SCIENCE QUOTES III
quotations about science
On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Human sciences are like gaslights in the streets. They serve our purpose only while the heavens are dark. The brighter the sky the more dim and useless they become.
DR. THOMAS
attributed, Holy Thoughts on Holy Things
Science has grown frightfully audacious in these days -- swift-footed, ponderous, careering over her iron ways with unslacking pace. This rampant dragon, on which I am mounted, see how he bends his once stiff neck to his rider, champing his checked bit and pawing the dust, impatient to leap around the globe. Genius is prescient, foresees its own might. Man is striving through these iron-ribbed, steam-sped hippogriffs, to recover his lost ubiquity and omnipotence, and threatens soon to grasp in his ample palm, and fix with flaming eye-ball, the elemental forces!
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Scientific revolutions, almost by definition, defy common sense.
MICHIO KAKU
preface, Hyperspace
Science corrects the old creeds, sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Address read before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, July 18, 1867
When man seized the loadstone of science, the loadstar of superstition vanished in the clouds.
W. R. ALGER
attributed, Forty Thousand Quotations, Prose and Poetical
The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters. The grand whorehouse which they have made of life requires no decoration; it is essential only that the drains function adequately.
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
It is enough now to affirm that the modern physical sciences are very far indeed from being capable of exhibiting themselves systematically as stripped of all metaphysics. On the contrary, the most stupendous metaphysical assumptions and implications are woven into their structure throughout. Instead of being mere formulas for stating uniform sequences among phenomena, they are descriptions and explanations of experiences which appeal at every step to invisible and mysterious entities, to hidden and abstruse forces, to transactions that are assumed to take place among beings whose existence and modes of behavior can never become, in any sense of the words, immediate data of sensuous knowledge.
GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD
Philosophy of Mind: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Psychology
In the history of science we have discovered a sequence of better and better theories or models, from Plato to the classical theory of Newton to modern quantum theories. It is natural to ask: Will this sequence eventually reach an end point, an ultimate theory of the universe, that will include all forces and predict every observation we can make, or will we continue forever finding better theories, but never one that cannot be improved upon?
STEPHEN HAWKING & LEONARD MLODINOW
The Grand Design
SCIENCE IS RISEN!
The framework of veracity
This I seek for clarity
Reveal the path to certainty
PRAISE TO SCIENCE ETERNALLY!
"Brothers and sisters! Free your bodies
From the contempt of a soul
Let it die with archaic ideals
The only heaven and hell
Are the ones you make for yourself right here and now
ACCEPT SCIENCE INTO YOUR LIFE!"
It rules in Earth and sky
Now we live no more to die
SCIENCE IS RISEN!
THE FACELESS
"Hymn of Sanity"
There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook K", Aphorisms
When I observe the luminous progress and expansion of natural science in modern times, I seem to myself like a traveller going eastwards at dawn, and gazing at the growing light with joy, but also with impatience; looking forward with longing to the advent of the full and final light, but, nevertheless, having to turn away his eyes when the sun appeared, unable to bear the splendour he had awaited with so much desire.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endangers its cargo.
WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN
undelivered summation of the Scopes 'Monkey' Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, 1925
Science consists exactly of those forms of knowledge that can be verified and duplicated by anybody.
SETH LLOYD
attributed, The Clock and the Arrow
I'm scared to death about the denial of science. Science is real. Science is the most real thing in our world, other than nature. I'm hoping we'll all get back to a place where we can really understand that science is tested knowledge.
HARRISON FORD
"Harrison Ford on conservation: 'Nature is my god'", Washington Post, September 29, 2017
Science mines nature for truth of a different order -- it is our mightiest means of communing with reality, probing its mysteries, and gleaning from them some sense of belonging, of locating ourselves in the universe, understanding our place in it, and liberating ourselves from delusion.
MARIA POPOVA
"Poetry as Protest and Sanctuary", brainpickings, April 18, 2017
The amount of scientific information we've discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The Organized Mind
Science embraces facts and debates opinion; religion embraces opinion and debates the facts.
TOM HEEHLER
The Well-Spoken Thesaurus
In science one achieves the greatest impact (and often the greatest headlines) not by going along with the herd, but by bucking against it.
LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
A Universe from Nothing
Science is a good piece of furniture for a man to have in an upper chamber, provided he has common sense on the ground floor.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers