Quotes About Science

A merely symbolic religion does not threaten the ruling regime of materialistic science.

Just as scientists test a theory by taking it into the lab and mixing chemicals in a test tube to see if the results confirm the theory, so we test a worldview by taking it into the laboratory of ordinary life.

Two Princeton sociologists conclude, "If we were asked to design a system for making sure that children's basic needs were met, we would probably come up with something quite similar to the two-parent ideal."39 Those who respect science the most should also be the most pro-marriage.

Two Princeton sociologists conclude, "If we were asked to design a system for making sure that children's basic needs were met, we would probably come up with something quite similar to the two-parent ideal." Those who respect science the most should also be the most pro-marriage.

Now science has presented us with a hope called stem cell research, which may provide our scientists with many answers that have for so long been beyond our grasp.

Remember, I'm a doctor's daughter. So obviously I'm interested in all medical things.

As was done at the time of Maggie's death, scientists and individuals today are still pondering the possibility, if not the certainty, of the eternal life of the human soul. like death itself, this remains one of our greatest mysteries.

Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

Bruce Lipton (The Biology of Belief)

While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence.

Science is pretty much the same. A conclusion becomes established not when a clever person proposes it, or even a group of people begin to discuss it, but when the jury of peers—the community of researchers—reviews the evidence and concludes that it is sufficient to accept the claim.

C. P. Snow once argued that foolish faith in authority is the enemy of truth.

All scientific work is incomplete—whether it be observational or experimental. All scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us a freedom to ignore the knowledge we already have, to postpone action that it appears to demand at a given time. Who knows, asks Robert Browning, but the world may end tonight? True, but on available evidence most of us make ready to commute on the 8:30 next day.9

Economists have a term for these costs—a less reassuring one than Friedman's "neighborhood effects." They are "negative externalities": negative because they aren't beneficial and external because they fall outside the market system. Those who find this hard to accept attack the messenger, which is science.

Did all of Singer's efforts to discredit mainstream science matter? When asked in 1995 where he got his assessments of ozone depletion, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, probably the most powerful man in Congress at the time, said, "my assessment is from reading people like Fred Singer."93

Two crucial developments during the presidential campaign year of 1988 changed climate science forever. The first was the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The second was the announcement by climate modeler James E. Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, that anthropogenic global warming had begun. An organized campaign of denial began the following year, and soon ensnared the entire climate science community.

From its earliest, days, science has been associated with institutions—the Accademia dei Lincei, founded in 1609, the Royal Society in Britain, founded in 1660, the Académie des Sciences in France, founded in 1666—because scholars (savants and natural philosophers as they were variously called before the nineteenth-century invention of the word "scientist") understood that to create new knowledge they needed a means to test each other's claims.

Like its bête noire, Marxism, laissez-faire economics claimed to be scientific, based upon immutable laws of nature, and also like Marxism, it has not stood the test of experience. If it were a scientific theory, it would have long ago been rejected.37 Free-market fundamentalism is an article of faith.

Nobody can publish an article in a scientific journal claiming the Sun orbits the Earth, and for the same reason, you can't publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal claiming there's no global warming. Probably well-informed professional science journalists wouldn't publish it either. But ordinary journalists repeatedly did.

The public cares little about science, except insofar as its conclusions can be made to intervene in behalf of some moral, religious or social controversy.

History shows us clearly that science does not provide certainty. It does not provide proof. It only provides the consensus of experts, based on the organized accumulation and scrutiny of evidence.

Bad, bad science. You can practically see the fingers wagging. Scientists had been bad boys; it was time for them to behave themselves. The tobacco industry would be the daddy who made sure they did. It wasn't just money at stake; it was individual liberty. Today, smoking, tomorrow … who knew? By protecting smoking, we protected freedom.

Conversely, if the claim is rejected, the honest scientist is expected to accept that judgment, and move on to other things. In science, you don't get to keep harping on a subject until your opponents just give up in exhaustion.

This is a characteristic pattern in science: first there is scattered evidence of a phenomenon, published in specialist journals or reports, and then someone begins to connect the dots.