Anthony Standen Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

The extraordinary degree of dullness that pervades the laboratory periods of physics courses...[is] so acute that for many people it is the bitterest experience of their education.

Anthony Standen
There are science teachers who actually claim that they teach "a healthy skepticism." They do not. They teach a profound gullibility, and their dupes, trained not to think for themselves, will swallow any egregious rot, provided it is dressed up with long words and an affectation of objectivity to make it sound scientific.

Anthony Standen
Psychologists, like other scientists, pride themselves on being extremely modern, and therefore much better than any group of people that ever were before....

Anthony Standen
Physics is NOT a body of indisputable and immutable Truth; it is a body of well-supported probable opinion only....

Anthony Standen
Physical scientists probably deserve the reputation they enjoy for incorruptibility and unswerving devotion to pure truth. The reason for this is that it is not worth while to bribe them.

Anthony Standen
Education, like everything else, goes in fads, and has the normal human tendency to put up with something bad for just so long, and then rush to the other extreme.

Anthony Standen
Scientists are convinced that they, as scientists, possess a number of very admirable human qualities, such as accuracy, observation, reasoning power, intellectual curiosity, tolerance, and even humility.

Anthony Standen
We are having wool pulled over our eyes if we let ourselves be convinced that scientists as a group are anything special in the way of brains. They are very ordinary professional men, and all they know is their own trade, just like all other professional men.

Anthony Standen
But regular biology, as an "ology," has to be "scientific," and this means in practice that it has to be made dull.... Everything has to be expressed in utterly impersonal terms.

Anthony Standen
Chemists are, on the whole, like physicists, only 'less so'.They don't make quite the same wonderful mistakes, and much what they do is an art, related to cooking, instead of a true science. They have their moments, and their sources of legitimate pride. They don't split atoms, as the physicists do. They join them together, and a very praiseworthy activity that is.

Anthony Standen
Education, like everything else, goes in fads, and has the normal human tendency to put up with something bad for just so long, and then rush to the other extreme.

Anthony Standen
As advertising always convinces the sponsor even more than the public, the scientists have become sold, and remain sold, on the idea that they have the key to the Absolute, and that nothing will do for Mr. Average Citizen but to stuff himself full of electrons.

Anthony Standen
Since biologists deal constantly in analogies, they are easily misled by them.

Anthony Standen
Physics can never prove things the way things are proved in mathematics, by eliminating all of the alternative possibilities. It is not possible to say what the alternative possibilities are....

Anthony Standen
Such instances of the almost infinite unpredictability of man are known to social scientists, but they are no more affected by them than the asylum inmate is by being told that he is not Napoleon.

Anthony Standen
Physicists, being in no way different from the rest of the population, have short memories for what is inconvenient.

Anthony Standen
The velocity of light occupies an extraordinary place in modern physics. It is lese-majesté to make any criticism of the velocity of light. It is a sacred cow within a sacred cow, and it is just about the Absolutest Absolute in the history of human thought.

Anthony Standen
The dreadful cocksureness that is characteristic of scientists in bulk is not only quite foreign to the spirit of true science, it is not even justified by a superficial view.

Anthony Standen
We are having wool pulled over our eyes if we let ourselves be convinced that scientists, taken as a group, are anything special in the way of brains. They are very ordinary professional men, and all they know is their own trade, just like all other professional men. There are some geniuses among them, just as there are mental giants in any other field of endeavor.

Anthony Standen
A biologist, if he wishes to know how many toes a cat has, does not "frame the hypothesis that the number of feline digital extremities is 4, or 5, or 6," he simply looks at a cat and counts. A social scientist prefers the more long-winded expression every time, because it gives an entirely spurious impression of scientificness to what he is doing.

Anthony Standen
Scientists are convinced that they, as scientists, possess a number of very admirable human qualities, such as accuracy, observation, reasoning power, intellectual curiosity, tolerance, and even humility.

Anthony Standen
If the idols of scientists were piled on top of one another in the manner of a totem pole the topmost would be a grinning fetish called Measurement.

Anthony Standen
Insight is not the same as scientific deduction, but even at that it may be more reliable than statistics.

Anthony Standen
The dreadful cocksureness that is characteristic of scientists in bulk is not only quite foreign to the spirit of true science, it is not even justified by a superficial view.

Anthony Standen
It is true that physics gives a wonderful training in precise, logical thinking-about physics. It really does depend upon accurate reproducible experiments, and upon framing hypotheses with the greatest possible freedom from dogmatic prejudice. And if these were the really important things in life, physics would be an essential study for everybody.

Anthony Standen
In its central content, biology is not accurate thinking, but accurate observation and imaginative thinking, with great sweeping generalizations.

Anthony Standen
"There's many a true word spoken in jest"; scientists are abominably solemn; therefore scientists miss many a true word.

Anthony Standen
There's many a true word spoken in jest; scientists are abominably solemn; therefore scientists miss many a true word.

Anthony Standen
"Survival of the fittest" led to the concept of "nature red in tooth and claw" and this is not sufficiently wishy-washy for modern scientists.

Anthony Standen
Physics is not about the real world, it is about "abstractions" from the real world, and this is what makes it so scientific.

Anthony Standen