Knowledge Quotes - Page 39

• It's a dangerous thing to think we know everything.

  Jack Kuehler

  Thinking, Danger, Knows

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• Engineering is not merely knowing and being knowledgeable, like a walking encyclopedia; engineering is not merely analysis; engineering is not merely the possession of the capacity to get elegant solutions to non-existent engineering problems; engineering is practicing the art of the organizing forces of technological change ... Engineers operate at the interface between science and society.

  Gordon S. Brown

  Art, Science, Engineering

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• What has been done is little-scarcely a beginning; yet it is much in comparison with the total blank of a century past. And our knowledge will, we are easily persuaded, appear in turn the merest ignorance to those who come after us. Yet it is not to be despised, since by it we reach up groping to touch the hem of the garment of the Most High.

  Agnes Mary Clerke

  Ignorance, Science, Past

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• Without any doubt, the regularity which astronomy shows us in the movements of the comets takes place in all phenomena. The trajectory of a simple molecule of air or vapour is regulated in a manner as certain as that of the planetary orbits; the only difference between them is that which is contributed by our ignorance. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Ignorance, Science, Simple

  Pierre-Simon Laplace (2012). “Pierre-Simon Laplace Philosophical Essay on Probabilities: Translated from the fifth French edition of 1825 With Notes by the Translator”, p.3, Springer Science & Business Media

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• [At high school in Cape Town] my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, from which I learnt that a knowledge of mathematics and physics was essential to the pursuit of astronomy. This increased my fondness for those subjects.

  Allan McLeod Cormack

  School, Learning, Science

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• The mechanist is intimately convinced that a precise knowledge of the chemical constitution, structure, and properties of the various organelles of a cell will solve biological problems. This will come in a few centuries. For the time being, the biologist has to face such concepts as orienting forces or morphogenetic fields. Owing to the scarcity of chemical data and to the complexity of life, and despite the progresses of biochemistry, the biologist is still threatened with vertigo.

  Andre Michel Lwoff

  Science, Cells, Data

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• We find that one of the most rewarding features of being scientists these days ... is the common bond which the search for truth provides to scholars of many tongues and many heritages. In the long run, that spirit will inevitably have a constructive effect on the benefits which man can derive from knowledge of himself and his environment.

  Stanford Moore

  Running, Science, Men

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• If the God of revelation is most appropriately worshipped in the temple of religion, the God of nature may be equally honored in the temple of science. Even from its lofty minarets the philosopher may summon the faithful to prayer, and the priest and sage exchange altars without the compromise of faith or knowledge.

  David Brewster

  God, Faith, Prayer

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• Geology holds the keys of one of the kingdoms of nature; and it cannot be said that a science which extends our Knowledge, and by consequence our Power, over a third part of nature, holds a low place among intellectual employments.

  William Buckland

  Science, Keys, Intellectual

  William Buckland (1820). “Vindiciæ Geologicæ: The Connexion of Geology with Religion, Explained in an Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before University of Oxford, May 15, 1819, on the Endowment of Readership in Geology”, p.7

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• On examinations: Das Wissen ist der Tad der Forschung. Knowledge is the death of research. Nernst's motto.

  Walther Nernst

  Research, Examination, Motto

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• A man who is all theory is like "a rudderless ship on a shoreless sea." ... Theories and speculations may be indulged in with safety only as long as they are based on facts that we can go back to at all times and know that we are on solid ground.

  Elisha Gray

  Science, Men, Sea

  Elisha Gray (1899). “Nature's Miracles: Familiar Talks on Science”, W. Briggs ; Montreal : C.W. Coates ; Halifax : S.F. Huestis, [19--?]

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• A scientist strives to understand the work of Nature. But with our insufficient talents as scientists, we do not hit upon the truth all at once. We must content ourselves with tracking it down, enveloped in considerable darkness, which leads us to make new mistakes and errors. By diligent examination, we may at length little by little peel off the thickest layers, but we seldom get the core quite free, so that finally we have to be satisfied with a little incomplete knowledge.

  Torbern Bergman

  Mistake, Science, Errors

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• According to my views, aiming at quantitative investigations, that is at establishing relations between measurements of phenomena, should take first place in the experimental practice of physics. By measurement to knowledge [door meten tot weten] I should like to write as a motto above the entrance to every physics laboratory.

  Heike Kamerlingh Onnes

  Writing, Science, Doors

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• All knowledge attains its ethical value and its human significance only by the human sense with which it is employed. Only a good man can be a great physician.

  Hermann Nothnagel

  Science, Men, Good Man

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• And this is the ultimate lesson that our knowledge of the mode of transmission of typhus has taught us: Man carries on his skin a parasite, the louse. Civilization rids him of it. Should man regress, should he allow himself to resemble a primitive beast, the louse begins to multiply again and treats man as he deserves, as a brute beast. This conclusion would have endeared itself to the warm heart of Alfred Nobel. My contribution to it makes me feel less unworthy of the honour which you have conferred upon me in his name.

  Charles Nicolle

  Teaching, Heart, Science

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• As followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space.

  Charles Scott Sherrington

  Science, Thinking, Space

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• As was the case for Nobel's own invention of dynamite, the uses that are made of increased knowledge can serve both beneficial and potentially harmful ends. Increased knowledge clearly implies increased responsibility. We reject the notion advocated in some quarters that man should stop eating from the tree of knowledge, as if that were humanly possible.

  Nicolaas Bloembergen

  Responsibility, Science, Men

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• At a given instant everything the surgeon knows suddenly becomes important to the solution of the problem. You can't do it an hour later, or tomorrow. Nor can you go to the library and look it up.

  John W. Kirklin

  Science, Important, Library

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• Each time one of the medicine men dies, it's as if a library has burned down.

  Mark Plotkin

  Science, Men, Medicine

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• It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.

  Jean Rostand

  Science, Important, Sometimes

  Jean Rostand (1962). “The substance of man”

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• It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power; we are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible, and which are not.

  Carl Sagan

  Smart, Responsibility, Science

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• It may be said "In research, if you know what you are doing, then you shouldn't be doing it." In a sense, if the answer turns out to be exactly what you expected, then you have learned nothing new, although you may have had your confidence increased somewhat.

  Richard Hamming

  Learning, Science, Research

  Richard W. Hamming, Richard Wesley Hamming (1973). “Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers”, p.704, Courier Corporation

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• It must be conceded that a theory has an important advantage if its basic concepts and fundamental hypotheses are 'close to experience,' and greater confidence in such a theory is certainly justified. There is less danger of going completely astray, particularly since it takes so much less time and effort to disprove such theories by experience. Yet more and more, as the depth of our knowledge increases, we must give up this advantage in our quest for logical simplicity in the foundations of physical theory.

  Albert Einstein

  Giving Up, Science, Simplicity

  Albert Einstein (2010). “Ideas And Opinions”, p.349, Broadway Books

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• It seems to me, that the only Objects of the abstract Sciences or of Demonstration is Quantity and Number, and that all Attempts to extend this more perfect Species of Knowledge beyond these Bounds are mere Sophistry and Illusion.

  David Hume

  Science, Numbers, Perfect

  David Hume (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of David Hume (Illustrated)”, p.1066, Delphi Classics

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• It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Science, Heaven, Secret

  Frankenstein ch. 2 (1818)

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