.

It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.

It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on.

Scientists working on the origin of life deserve a lot of credit; they have attacked the problem by experiment and calculation, as science should. And although the experiments have not turned out as many hoped, through their efforts we now have a clear idea of the staggering difficulties that would face an origin of life by natural chemical processes. In private many scientists admit that science has no explanation for the beginning of life.

Every advance [in Science] will most likely tell us as much about ourselves as it will about the universe we inhabit. We are all collections of chemicals made in the cataclysmic explosions of stars; we are stardust, or nuclear waste, depending on your perspective.

Sometimes, the idea that science is a neutral, careful, bias-avoiding discipline has a bad day.

Lucas] was most famous for his short, best-selling book on fossils, "Animals of the Past: An Account of Some of the Creatures of the Ancient World", in which he showed his gift for enlivening the driest science. Apologizing for using Latin scientific names, he wrote: 'The reader may perhaps sympathize with the old lady who said the discovery of all these strange animals did not surprise her so much as the fact that anyone should know their names when they were found.

Galileo was challenged because he declared a theory to be a fact and argued with the Church about the genuine meaning of the Bible.

The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief.

Readers probably haven't heard much about it yet, but they will. Quantum technology turns ordinary reality upside down.

You know what's wrong with scientific power? It's a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are.

We now live in the Esperantists' dreamworld, but the universal language of natural science is English, a language that is the native tongue of some very powerful nation states and as a consequence not at all neutral ["Absolute English," Aeon , February 4, 2015]

The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to be satisfied to get it going.

Where both [Frege and Husserl] failed was in demarcating logical notions too strictly from psychological ones… These failings have left philosophy open to a renewed incursion from psychology, under the banner of 'cognitive science'. The strategies of defence employed by Husserl and Frege will no longer serve: the invaders can be repelled only by correcting the failings of the positive theories of those two pioneers.

Who would not have been laughed at if he had said in 1800 that metals could be extracted from their ores by electricity or that portraits could be drawn by chemistry. { Commenting on Henri Becquerel 's process for extracting metals by voltaic means .}

Nature is our kindest friend and best critic in experimental science if we only allow her intimations to fall unbiased on our minds.

See how beautifully these are coloured: you see here mauve, magenta, and all the chemical colours recently introduced, applied to candles.

If the world turns to religions of knowledge and enlightenment rather than place faith in dusty books and fanatical prophets, the vast divide between science and religion will be at last be healed. We can enter a Golden Age of human thinking and spirituality