Science Quotes - Page 23

• Imagination is more important than knowledge.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Positive, Leadership

  Albert Einstein (2015). “Bite-Size Einstein: Quotations on Just About Everything from the Greatest Mind of the Twentieth Century”, p.32, St. Martin's Press

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• But beyond the bright searchlights of science,
  Out of sight of the windows of sense,
  Old riddles still bid us defiance,
  Old questions of Why and of Whence.

  William Cecil Dampier

  Sight, Window, Defiance

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• Furnished as all Europe now is with Academies of Science, with nice instruments and the spirit of experiment, the progress of human knowledge will be rapid and discoveries made of which we have at present no conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the happiness of knowing what will be known a hundred years hence.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Sorry, Nice, Years

  1783 Letter to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, 27 Jul.

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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

  Discipline, Understanding, Add

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• It is the theory which decides what we can observe

  Albert Einstein

  Theory

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• We are in the ordinary position of scientists of having to be content with piecemeal improvements: we can make several things clearer, but we cannot make anything clear.

  Frank P. Ramsey

  Ordinary, Improvement, Scientist

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• What is is what must be.

  Gottfried Leibniz

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• What's the go of that? What's the particular go of that?

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Particular

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• There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.

  Anton Chekhov

  Tables, Mathematics, Mathematical

  Anton Chekhov (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov (Illustrated)”, p.3760, Delphi Classics

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• The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

  Richard Dawkins

  Funny, Sarcastic, Atheist

  River Out of Eden ch. 4 (1995)

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• A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held.

  Georg Cantor

  Power, Accepted, Mathematician

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• Desire for approval and recognition is a healthy motive, but the desire to be acknowledged as better, stronger, or more intelligent than a fellow being or fellow scholar easily leads to an excessively egoistic psychological adjustment, which may become injurious for the individual and for the community.

  Albert Einstein

  Intelligent, Interesting, Community

  Albert Einstein (2011). “Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words”, p.28, Open Road Media

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• Scientists are not the paragons of rationality, objectivity, openmindedness and humility that many of them might like others to believe.

  Marcello Truzzi

  Believe, Humility, Objectivity

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• Four elements, Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, also provide an example of the astonishing togetherness of our universe. They make up the "organic" molecules that constitute living organisms on a planet, and the nuclei of these same elements interact to generate the light of its star. Then the organisms on the planet come to depend wholly on that starlight, as they must if life is to persist. So it is that all life on the Earth runs on sunlight. [Referring to photosynthesis]

  George Wald

  Life, Running, Stars

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• There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Philosopher, Absurd, Statements

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• The person who thought there could be any real conflict between science and religion must be either very young in science or ignorant of religion.

  Joseph Henry

  Real, Thinking, Ignorant

  "A Memorial of Joseph Henry".

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• I personally feel it is presumptuous to believe that man can determine the whole temporal structure of the universe, its evolution, development and ultimate fate from the first nanosecond of creation to the last 10^10 years, on the basis of three or four facts which are not very accurately known and are disputed among the experts.

  John N. Bahcall

  Believe, Fate, Men

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• I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it.

  Charles Darwin

  Giving Up, Mind, Facts

  "Dow 36,000". Book by James K. Glassman, Kevin A. Hassett, www.cnn.com. September 14, 1999.

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• To talk about communication theory without communicating its real mathematical content would be like endlessly telling a man about a wonderful composer, yet never letting him hear an example of the composer's music.

  John R. Pierce

  Real, Communication, Men

  John R. Pierce (2012). “An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise”, p.10, Courier Corporation

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• 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.

  George Johnson

  Hands, Boxing, Trying

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• Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Humorous, Sarcasm, Stories

  The Sign of the Four ch. 1 (1890)

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• Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors, concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods-in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.

  Albert Einstein

  Fate, Blessing, Men

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• Philosophy is true mother of the arts [of science].

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Mother, Art, Philosophy

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• I think the next [21st] century will be the century of complexity. We have already discovered the basic laws that govern matter and understand all the normal situations. We don't know how the laws fit together, and what happens under extreme conditions. But I expect we will find a complete unified theory sometime this century. The is no limit to the complexity that we can build using those basic laws.

  Stephen Hawking

  Knowledge, Thinking, Law

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• A mere index hunter, who held the eel of science by the tail.

  Tobias Smollett

  Eels, Hunters, Tails

  Tobias George Smollett, Tobias Smollett (1831). “The adventures of Peregrine Pickle: In which are included, Memoirs of a lady of quality. In four volumes. ...”, p.246

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