Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure
Science. ~Edwin Powell Hubble, The Nature of Science, 1954
I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success because it has such a limited and
narrow realm in which to focus its efforts. Namely, the physical universe. ~Ken Jenkins
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate. ~Henry J. Tillman
A biophysicist talks physics to the biologists and biology to the physicists, but then
he meets another biophysicist, they just discuss women. ~Author Unknown
Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.
~Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends, 1972
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of
conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. ~Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. ~Adam
Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776
Science is a cemetery of dead ideas. ~Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life,
1913
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries,
is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..." ~Isaac Asimov
A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found
guilty.
A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.
~Edward Teller
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. ~Wernher Von Braun
Science does not know its debt to imagination. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways
of thinking about them. ~William Lawrence Bragg
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. ~John
Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 1929
Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men. ~Jean Rostand
Scientists should always state the opinions upon which their facts are based. ~Author
Unknown
That theory is worthless. It isn't even wrong! ~Wolfgang Pauli
Louise: "How did you get here?"
Johnny: "Well, basically, there was this
little dot, right? And the dot went bang and the bang expanded.
Energy formed into matter, matter cooled,
matter lived, the amoeba to fish, to fish to fowl,
to fowl to frog, to frog to mammal, the mammal to monkey, to monkey
to man, amo amas amat,
quid pro quo, memento mori, ad infinitum,
sprinkle on a little bit of grated cheese
and leave under the grill till Doomsday."
~From the movie Naked
Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but
a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science. ~Henri Poincaré
A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point
reached by the genius of the last generation. ~Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual, 1965
The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which
is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences
of the human heart. ~Walter Lippmann
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whenever science makes a discovery, the devil grabs it while the angels are debating the
best way to use it. ~Alan Valentine
Science is simply common sense at its best. ~Thomas Huxley
Great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories
about the nature of things. ~Aldous Huxley, "Wordsworth in the Tropics"
Physics is imagination in a straight jacket. ~John Moffat
If we wish to make a new world we have the material ready. The first one, too, was
made out of chaos. ~Robert Quillen
Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it. ~Albert
Einstein
To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal
truth. ~Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, 1995
The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to rethink our
beliefs about the universe and our place in it. ~Robert L. Park, in The New York Times, 7 December 1999
It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence
by the percipient scientist long in advance of any possible proof. ~John Desmond Bernal, The Origin of Life, 1967
Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology. ~Karl Marx, Capital,
1867
Science is the topography of ignorance. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Medical Essays,
1883
Observations always involve theory. ~Edwin Hubble
The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special
attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music. ~Lewis Thomas
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right
questions. ~Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le cuit, 1964
Men are probably nearer the central truth in their superstitions than in their science.
~Henry David Thoreau
I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups
rather than to make men happy. ~Bertrand Russell, Icarus, or the Future of Science, 1925
Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because
we know so little;
it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. ~Bertrand Russell
Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly
divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law. ~William James, The Will to Believe and Other
Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1910
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. ~Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974
Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism
a virtue. ~Robert K. Merton, Social Theory, 1957
The whole history of physics proves that a new discovery is quite likely lurking at the
next decimal place. ~F.K. Richtmeyer
The task of asking nonliving matter to speak and the responsibility for interpreting its
reply is that of physics. ~J.T. Fraser, Time, the Familiar Stronger, 1987
The quantum is that embarrassing little piece of thread that always hangs from the sweater
of space-time. Pull it and the whole thing unravels. ~Fred Alan Wolfe, Star Wave: Mind Consciousness of Quantum
Physics, 1984
In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for
you. ~Frank Wilczek
There were two kinds of physicists in Berlin: on the one hand there was Einstein,
and on the other all the rest. ~Rudolph Ladenburg
Science without conscience is the soul's perdition. ~François Rabelais, Pantagruel,
1572
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth
of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.
~Bertrand Russell, What I Believe, 1925
In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes' bath and
Newton's apple, the [3.6 million year old] fossil footprints were eventually noticed one evening in September 1976 by the
paleontologist Andrew Hill, who fell while avoiding a ball of elephant dung hurled at him by the ecologist David Western.
~John Reader, Missing Links: The Hunt for Earliest Man
Amoebas at the start
Were not complex;
They tore themselves apart
And started
Sex.
~Arthur Guiterman
Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable
to withhold one's provisional consent. ~Stephen Jay Gould
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common
sense on the ground floor. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, 1872
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. ~Albert
Einstein
Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind. ~Marston Bates
But the great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact
- which is so constantly being enacted under the eyes of philosophers... ~T.H. Huxley, "Biogenesis and Abiogenesis," The Royal
Society President's Address to the Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Liverpool, Critiques
and Addresses, 1870, Collected Essays VIII
How index-learning turns no student pale,
Yet holds the eel of science by the tail!
~Alexander
Pope, Dunciad
DNA was the first three-dimensional Xerox machine. ~Kenneth Boulding, "Energy and
the Environment," Beasts, Ballads, and Bouldingisms, 1976
If it's green or wriggles, it's biology.
If it stinks, it's chemistry.
If it doesn't
work, it's physics.
~Handy Guide to Science
It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists
are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms. ~George Wald
In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last.
~Hugh Walpole
Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden,
and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry. ~John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy,
1920
I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive
at them. ~Karl Friedrich Gauss
The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.
~Celia Green, The Decline and Fall of Science, 1972
Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art. ~Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy,
1926
Science, in the very act of solving problems, creates more of them. ~Abraham Flexner,
Universities, 1930
Science... never solves a problem without creating ten more. ~George Bernard Shaw
There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; what is
national is no longer science. ~Anton Chekhov
Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason,
and demands the production of objective fact. ~H.L. Mencken, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebook, 1956
It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea
rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as
he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher. ~Charles Peirce
The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. ~Gerard Piel
An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording
of Nature's answer. ~Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, 1949
My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother
in Brooklyn would ask her child after school, "So? Did you learn anything today?" But not my mother. "Izzy,"
she would say, "did you ask a good question today?" That difference - asking good questions - made me become a scientist.
~Isidor Isaac Rabi
Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts
is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house. ~Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, 1905
The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians,
but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk. ~H.L. Mencken, Minority
Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebook, 1956
Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but
also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics,
in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to
pursue. They may lead us - to put it in extreme terms - to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to
decide which path to take. ~Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point, 1982
There is no gravity. The earth sucks. ~Graffito
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society
gathers wisdom. ~Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988
In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called,
as there is mathematics. ~Immanuel Kant
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing opponents and making them see the
light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. ~Max
Planck, A Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, 1949
The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions,
never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less
and less satisfied with our answers to better problems. ~G.W. Allport, Becoming, 1955
The improver of natural science absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such.
For him, scepticism is the highest of duties: blind faith the one unpardonable sin. ~Thomas Henry Huxley, Lay
Sermons, Addresses and Reviews, 1871
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics,
though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry. ~H.L. Mencken, "Minority Report," Notebooks, 1956
