History Of Science Quotes - Page 2

• Just as science is more immediate and exciting than the history of science, so is insight more compelling than a history of insight.

  Robert D. Richardson

  Thinking, Exciting, Insight

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• The natural history of science is the study of the unknown. If you fear it you're not going to study it and you're not going to make any progress.

  Michael E. DeBakey

  Science, Progress, Study

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• The history of science is a record of the transformations of contempts amd amusements.

  Charles Fort

  Science, Records, Amusement

  Charles Fort (2014). “Wild Talents”, p.67, Baen Publishing Enterprises

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• The history of science fiction started in the caves 20,000 years ago. The ideas on the walls of the cave were problems to be solved. It's problem solving. Primitive scientific knowledge, primitive dreams, primitive blueprinting: to solve problems.

  Ray Bradbury

  Dream, Wall, Years

  Ray Bradbury, Steven L. Aggelis (2004). “Conversations with Ray Bradbury”, p.126, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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

  Karl Popper

  Science, Proud, Humans

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• The history of science should not be an instrument to defend any kind of social or philosophic theory; it should be used only for its own purpose, to illustrate impartially the working of reason against unreason, the gradual unfolding of truth, in all its forms, whether pleasant or unpleasant, useful of useless, welcome or unwelcome.

  George Sarton

  Purpose, Useless, Welcome

  George Sarton (1952). “Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece”, p.14, Courier Corporation

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• If someone could actually prove scientifically that there is such a thing as a supernatural force, it would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. So the notion that somehow scientists are resisting it is ludicrous.

  E. O. Wilson

  Discovery, Supernatural Forces, Would Be

  "E.O. Wilson: What I've Learned" by Tom Junod, www.esquire.com. January 5, 2009.

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• The chief requisite for the making of a good chicken pie is chicken; no amount of culinary legerdemain can make up for the lack of chicken. In the same way, the chief requisite for the history of science is intimate scientific knowledge; no amount of philosophic legerdemain can make up for its absence.

  George Sarton

  Pie, Way, Absence

  George Sarton (1918). “The Teaching of the History of Science”

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• We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe.

  Robert Charles Wilson

  Believe, Taught Us, Long

  Robert Charles Wilson (2004). “Blind Lake”, p.163, Macmillan

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• Oddly, since by now I've written quite a lot on early modern philosophers, I didn't care for the history of philosophy, which I thought dull and obscure, until I got a minor job writing articles for a children's encyclopedia in the history of science and began to make connections between science and philosophy.

  Catherine Wilson

  Jobs, Children, Philosophy

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator.

  Jerry A. Coyne

  Giving Up, Ignorance, Research

  Jerry A. Coyne (2009). “Why Evolution Is True”, p.150, Penguin

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• More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track.

  Ronald Fisher

  Mean, Past, Ideas

  "Natural selection from the genetical standpoint". "Australian Journal of Earth Sciences" Peer-reviewed journal, 1959.

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• If all history is only an amplification of biography, the history of science may be most instructively read in the life and work of the men by whom the realms of Nature have been successively won.

  Archibald Geikie

  Men, Amplification, May

  Sir Archibald Geikie (1905). “The Founders of Geology”

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• The history of science knows scores of instances where an investigator was in the possession of all the important facts for a new theory but simply failed to ask the right questions.

  Ernst Mayr

  Important, Facts, Theory

  Ernst Mayr (1982). “The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance”, p.29, Harvard University Press

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• Any scientist who tells you they know that GMOs are safe and not to worry about it, is either ignorant of the history of science or is deliberately lying. Nobody knows what the long-term effect will be.

  David Suzuki

  Lying, Gmos, Long

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• The history of science is the saga of nature defying common sense.

  Kedar Joshi

  Nature, Science, Common Sense

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• The history of science is science itself; the history of the individual, the individual.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Science, Historical, Individual

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• You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature.

  Paul Lauterbur

  Writing, Years, Paper

  "2 M.R.I. Pioneers Win Nobel Prize" by Nicholas Wade, www.nytimes.com. October 6, 2003.

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• In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right.

  Freeman Dyson

  Majority, Minorities, Global Warming

  Freeman Dyson (2015). “Dreams of Earth and Sky”, p.94, New York Review of Books

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• The history of science teaches only too plainly the lesson that no single method is absolutely to be relied upon, that sources of error lurk where they are least expected, and that they may escape the notice of the most experienced and conscientious worker.

  John William Strutt

  Teaching, Science, Errors

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• The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities-perhaps the only one-in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there. In most other fields of human endeavour there is change, but rarely progress ... And in most fields we do not even know how to evaluate change.

  Karl Popper

  Dream, Mistake, Learning

  1960 Conjectures and Refutations (published1963), ch.10.

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• Historians of a generation ago were often shocked by the violence with which scientists rejected the history of their own subject as irrelevant; they could not understand how the members of any academic profession could fail to be intrigued by the study of their own cultural heritage. What these historians did not grasp was that scientists will welcome the history of science only when it has been demonstrated that this discipline can add to our understanding of science itself and thus help to produce, in some sense, better scientists.

  I. Bernard Cohen

  Science, Discipline, Understanding

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• It is for Muslim scholars to study the whole history of Islamic science completely and not only the chapters and periods which influenced Western science. It is also for Muslim scholars to present the tradition of Islamic science from the point of view of Islam itself and not from the point of view of the scientism, rationalism and positivism which have dominated the history of science in the West since the establishment of the discipline in the early part of the 20th century in Europe and America.

  Seyyed Hossein Nasr

  Islamic, Views, Europe

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• Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Attitude, Reality, Tunnels

  Robert Anton Wilson (1977). “Cosmic trigger: final secret of the illuminati”, New Falcon Pubns

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• History of science is a relay race, my painter friend. Copernicus took over his flag from Aristarchus, from Cicero, from Plutarch; and Galileo took that flag over from Copernicus.

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Race, Copernicus, Flags

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