quotations about science
The great contribution of science is to demonstrate that a person can regard the world as chaos, but can find in himself a method of perceiving, within that chaos, small arrangements of order, that out of himself, and out of the order that previous scientists have generated, he can make things that are exciting and thrilling to make, that are deeply spiritual contributions to himself and to his friends. The scientist comes to the world and says, "I do not understand the divine source, but I know, in a way that I don't understand, that out of chaos I can make order, out of loneliness I can make friendship, out of ugliness I can make beauty."
EDWIN H. LAND
address at MIT, "Generation of Greatness: The Idea of a University in an Age of Science", May 22, 1957
So what is science, and why do we consider it so useful and important? Despite the Hollywood stereotypes, science is not about white lab coats and bubbling beakers or sparkling apparatuses. Science is a way of looking at the world using a specific toolbox--the scientific method.
DONALD PROTHERO
"The Holocaust, Denier's Playbook, and the Tobacco Smokescreen: Common Threads in the Thinking and Tactics of Denialists and Pseudoscientists", Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem
Science is not the total answer; this I know, this I have learned in my lifetime. And that leaves me with the belief that miracles, no matter how inexplicable or unbelievable, are real and can occur without regard to the natural order of things.
NICHOLAS SPARKS
The Notebook
Science has an uncomfortable way of pushing human beings from center stage. In our prescientific stories, humans began as the focal point of Nature, living on an Earth that was the center of the universe. As the origins of the Earth and of mankind were investigated more carefully, it became clear that Nature had other interests beyond people, and the Earth was less central than previously hoped. Humankind was just one branch of the great family of life, and the Earth is a smallish planet orbiting an unexceptional sun quite far out on one arm of a run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy.
SETH LLOYD
Programming the Universe
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
attributed, Clarke Foundation
Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The Doctor's Dilemma
Science is a subordinate category. When science offers itself as the final stage or form of knowing, it is guilty of a false quantity, in that it puts the accent, which belongs elsewhere, upon the penultimate.
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
lecture at Columbia University, March 4, 1908
Leave your faith in science's hands
Research might lead to your salvation
While you're in a state of suspended animation
PESTILENCE
"Suspended Animation"
Everything aspires to the light. You don't have to chase down a fly to get rid of it -- you just darken the room, leave a crack of light in a window, and out he goes. Works every time. We all have that instinct, that aspiration. Science can't dim that. All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home.
TOBIAS WOLFF
Old School
By science men may learn the mysteries of the spirit world.
JOHN DEE
attributed, Day's Collacon
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance -- the idea that anything is possible.
RAY BRADBURY
Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1976
Science is truth for life
Watch religion fall obsolete
Science Will be truth for life
Technology as nature
10,000 MANIACS
"Planned Obsolescence"
For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable. Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right.
GREGORY BENFORD
Timescape
Every science owns kin with its sister science.
HYPATIA
attributed, Day's Collacon
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The World As I See It
Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
In the history of science and throughout the whole course of its progress we see certain epochs following one another more or less rapidly. Some important view is expressed, it may be original or only revived; sooner or later it receives recognition; fellow workers spring up; the outcome of it finds its way into the schools; it is taught and handed down; and we observe, unhappily, that it does not in the least matter whether the view be true or false. In either case its course is the same; in either case it comes in the end to be a mere phrase, a lifeless word stamped on the memory.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Understanding science is necessary to make informed decisions on issues both private and public -- from individual health care to national defense.
JOHN DURANT
"John Durant plans a new era for the MIT Museum", MIT News, September 27, 2017
Science is the whore of industry and the handmaiden of war.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
CARL SAGAN
Keynote address to the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, 1987