Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

George Johnson

Trying to capture the physicists' precise mathematical description of the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catcher's mitt on the other.

John Burroughs

Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all - that has been my religion.

John D. Barrow

What cannot be known is more revealing than what can.

Linus Pauling

Science is the search for truth.

Linus Pauling

There is no area of the world that should not be investigated by scientists. There will always remain some questions that have not been answered. In general, these are the questions that have not yet been posed.

Linus Pauling

I try to identify myself with the atoms ... I ask what I would do If I were a carbon atom or a sodium atom.

Linus Pauling

Science is the search for truth - it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others.

Lindsay Wagner

The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.

Leo Tolstoy

Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.

Lewis Carroll

'What's the use of their having names the Gnat said, 'if they won't answer to them?' 'No use to them,' said Alice; 'but it's useful to the people who name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?' 'I can't say,' the Gnat replied.

Joseph Wood Krutch

Poetry, mythology, and religion represent the world as man would like to have it, while science represents the world as he gradually comes to discover it.

Joseph Wood Krutch

If only the fit survive and if the fitter they are the longer they survive, then Volvox must have demonstrated its superb fitness more conclusively than any higher animal ever has.

Joseph Wood Krutch

Electronic calculators can solve problems which the man who made them cannot solve; but no government-subsidized commission of engineers and physicists could create a worm.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

There are three kinds of explanation in science: explanations which throw a light upon, or give a hint at a matter; explanations which do not explain anything; and explanations which obscure everything.

Karl Popper

Almost everyone... seems to be quite sure that the differences between the methodologies of history and of the natural sciences are vast. For, we are assured, it is well known that in the natural sciences we start from observation and proceed by induction to theory. And is it not obvious that in history we proceed very differently? Yes, I agree that we proceed very differently. But we do so in the natural sciences as well.

Karl Popper

There can be no ultimate statements science: there can be no statements in science which can not be tested, and therefore none which cannot in principle be refuted, by falsifying some of the conclusions which can be deduced from them.

Karl Popper

But it is certainly not possible to insist on one hand that the formalism is complete and to insist on the other hand that its application to 'the actual' actually demands a step which cannot be derived from it.

Karl Popper

It is the rule which says that the other rules of scientific procedure must be designed in such a way that they do not protect any statement in science against falsification.

Karl Popper

But some of these theories are so bold that they can clash with reality: they are the testable theories of science. And when they clash, then we know that there is a reality; something that can inform us that our ideas are mistaken.

Karl Popper

It is not intuitive ease I am after, but rather a point of view which is sufficiently definite to clear up some difficulties, and to be criticized in rational terms. (Bohr's complementarity cannot be so criticized, I fear; it can only be accepted or denounced - perhaps as being ad hoc, or as being irrational, or as being hopelessly vague.)

Karl Popper

The history of science is everywhere speculative. It is a marvelous hiatory. It makes you proud to be a human being.

Karl Popper

All we can do is search for the falsity content in our best theory.

Karl Popper

Thus science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths; neither with the collection of observations, nor with the invention of experiments, but with the critical discussion of myths, and of magical techniques and practices.

Karl Popper

The difference between the amoeba and Einstein is that, although both make use of the method of trial and error elimination, the amoeba dislikes erring while Einstein is intrigued by it.

Karl Popper

Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or 'given' base; and when we cease our attempts to drive our piles into a deeper layer, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that they are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.

Karl Popper

Science is perhaps the only human activity in which errors are systematically criticized and, in time, corrected.

Pearl S. Buck

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.

Peace Pilgrim

You might say that science operates pragmatically and religion by divine guidance. If valid, they would reach the same conclusions but science would take a lot longer.

Penelope Fitzgerald

If they don't depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips.

Peter Sarnak

The Torus is my enemy!

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist one—remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.