Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard Dawkins

Chaos theory, a more recent invention, is equally fertile ground for those with a bent for abusing sense. It is unfortunately named, for 'chaos' implies randomness. Chaos in the technical sense is not random at all. It is completely determined, but it depends hugely, in strangely hard-to-predict ways, on tiny differences in initial conditions.

Richard Whately

To teach one who has no curiosity to learn, is to sow a field without ploughing it.

Russell Baker

I am sitting here 93 million miles from the sun on a rounded rock which is spinning at the rate of 1000 miles an hour... and my head pointing down into space with nothing between me and infinity but something called gravity which I can't even understand, and which you can't even buy any place so as to have some stored away for a gravityless day...

Ronald Ross

The Panama Canal was dug with a microscope.

Reinhold Niebuhr

The scientific observer of the realm of nature is in a sense naturally and inevitably disinterested. At least, nothing in the natural scene can arouse his bias. Furthermore, he stands completely outside of the natural so that his mind, whatever his limitations, approximates pure mind. The observer of the realm of history cannot be disinterested in the same way, for two reasons: first, he must look at history from some locus in history; secondly, he is to a certain degree engaged in its ideological conflicts.

Ovid

Ere land and sea and the all-covering sky Were made, in the whole world the countenance Of nature was the same, all one, well named Chaos, a raw and undivided mass, Naught but a lifeless bulk, with warring seeds Of ill-joined elements compressed together.

Paul Valery

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

Paul Valery

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

Pope John Paul II

Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.

Pierre de Fermat

And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown that the ancients did not know everything.

Pierre Charron

The true science and study of mankind is man.

Peter Medawar

Heredity proposes and development disposes.

Peter Medawar

The case I shall find evidence for is that when literature arrives, it expels science.

Peter Medawar

I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him unintelligent. He was annoyed, and it did not appease him when I went on to ask how he came to attach such a clear meaning to the notion of lack of intelligence. We never spoke again.

Peter Medawar

[A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause.

Peter Medawar

Twice in my life I have spent two weary and scientifically profitless years seeking evidence to corroborate dearly loved hypotheses that later proved to be groundless; times such as these are hard for scientists-days of leaden gray skies bringing with them a miserable sense of oppression and inadequacy.

Peter Medawar

The fact that scientists do not consciously practice a formal methodology is very poor evidence that no such methodology exists. It could be said-has been said-that there is a distinctive methodology of science which scientists practice unwittingly, like the chap in Moliere who found that all his life, unknowingly, he had been speaking prose.

Peter Medawar

It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known.

Peter Medawar

Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.

Peter Medawar

You have ... been told that science grows like an organism. You have been told that, if we today see further than our predecessors, it is only because we stand on their shoulders. But this [Nobel Prize Presentation] is an occasion on which I should prefer to remember, not the giants upon whose shoulders we stood, but the friends with whom we stood arm in arm ... colleagues in so much of my work.

Peter Medawar

Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?

Peter Medawar

Any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not not enough that a problem should be "interesting." ... The problem must be such that it matters what the answer is-whether to science generally or to mankind.

Peter Medawar

For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very preceisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.

Peter Abelard

The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.

Rachel Carson

There is one quality that characterizes all of us who deal with the sciences of the earth and its life - we are never bored.

Pliny the Elder

It [the earth] alone remains immoveable, whilst all things revolve round it.

Victor Hugo

[T]he small is great, the great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity...

Victor Hugo

Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.

Vernor Vinge

The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.

Robert Frost

The best thing we're put here for's to see; The strongest thing that's given us to see with's a telescope. Someone in every town, seems to me, owes it to the town to keep one.

Robert Frost

And one of the three great things in the world is gossip, you know. First there's religion; and then there's science; and there's-and then there's friendly gossip. Those are the three-the three great things.

Richard E. Byrd

We men who serve science serve only a reflection in a mirror.

Rene Descartes

I should consider that I know nothing about physics if I were able to explain only how things might be, and were unable to demonstrate that they could not be otherwise.