Scientific Revolution Quotes

• The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Humility, Science, Arrogance

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• A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

  Max Planck

  Death, Truth, Growing Up

  Scientific Autobiography, and Other Papers "Scientific Autobiography" (1948) (translation by Frank Gaynor)

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• Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.

  Freeman Dyson

  Technology, Toys, Ethics

  Freeman J. Dyson (2016). “Dear Professor Dyson: Twenty Years of Correspondence Between Freeman Dyson and Undergraduate Students on Science, Technology, Society and Life”, p.347, World Scientific

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• About the scientific revolution: it "outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes".

  Herbert Butterfield

  Renaissance, Revolution, Christianity

  Herbert Butterfield (1997). “The Origins of Modern Science”, p.7, Simon and Schuster

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• Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Successful, Doe, Facts

  Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.52, University of Chicago Press

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• Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Change, Science, Men

  Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.90, University of Chicago Press

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• It [the scientific revolution] outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom. . . . It looms so large as the real origin of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodization of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance.

  Herbert Butterfield

  Real, Science, Historical

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• We are redefining and we are restating our socialism in terms of the scientific revolution

  Harold Wilson

  Eugenics, Revolution, Socialism

  Speech at Labour Party conference on October 01, 1963. "Labour Party Annual Conference Report, 1963", pp. 139-140, 1963.

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• Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world... I am convinced that we must learn to make sense of statements that at least resemble these. What occurs during a scientific revolution is not fully reducible to a re-interpretation of individual and stable data. In the first place, the data are not unequivocally stable.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Science, Data, Understanding

  Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.121, University of Chicago Press

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• Groups do not have experiences except insofar as all their members do. And there are no experiences... that all the members of a scientific community must share in the course of a [scientific] revolution. Revolutions should be described not in terms of group experience but in terms of the varied experiences of individual group members. Indeed, that variety itself turns out to play an essential role in the evolution of scientific knowledge.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Knowledge, Science, Play

  Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Thomas S. Kuhn (1989). “Die Wissenschafts Philosophie Thomas S. Kuhns: Rekonstruktion und Grundlagenprobleme”

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• We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.

  Terence McKenna

  Views, Years, Names

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• Scientific revolutions, almost by definition, defy common sense.

  Michio Kaku

  Common Sense, Definitions, Revolution

  Michio Kaku (1995). “Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension”, p.7, OUP Oxford

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• If we would understand the Scientific Revolution correctly, we should always remember that its most powerful impetus was the unremitting search for hidden divinity. As such, it is a direct descendant of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

  Julian Jaynes

  Powerful, Mind, Revolution

  Julian Jaynes (1990). “The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• After sketching his program for the scientific revolution that he foresaw, Bacon ends his account with a prayer: "Humbly we pray that this mind may be steadfast in us, and that through these our hands, and the hands of others to whom thou shalt give the same spirit, thou wilt vouchsafe to endow the human family with new mercies". That is still a good prayer for all of us as we begin the twenty-first century.

  Freeman Dyson

  Prayer, Hands, Giving

  "Progress In Religion". Freeman Dyson's Acceptance Speech for the Templeton Prize at the Washington National Cathedral, www.edge.org. May 16, 2000.

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• Where do you draw the line as a human being? Written record is only, what, a couple thousand years? And this scientific revolution is less than a hundred years. And computers only a few decades! We've changed so much. It's amazing, the speed of changes.

  Hiroshi Sugimoto

  Couple, Years, Records

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The great question for our time is, how to make sure that the continuing scientific revolution brings benefits to everybody rather than widening the gap between rich and poor. To lift up poor countries, and poor people in rich countries, from poverty, to give them a chance of a decent life, technology is not enough. Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.

  Freeman Dyson

  Country, Technology, Rich Countries

  "Progress In Religion". Freeman Dyson's Acceptance Speech for the Templeton Prize at the Washington National Cathedral, www.edge.org. May 16, 2000.

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• Although scientific revolutions in how we see the world do occur, the bulk of our scientific understanding comes from the cumulative impact of numerous incremental studies that together paint an increasingly coherent picture of how nature works.

  Michael E. Mann

  Impact, Understanding, Together

  Michael E. Mann (2013). “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines”, p.38, Columbia University Press

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• ...As Thomas Kuhn pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, new scientific theories in any field are regarded with skepticism because scientists become attached to the old perspective earlier in their careers.

  Marilyn Ferguson

  Dark, Careers, Perspective

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• The idea of literalism in the Bible is a very new phenomenon. In many ways, it's a product of the scientific revolution.

  Reza Aslan

  Ideas, Way, Revolution

  "Christ In Context: 'Zealot' Explores The Life Of Jesus". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. July 15, 2013.

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• We are redefining and we are restating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution ... The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or outdated methods on either side of industry.

  Harold Wilson

  Science, Practice, White

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• The great scientific achievements are research programmes which can be evaluated in terms of progressive and degenerative problemshifts; and scientific revolutions consist of one research programme superceding (overtaking in progress) another. This methodology offers a new rational reconstruction of science.

  Imre Lakatos

  Science, Achievement, Progress

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• As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice--there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Science, Impact, Political Revolution

  Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.94, University of Chicago Press

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• The main issue [of the Scientific Revolution] is that the people in the industrialised countries are getting richer, and those in the non-industrialised countries are at best standing still: so the gap between the industrialised countries and the rest is widening every day. On the world scale this is the gap between the rich and the poor.

  C.P. Snow

  Country, Issues, People

  C. P. Snow, Stefan Collini (2012). “The Two Cultures”, p.41, Cambridge University Press

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• Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a revival of Hellenistic science but its final defeat.

  David Bentley Hart

  Christian, Believe, Revolution

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• Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Philosophy, Real

  "What Is It Like to Be a Baby?". Interview with Jonah Lehrer, www.scientificamerican.com. September 1, 2009.

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