Quotes About Perspective

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?

That is the spiral galaxy in Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It consists of one hundred billion suns. Now I think we are small enough.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it is the exact opposite.

Science is a particular way of thinking about things.

One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

Earth has few secrets from the birds.

We make versions, and true versions make worlds.

The total number of people who understand relativistic time, even after eighty years since the advent of special relativity, is still much smaller than the number of people who believe in horoscopes.

Creative people see Prometheus in a mirror, never Pandora.

Remember that every science is based upon an abstraction. An abstraction is taking a point of view or looking at things under a certain aspect or from a particular angle.

When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.

One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall.

A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it.

We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !

Nonbelievers may hear all the notes of science, but without a theistic context and perspective they will not hear the song.

The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.

It's much easier on the emotions when one sees life as an experiment rather than a struggle for popularity.

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred.

In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.

By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.

Science fiction is like a blender - you can put in any historical experience and take influences from everything you see, read or experience.

Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.

The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.