Peter Medawar Quotes About Science

Quotes about: Science

• Scientific reasoning is a dialogue between the possible and the actual, between proposal and disposal between what might be true, and what is in fact the case.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Reality, Might

  "The hope of progress: a scientist looks at problems in philosophy, literature and science".

• 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 Medawar

  Science, Imagination, Creative

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.63, Oxford University Press, USA

• Psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century and a terminal product as well-something akin to a dinosaur or zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Ideas, History

• It is a common failing-and one that I have myself suffered from-to fall in love with a hypothesis and to be unwilling to take no for an answer. A love affair with a pet hypothesis can waste years of precious time. There is very often no finally decisive yes, though quite often there can be a decisive no.

  Peter Medawar

  Falling In Love, Science, Years

  Peter Brian Medawar (1981). “Advice to a young scientist”

• Heredity proposes and development disposes.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Development, Heredity

• 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

  Science, Men, Discovery

• Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us. The theatrical illusion is shattered if we ask what goes on behind the scenes. In real life discovery and justification are almost always different processes.

  Peter Medawar

  Real, Science, Discovery

  Peter Brian Medawar (1969). “Induction and intuition in scientific thought”

• 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

  Philosophy, Science, Artist

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.13, Oxford University Press, USA

• Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won't do. It is an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth century thought.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, America, World

• Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Paper, Fraud

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.33, Oxford University Press, USA

• 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

  Science, Practice, Facts

  Peter Brian Medawar (1969). “Induction and intuition in scientific thought”

• 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

  Science, Years, Sky

  Peter Brian Medawar (1979). “Advice to a young scientist”, Harpercollins Childrens Books

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

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Class, Dull

• 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

  Science, Annoyed, Calling

  "Advice to a Young Scientist". Book by Peter Medawar, p. 25, 1979.

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

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Literature, Cases

  Peter Brian Medawar (1973). “The hope of progress: a scientist looks at problems in philosophy, literature and science”, Anchor

• 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

  Science, Giants, Arms

• It can be said with complete confidence that 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 enough that a problem should be "interesting".

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Yield, Discovery

  "Advice to a young scientist".

• No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond his competence. ... Good scientists study the most important problems they think they can solve. It is, after all, their professional business to solve problems, not merely to grapple with them.

  Peter Medawar

  Lying, Science, Thinking

• To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Mind, Progress

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.119, Oxford University Press, USA

• Scientists who think science consists of unprejudiced data-gathering without speculation are merely cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge.

  Peter Medawar

  Knowledge, Science, Past

• It is ... a sign of the times-though our brothers of physics and chemistry may smile to hear me say so-that biology is now a science in which theories can be devised: theories which lead to predictions and predictions which sometimes turn out to be correct. These facts confirm me in a belief I hold most passionately-that biology is the heir of all the sciences.

  Peter Medawar

  Brother, Time, Science

• How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind [pseudoscience/'woo'], for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.

  Peter Medawar

  Philosophy, Taken, Science

• If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.

  Peter Medawar

  Art, Science, Research

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.42, Oxford University Press, USA

• I believe in intelligence, and I believe also that there are inherited differences in intellectual ability, but I do not believe that intelligence is a simple scalar endowment that can be quanitified by attaching a single figure to it—an I.Q. or the like.

  Peter Medawar

  Believe, Science, Simple

  Peter Brian Medawar (1981). “Advice to a young scientist”

• The art of research [is] the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them.

  Peter Medawar

  Art, Mean, Science

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