British Scientist Quotes

A soap bubble is a beautiful thing. It appeals to several senses and to many kinds of minds; it is a source of delight to children, and we who know what somewhat of the mysteries of molecular physics which it helps to reveal look at it with admiration.

The trouble with Physics at the present time is that there are so many workers making discoveries so fast, and important discoveries too, that it is difficult for any one worker to keep a balanced view of the state of the subject.

Owen Willans Richardson

Physics tend to be dictated by fad and fashion. There are the gurus who dictate the direction in which new ideas grow.

Clinical science has as good a claim to the name and rights and self-subsistence of a science as any other department of biology.

Viewing the laws of the electric circuit from the point at which the labours of Ohm has placed us, there is scarcely any branch of experimental science in which so many and such various phenomena are expressed by formulae of such simplicity and generality...

Charles Wheatstone

Physical reality is neither some objective truth "out there" nor a purely subjective experience "in here." It is a uniquely human description of the interaction between humanity and Nature, involving elements of both inner and outer realms.

John Ellis (physicist)

A scientist who uses only logical reasoning from 'self-evident' principles will soon find himself in a cul-de-sac - like a blind landscape artist.

It should ever be borne in mind that the primary object of every study ought to be an inward one that of enlarging and elevating the intellect; and the direct aim of science should be the discovery of the principles of unity, order, and connexion, which are everywhere manifest in the universal life of nature.

If the purpose of scientific methodology is to prescribe or expound a system of enquiry or even a code of practice for scientific behavior, then scientists seem able to get on very well without it.

Experience... can only deal with the past; and the moment we attempt to project experience a hair's breadth beyond the point it has at any moment reached, we are condemned by reason.

By the year 2070 we cannot say, or it would be imbecile to do so, that any man alive could understand Shakespearean experience better than Shakespeare, whereas any decent eighteen-year-old student of physics will know more physics than Newton.

The spirit of a country, if it is to be true to itself, needs continually to draw great breaths of inspiration from the simple realities of the country; from the smell of its soil, the pattern of its fields, the beauty of its scenery and from the men and women who dwell and toil in the rural areas

George Stapledon

Science doesn't always go forwards. It's a bit like doing a Rubik's cube. You sometimes have to make more of a mess with a Rubik's cube before you can get it to go right. You build up this picture of what there is and you believe it to be true and you work with this picture and you refine it but sometimes you have to abandon the picture. Sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everybody thought we had, actually turns out to be wrong.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

An opportunity for cybernetics to change the course of the philosophy of mind was missed when intentionality was misinterpreted as "the providing of coded knowledge".

Igor Aleksander

A main problem in the study of organizational change is that the environmental contexts in which organizations exist are themselves changing, at an increasing rate and towards increasing complexity. This point, in itself, scarcely needs laboring. Nevertheless, characteristics of organizational environments demand consideration for their own sake if there is to be an advancement of understanding in the behavioral sciences of a great deal that is taking place under the impact of technological change, especially at the present time.

For poets that have had my luck,
Seldom write when they can kiss.

Throughout this volume, we have felt considerable inconvenience, from the dogmatical classification of plants, and have all along been floundering between species and variety, which certainly under culture soften into each other.

Patrick Matthew

Good ideas, as we have seen, are not always well received, especially if there are too many of them.

Meredith Belbin

Wait, then, my soul! submissive wait,
Prostrate before His awful seat;
And mid the terrors of His rod,
Trust in a wise and gracious God!

Richard Henry Beddome

Cursory inspection of the world suggests it is a giant complex with dense connections between its parts. We cannot cope with it in that form and are forced to reduce it to some separate areas which we can examine separately'...

Peter Checkland

When people would come in with non-specific problems and we never quite got to the root of a medical diagnosis, it always seemed to me they were expressing problems in living, and that one needed to look at their problems in living, and how they manifested themselves in physical problems.

Used with caution, such formulae really are very useful indeed, and indeed they form the professional stock-in-trade of most engineering designers and draughtsmen. There is not the slightest need to be ashamed of using them; in fact we all do. But they must be used with caution.

We consider the notion of "system" as an organising concept, before going on to look in detail at various systemic metaphors that may be used as a basis for structuring thinking about organisations and problem situations.

Robert L. Flood

The most satisfactory definition of man from the scientific point of view is probably Man the Tool-maker.

Organic Chemistry has become a vast rubbish heap of puzzling and bewildering compounds.

J. Norman Collie