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Science Quotes
"Though many have tried, no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science, which can do so much, cannot decide what it ought to do."
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"Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted."
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"The developing science departs at the same time more and more from its original scope and purpose and threatens to sacrifice its earlier unity and split into diverse branches."
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"Despite the Great Chain of Being's traditional ranking of humans between animals and angels, there is no evolutionary justification for the common assumption that evolution is somehow 'aimed' at humans, or that humans are 'evolution's last word'."
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"Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment."
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"Intellectual curiosity and the human brain are the root of science."
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"As a microbiologist, I am particularly concerned with Mr. Bush's blatant disregard for science."
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"Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature."
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"There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything."
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"The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee."
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"Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with."
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"In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong."
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"One thing a girl loves more than a bad boy is a self-aware bad boy."
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"The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff."
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"There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths."
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"One must divide one's time between politics and equations. But our equations are much more important to me, because politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity."
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"The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star."
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"There is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated from the experiment itself. Impossible to detach the observer from the observed. A great deal of scientific truth has later turned out to be its observer's fiction. It is irrational to assume that this is no longer the case."
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"Like many students, I found the drudgery of real experiments and the slowness of progress a complete shock, and at my low points I contemplated other alternative careers including study of the philosophy or sociology of science."
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"Physiology is the science which treats of the properties of organic bodies, animal and vegetable, of the phenomena they present, and of the laws which govern their actions. Inorganic substances are the objects of other sciences, - physics and chemistry."
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"Without renouncing the support of physics, it is possible for the physiology of the senses, not only to pursue its own course of development, but also to afford to physical science itself powerful assistance."
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"Ever since Newton, we've done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we're now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication."
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"With rare exceptions (chiefly the social insects), mammals and birds are the only organisms to devote substantial attention to the care of their young; an evolutionary development that, through the long period of plasticity which it permits, takes advantage of the large information-processing capability of the mammalian and primate brains. Love seems to be an invention of the mammals."
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"I remember in 1978 meeting two Ugandan captains in the hotel talking Russian. They had been educated in Moscow and since they came from different Ugandan peoples, it was the only way they could understand one another."
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"The purpose of science is not to analyze or describe but to make useful models of the world. A model is useful if it allows us to get use out of it."
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"The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler."
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"From my earliest days, I was fascinated by science."
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"In beef trade issues, we base our decisions upon science."
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