Quotes About Science

The most salient feature of the statement is its categorical rejection of the idea that there is any wide disparity among people in their innate ability to master science. A blithe egalitarianism reigns. Any attempt to confront this pipe dream with an "elitist" view of the spectrum of talent would be rejected with pious horror.

A corollary of this philosophy is that it is not particularly important for a teacher to understand science well. The teacher, after all, is but a coparticipant in the process of constructing "knowledge." (The deemphasis on teacher expertise is probably just as well. As physicist Alan Cromer has pointed out, the training of teachers in constructivist methodology is marvelously suited to creating confusion about the scientific points at issue.)28

Rather, it is the ontological shadowland of "nonhuman others" that must be vindicated. In this quasi-theology, to enter the state of domination/damnation we needn't act to evil effect, deliberately or otherwise. Our "knowledge" is sufficient to condemn us. "Modern science" itself is the source of the evil taint. To know is to be guilty of dominating what is known.

These days (as those few physicians who try actively to fight quackery have found to their sorrow), it is nearly impossible to deprive a doctor of his license to practice for anything so problematical as mere scientific heterodoxy. To fly by the seat of one's pants, espousing or devising nostrums as one chooses, without regard to scientific validity, is an open option. The stock of patients who can be recruited by the force of personality or the lure of hope is essentially limitless.

When it comes to the ever-elusive goal of achieving what is usually called "scientific literacy" for the general population, it is hard not to conclude that the task is hopeless.7b

Social constructivist and postmodernist articles of faith-that no community of knowers enjoys a privileged epistemological position above any other-obviously stokes the confidence of multiculturalism's advocates when they insist that these "Otherly" perspectives be brought into today's science classroom, despite their poor fit with standard science.-';

Scientists are mistaken if they think that because the society that surrounds them revels in the plenty that science bestows, it has developed a frame of mind that reflects the scientific ethos. More ancient tendencies are in play in the collective imagination.

Nonspecialist science education has to pass along a general sense of the content, methods, efficacy, and authority of science. Yet it must do so without evoking the complex of resentments and anxieties that so ominously besiege science in contemporary society. At best this would be a daunting task. In the current climate, where our various social and political mechanisms are pulling in a dozen different directions at once, it may be an impossible one.

Our task as science educators is to ensure that discussions of values and ethics in science become models of rational inquiry rather than verbal free-for-ails where uninformed individuals generate more heat than light as they share mutual ignorance.8's

The general culture itself, though without strong ideological passions or theoretical enthusiasms, is poor soil for cultivating a widespread understanding of science. It is, to use blunt words, a lazy, fatally unambitious culture, strongly resistant to demands for sustained and coherent thought on any topic (aside, perhaps, from sports, guns, and automobiles).

Both leftists and conservatives have, in their different ways, contributed to a slack public educational system, which is particularly feeble when it comes to science. Neither faction is likely to accept serious reform gracefully, the left because of its dogmatic anti-elitism, the right because of its own version of anti-elitism as well as its resistance to public expenditure and its fervent preference for "localism" in all things.

With shaken confidence in the consistency and legitimacy of what they take to be scientific research, people revert to ancient and erroneous habits of thought-post hoc ergo propter hot- reasoning, reliance on anecdotal evidence, false analogy, and simple rumor chasing.

In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.

SF] was a commercial genre born in the old adventure pulp magazines of the first third of the twentieth century, aimed primarily at adolescent males, which, over the decades, in fits and starts, evolved into an intellectually credible, scientifically germane, transcendental literature without losing its popular base. Of what other literature in the history of the western world can this truly be said?

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the languages of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music.

Pure mathematics enters into and gives form to the physical sciences, and I have a notion that myths and images of literature also enter into and give form to all the structures we build out of world

Ra?iunea ?i fantezia sunt religie - ra?iunea ?i inteligen?a, ?tiin??.

Una ciencia construida únicamente en vista de sus aplicaciones es una ciencia imposible, porque las verdades solo son fecundas si están encadenadas entre sí. Y si uno se consagra solamente a aquellas [verdades] de las cuales se espera un resultado inmediato faltarán los eslabones intermedios y no habrá más cadena.

Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces; though there is some silly theory of gravitation.

Birçok dert de, ne yaz?k, bilimin istedi?i tan?mlar?n içine s??m?yordu. ?nsan?n, bilimd??? ne kadar çok hastal??? vard?.

I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.

Fantasy is totally wide open all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.

So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.