Jacob Bronowski - Science Quotes

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That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

Jacob Bronowski
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. That is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast on nature.

Jacob Bronowski
No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.

Jacob Bronowski
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped.

Jacob Bronowski
Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science.

Jacob Bronowski
A popular cliche in philosophy says that science is pure analysis or reductionism, like taking the rainbow to pieces; and art is pure synthesis, putting the rainbow together. This is not so. All imagination begins by analyzing nature.

Jacob Bronowski
The private motives of scientists are not the trend of science. The trend of science is made by the needs of society: navigation before the eighteenth century, manufacture thereafter; and in our age I believe the liberation of personality. Whatever the part which scientists like to act, or for that matter which painters like to dress, science shares the aims of our society just as art does.

Jacob Bronowski
Science is not a mechanism but a human progress, and not a set of findings but the search for them.

Jacob Bronowski
Science is a great many things... but in the end they all return to this: science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think. It need more courage than we have ever found when we have faced our worldly problems.

Jacob Bronowski
Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture.

Jacob Bronowski
There are three creative ideas which, each in its turn, have been central to science. They are the idea of order, the idea of causes, and the idea of chance.

Jacob Bronowski
The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.

Jacob Bronowski
Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.

Jacob Bronowski
Truth in science is like Everest, an ordering of the facts.

Jacob Bronowski
It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination; because without that, man and beliefs and science will perish together.

Jacob Bronowski
Like the voyages of the Spaniards into the fabulous West, Science even at its boldest does the will of history, and in turn helps to determine its movement.

Jacob Bronowski
Whether our work is art or science or the daily work of society, it is only the form in which we explore our experience which is different.

Jacob Bronowski
A fact is discovered, a theory is invented; is any theory ever deep enough for it to be truly called a creation? Most scientists would answer: no! Science, they would say, engages only part of the mind - the rational intellect - but creation must engage the whole mind. Science demands none of that ground swell of emotion, none of the rich bottom of personality, which fills out the work of art...

Jacob Bronowski
The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations — more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.

Jacob Bronowski
I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.

Jacob Bronowski
Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.

Jacob Bronowski
When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,-or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge's phrase, for unity in variety.

Jacob Bronowski
I set out to show that there exists single creative activity, which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences.It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind.

Jacob Bronowski
No fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts. In the language of science, every fact is a field — a crisscross of implications, those that lead to it and those that lead from it. … We condense the laws around concepts. Science takes its coherence, its intellectual and imaginative strength together, from the concepts at which its laws cross, like knots in a mesh.

Jacob Bronowski
Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides.

Jacob Bronowski
The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.

Jacob Bronowski
The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science. I have used three words to describe these far - reaching changes : discovery, invention and creation. There are contexts in which one of these words is more appropriate than the others.

Jacob Bronowski
Science has nothing to be ashamed of, even in the ruins of Nagasaki.

Jacob Bronowski
One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.

Jacob Bronowski
Tolerance among scientists cannot be based on indifference, it must be based on respect. Respect as a personal value implies, in any society, the public acknowledgements of justice and of due honor. These are values which to the layman seem most remote from any abstract study. Justice, honor, the respect of man for man: What, he asks, have these human values to do with science? [...]
Those who think that science is ethically neutral confuse the findings of science, which are, with the activity of science, which is not.

Jacob Bronowski