James Bryant Conant Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based upon excellence of performance.

James Bryant Conant
There is only one proved method of assisting the advancement of pure science—that of picking men of genius, backing them heavily, and leaving them to direct themselves.

James Bryant Conant
He who enters a university walks on hallowed ground.

James Bryant Conant
Even the development of the steam engine owed but little to the advancement of science.

James Bryant Conant
A conceptual scheme is never discarded merely because of a few stubborn facts with which it cannot be reconciled; a conceptual scheme is either modified or replaced by a better one, never abandoned with nothing left to take its place.

James Bryant Conant
Mathematics and measurement are not to be unduly worshipped, nor can they be neglected by even the lay observer.

James Bryant Conant
Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems.

James Bryant Conant
Experimental discoveries must fit the time; facts may be at hand for years without their significance being realized; the total scientific situation must be favorable for the acceptance of new views.

James Bryant Conant
A useful concept may be a barrier to the acceptance of a better one if long-entrenched in the minds of scientists.

James Bryant Conant
Scientists today represent the progeny of one line of descent who migrated, so to speak, some centuries ago into certain fields which were ripe for cultivation. Once science had become self-propagating, those who till these fields have had a relatively easy time keeping up the tradition of their forebears.

James Bryant Conant
The stumbling way in which even the ablest of the scientists in every generation have had to fight through thickets of erroneous observations, misleading generalizations, inadequate formulations, and unconscious prejudice is rarely appreciated by those who obtain their scientific knowledge from textbooks.

James Bryant Conant
Science is an interconnected series of concepts and schemes that have developed as a result of experimentation and observation and are fruitful of further experimentation and observation.

James Bryant Conant
[Science is] the activity of people who work in laboratories and whose discoveries have made possible modern industry and medicine.

James Bryant Conant
We can put it down as one of the principles learned from the history of science that a theory is only overthrown by a better theory, never merely by contradictory facts.

James Bryant Conant