Quotes About Scientific

When we are asked to swear in American courts of law—that we will tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"—we are being asked the impossible. It is simply beyond our powers. Our memories are fallible; even scientific truth is merely an approximation; and we are ignorant about nearly all of the Universe. Nevertheless, a life may depend on our testimony.

Under Communism, both religion and pseudoscience were systematically suppressed—except for the superstition of the state ideological religion. It was advertised as scientific, but fell as far short of this ideal as the most unselfcritical mystery cult.

There were many women in the Soviet scientific community, proportionately more so than in the United States. But they tended to occupy menial middle-level positions, and male Soviet scientists, like their American counterparts, were puzzled about a pretty woman with evident scientific competence who forcefully expressed her views.

He believed in rational thinking and scientific inquiry, which was why he never won an argument with his mother, who believed in people doing what she told them, and believed it with a rock-hard certainty which dismissed all opposition.

Following this scientific process assures that everyone involved in making improvements is thinking critically and breaking old habits of prematurely leaping to solutions or rushing through execution for the sake of meeting a deadline.

Even scientific knowledge, if there is anything to it, is not a random observation of random objects for the critical objectivity of significant knowledge is attained as a practice only philosophically in inner action.

And these researchers, in time-honored social-scientific fashion, substitute for "similarity" a more specialized term: "homogamy." Homogamous marriages involve similar partners, whereas heterogamous marriages involve couples who differ in important characteristics. (Feel free to drop these terms at cocktail parties and amaze your friends.)

From this point of view the question of the scientific status of Darwinian theory—in the widest sense, the theory of trial and error-elimination—becomes an interesting one. I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme—a possible framework for testable scientific theories.

For Aristotle's essentialist definitions are the principles from which all our knowledge is derived; they thus contain all our knowledge; and they serve to substitute a long formula for a short one. As opposed to this, the scientific or nominalist definitions do not contain any knowledge whatever, not even any 'opinion'; they do nothing but introduce new arbitrary shorthand labels; they cut a long story short.

The old scientific idea of episteme-of absoutely certain, demonstrable knowledge-has proved to be an idol. The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative for ever. It may indeed be corroborated, but every corroboration is relative to other statements which, again, are tentative. Only in our subjective experiences of conviction, in our subjective faith, can we be 'absolutely certain'.

It only needs to be convincing to the misinformed voter. Some of the big truths voters have accepted have little or no scientific basis. And these include the belief that AIDS is caused by human immunodeficiency virus, the belief that fossil fuel emissions are causing global warming, and the belief that the release of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere has created a hole in the ozone layer. The illusions go even deeper into our everyday lives when they follow us to the grocery store.

Certainly we've made important innovations, chief among them the systematic use of the scientific method," he said at one point, "but the primitive groundwork is still there, dominating the pattern of our lives. We're modified anthropoid apes inhabiting night clubs and battleships. What else could you expect us to be?

The high success of Newton's astronomy was in one way an intellectual disaster: it produced an illusion from which we tend still to suffer. This illusion was created by the circumstance that Newton's mechanics had a good model in the solar system. For this gave the impression that we had an ideal of scientific explanation; whereas the truth was, it was mere obligingness on the part of the solar system, by having had so peaceful a history in recorded time, to provide such a model.

Kate was especially intrigued by entries in the book showing scientific notations for chemical compounds. The long, complicated sequences of elements left her wondering what sort of substances these ingredients produced. Had her ancestors managed to preserve some of Valerian's ancient formulas for alchemy potions?

Our own conceptions of creation are far more scientific in outlook, and we expect creation stories merely to disclose the rudiments of nature's origins. Not so the ancients. They told creation stories with the primary purpose of providing a cosmic foundation for the meaning and purpose of human life.

If they were right, there was an absence of conflict not only over the specific case of cosmology but, in principle, over anything else in which scientific and biblical statements appeared to be in contradiction. A "conflict thesis" would have seemed untenable because there was nothing to fight about.

All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.

For us to demand that the Biblical text be scientifically or historically "accurate" as we define those terms is not a high view of Scripture, it is a low view of Scripture. It is in fact imposing our own prejudices upon the text by refusing to understand it within its context. This is called cultural imperialism and it is the height of hubris, or human pride.

The only problem is that the ancient writers were pre-scientific and did not know the earth went around the sun, so when they said the sun was moving from one end of the heavens to the other they believed reality was exactly as they observed it. They had absolutely no reason to believe in a "phenomenal distinction" between their observation and reality.[93]

Again, they have no idea of what could be called the evolution of the world or the evolution of society; that is, they do not look back towards a series of successive changes, which happened in nature or in humanity, as we do. We, in our religious and scientific outlook alike, know that earth ages and that humanity ages, and we think of both in these terms; for them, both are eternally the same, eternally youthful.

Zanadto wlaz?em w towarzystwo, które tu kwitnie. Ci?gle zadaj? si? z Francuzk? i drem franc[uskim] (?ydkiem) z pierwszej oraz z ma?p? australsk?, wobec której wypuszczam zreszt? du?o snobizmu naukowego.

Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology.

These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks—

These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks— the Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist.