Scientist Quotes - Page 20

• There is a famous formula, perhaps the most compact and famous of all formulas - developed by Euler from a discovery of de Moivre: e^(i pi) + 1 = 0... It appeals equally to the mystic, the scientist, the philosopher, the mathematician.

  Edward Kasner

  Education, Discovery, Philosopher

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• Scientists do not believe in fundamental and absolute certainties. For the scientist, certainty is never an end, but a search; not the ordering of certainty, but its exploration. For the scientist, certainty represents the highest degree of probability.

  Ashley Montagu

  Believe, Science, Degrees

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• Everyone is free to set up an opinion and to adduce proofs in support of it. Whether, though, a scientist shall find it worth his while to enter into serious investigations of opinions so advanced is a question which his reason and instinct alone can decide. If these things, in the end, should turn out to be true, I shall not be ashamed of being the last to believe them.

  Ernst Mach

  Believe, Science, Support

  Ernst Mach (1893). “The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Exposition of Its Principles”

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• Catastrophe Theory is-quite likely-the first coherent attempt (since Aristotelian logic) to give a theory on analogy. When narrow-minded scientists object to Catastrophe Theory that it gives no more than analogies, or metaphors, they do not realise that they are stating the proper aim of Catastrophe Theory, which is to classify all possible types of analogous situations.

  Rene Thom

  Science, Giving, Analogies

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• Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can't tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.

  Noam Chomsky

  Home, Opportunity, Productive Work

  Noam Chomsky (2010). “The Chomsky Reader”, p.179, Pantheon

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• The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced -- by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.

  Erich Fromm

  Science, Successful, Men

  1955 The Sane Society.

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• In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award for accomplishing with pinpoint precision and unerring reliability, the feat of sitting exactly where it is sitting. Nothing would prevent us from agreeing with the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn that rocks are smarter than cats because rocks have the sense to go away when you kick them.

  Steven Pinker

  Cat, Awards, Rocks

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• Renegade scientists and totalitarian loonies are not the folks most likely to abuse genetic engineering. You and I are-not because we are bad but because we want to do good. In a world dominated by competition, parents understandably want to give their kids every advantage. ... The most likely way for eugenics to enter into our lives is through the front door as nervous parents ... will fall over one another to be first to give Junior a better set of genes.

  Arthur Caplan

  Fall, Kids, Eugenics

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• [On Richard P. Feynman's live demonstration of the rigidity of the O-rings when cold that doomed the space shuttle Challenger, killing seven astronauts:] The public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks her a clear question.

  Freeman Dyson

  Eye, Thinking, Hands

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• We scientists are clever — too clever — are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it!

  Richard P. Feynman

  Clever, Men, Thinking

  Richard P. Feynman (2015). “The Quotable Feynman”, p.260, Princeton University Press

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• My own ongoing research among secular Americans-as well as that of a handful of other social scientists who have only recently turned their gaze on secular culture-confirms that nonreligious family life is replete with its own sustaining moral values and enriching ethical precepts.

  Phil Zuckerman

  Ongoing, Research, Culture

  "Do Godless Kids Turn Out All Right?" by Steve Mazie, bigthink.com.

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• Books on scientific photography with such beauty, breadth, and insight are rare. Felice Frankel's Envisioning Science is chock full of mind-boggling images and valuable information--not only for curious artists, students, and lay people, but also for seasoned researchers and photographers. The eclectic Frankel is both a scientist and photographer, and with the cold logic of the one and the inspired vision of the other, she covers an array of topics sure to stimulate your imagination and sense of wonder at the incredible vastness of the physical world.

  Clifford A. Pickover

  Photography, Book, Artist

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• I guess economists, it's a bit like scientists, you have definitely fewer women in that field.

  Christine Lagarde

  Fields, Economist, Fewer

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• MAGNETISM, n. Something acting upon a magnet. The two definitions immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Science, Light, Two

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.137, 谷月社

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• You can wear ruffles; you can be a jock, and you can still be a great computer scientist, or a great technologist, or a great product designer.

  Marissa Mayer

  Ruffles, Jocks, Computer

  "New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s Most Memorable Quotes About Being A Woman In Tech" by Britney Fitzgerald, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 17, 2012.

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• I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there's a continuity between philosophy and science in that way.

  Robert Nozick

  Philosophy, Thinking, Data

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• The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.

  Robert Nozick

  Imagination, Philosopher, Surprise

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• [A woman waiting for him in the Kremlin asked Gobachev] "Was communism invented by a politician or a scientist?" [He replied] "Well, a politician." She said, "That explains it. The scientist would have tried it on mice first."

  Ronald Reagan

  Science, Waiting, Firsts

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• This is the miracle of life: that each person who heeds him or herself knows what no scientist can ever know: who he or she is.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Self, Miracle, Persons

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• What is called economic progress is the joint effect of the activities of the three progressive groups-or classes-of the savers, the scientist-inventors, and the entrepreneurs, operating in a market economy as far as it is not sabotaged by the endeavors of the nonprogressive majority of the routinists and the public policies supported by them.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Class, Entrepreneur, Progress

  Ludwig Von Mises (1962). “The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method”

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• ... scientists have made no clear effort to become an important, independently active force of mankind. Whole congresses at a time, they back away from the suffering of others; it is more comfortable to stay within the bounds of science.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Science, Suffering Of Others, Effort

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• What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Father, Science, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.277, Penguin

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• We didn't set out to be educators or even scientists, and we don't purport that what we do is real science but we're demonstrating a methodology by which one can engage and satisfy your curiosity.

  Adam Savage

  Real, Curiosity, Educator

  "Stay Curious with Jamie and Adam of Mythbusters". Interview with Jenny Williams, www.wired.com. October 5, 2009.

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• A miscalculation is not negligence, nor prudence a crime. I am a scientist. I base my action or inaction upon probability and evidence. There is a reason we call science a discipline! Inferior minds bolt or build pyres to roast the witches in their midst!

  Rick Yancey

  Discipline, Mind, Action

  Rick Yancey (2010). “The Monstrumologist: The Terror Beneath”, p.203, Simon and Schuster

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• A scientist sets out to conquer nature through knowledge - external nature, external knowledge. By these means he may split the atom and achieve external power. A yogi sets out to explore his own internal nature, to penetrate the atom (atma) of being. He does not gain dominion over wide lands and restless seas, but over his own recalcitrant flesh and febrile mind.

  B.K.S. Iyengar

  Mean, Sea, Land

  B.K.S. Iyengar (2006). “Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom”, p.19, Rodale

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