Quotes About Scientific

Time and again we have come across phenomena eminently worthy of being investigated - only to have them disappear before we could make eve a visual record... Without being unduly pessimistic, I would say that, for every success we have had in filming or recording a matter of scientific interest, we have had ten failures. - p 46 Life and death in a coral sea

History cannot be logically constructed any more than a scientific event, if only because it involves the process of vague and indefinable concepts which are about to crystallize. The more detailed and differentiated the description for any field of thought, the more complex, interrelated, and mutually dependent in definition will be its concepts. They become a tangle impossible to unravel logically, an organic structure produced by mutual development and with interacting components.

And to think of this great country in danger of being dominated by people ignorant enough to take a few ancient Babylonian legends as the canons of modern culture. Our scientific men are paying for their failure to speak out earlier. There is no use now talking evolution to these people. Their ears are stuffed with Genesis.

Scientifically illiterate case law like this obviates the need for rigorous research in forensics. Few traditional forensic techniques have useful applications outside of the justice system and, as a result, once courts allow a technique to be used, there is no real incentive to conduct research—or even test the abilities of putative experts. Why conduct research on a technique that has already been accepted in court, the only place it matters?

This experience, Lick would say, gave him an instant insight into the scientific method: Always be extremely careful in your work—and in your proclamations of faith.

We have grown dull toward this world in which we live; we have forgotten that it is not normal or scientific in any sense of the word. It is fantastic. It is fairy tale through and through. Really now. Elephants? Caterpillars? Snow? At what point did you lose your wonder at it all?

Nos falta confianza en el presente, en el momento actual, en la visión efectiva, porque nuestra cultura nos dice que debemos confiar solo en lo que se ha conseguido y explicado en el pasado, en lo que se ha formulado de forma pública, lo que se ha editado, lo que se ha expuesto siguiendo los parámetros de una perspectiva claramente artística o claramente científica.

We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective.

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either. (Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews , Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

to depict reality - that is as much an artistic vision as a scientific sensibility

most scientific rival of the germ theory explained disease in terms purely of chemistry. It saw disease as a chemical process.

By 1918 humankind was fully modern, and fully scientific, but too busy fighting itself to aggress against nature. Nature, however, chooses its own moments. It chose this moment to aggress against man, and it did not do so prodding languidly. For the first time, modern humanity, a humanity practicing the modern scientific method, would confront nature in its fullest rage.

Thus much of our Western thinking is not scientific and objective but is orientated through a one-eyed perspective which reflects the prejudiced values of the West, and which necessarily prevents the enquirer from seeing the full picture. This is equivalent to what Blaut calls 'Eurocentric tunnel history'.32 What happens, then, when we view the world through a more inclusive two-eyed perspective?

You must also realize that the stuff of excellence-truth, real scientific truth-can be elusive... It is too often covered by the heavy fog of fear and hidden by the darkness of your detractors.

Sometimes little things can prolong an experience in a way that you run over budget. It's very scientific; a lot of people don't understand the science that goes behind making a film.

Some Rousseauean anthropologists protest that reports of cannibalism represent a racist desire to denigrate other cultures, but the scientific evidence suggests otherwise.

There is no doubt that the Old Testament is a physiological and anatomical textbook to those capable of reading it from a scientific viewpoint.

Sometimes scientific progress forces us to reevaluate the wisdom of the past. Other times, it reinforces it. The

I brought a young MIT mathematician, Dr. Nadipuram Prasad, into my department and gave him a budget. Within six months he developed the Markov method for econometric modeling. [...] It was exactly what we wanted: a tool that scientifically "proved" we were doing countries a favor by helping them incur debts they would never be able to pay off.

What the diary does not reveal, for it stops too soon, is the appalling fact that from late 1945 until 1952 Japanese medical researchers were prohibited by U.S. occupation authorities from publishing scientific articles on the effects of the atomic bombs.

Besides he was out of sympathy with the modern Sorbonne, where ideas of scientific exactitude, after the German model, were beginning to prevail over humanism.

He was one of that class of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely different kind of culture, literary or artistic, of which they make no use in the specialised work of their profession, but by which their conversation profits.

For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognised in a few years' time