Scientific Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The whole difference of modern scientific research from that of the Middle Ages, the secret of its immense success, lies in its collective character, in the fact that every fruitful experiment is published, every new discovery of relationships explained.

In disputes upon moral or scientific points, ever let your aim be to come at truth, not to conquer your opponent: so you never shall be at a loss in losing the argument, and gaining a new discovery.

Scientific practice may be considered a kind of storytelling practice...

Man has to apply a very weak intellect to a very complicated world; and the resources of the human intellect are too narrow, and the universe is too complex to leave any hope that it will ever be within man's power to carry scientific perfection to Tennyson's last degree of simplicity:.One law, one element.

Joseph William Mellor

As, to the religious, it will seem absurd to set forth any justification for Religion; so, to the scientific, will it seem absurd to defend Science.

Herbert Spencer

The war was started as the result of a mistaken intuitive "calculation" which transcended mathematics. We believed with a blind fervor that we could triumph over scientific weapons and tactics by means of our mystic will.... The characteristic reliance on intuition by Japanese had blocked the objective cognition of the modern world.

Hasegawa Nyozekan

If two objects or human beings show similar behaviour in all their relevant aspects open to observation, the assumption of some unobservable hidden difference between them must be regarded as a completely gratuitous hypothesis and one contrary to sound scientific method.

Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism.

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.

Stephen Jay Gould

Insistence upon numerical measurement when it is not inherently required by the consequence to be effected, is a mark of respect for the ritual of scientific practice at the expense of its substance.

In scientific research, as in life, many themes are pursued simultaneously by many different people; and the insights of one decade may spring from ideas that are several decades old but were ignored in the intervening years.

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

Left to itself, the world of science slowly diminishes as each result classed as scientific has to be reclassed as anecdotal or historical... Science is a continuous living process; it is made up of activities rather than records; and if the activities cease it dies.

G. Spencer-Brown

In a liberal scientific society, to claim that you are above error is the height of irresponsibility.

Mathematics is merely an apparatus for analyzing the deductions which can be drawn from any particular premises, supplied by common sense, or by more refined scientific observation, so far as these deductions depend on the forms of the propositions.

Alfred North Whitehead

The Montreal Protocol is a model of cooperation. It is a product of the recognition and international consensus that ozone depletion is a global problem, both in terms of its causes and its effects. The protocol is the result of an extraordinary process of scientific study, negotiations among representatives of the business and environmental communities, and international diplomacy. It is a monumental achievement.

Even within the realm of the strictly scientific; we need constant touch with the concrete realities of living nature to prevent our picturing her as exclusively such as we make her in our specialties and in our private dreams.

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

Power politics existed before Machiavelli was ever heard of; it will exist long after his name is only a faint memory. What he did, like Harvey, was to recognize its existence and subject it to scientific study.

Man's intellectual development has extended for a period of at least 5,000 years. However, it has been only during the past three centuries that scientists have realized their real objectives and have learned to use what we designate the scientific method.

Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity that will use its collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations, scientific knowledge, and innate creativity for its own benefit and for that of the natural world, all ecological problems will have their roots in social problems.

Murray Bookchin

I'm not familiar that they're dodging it. Maybe they are. But I think schools also ought to be fair to all views. Because, frankly, Darwinism is not an established scientific fact. It is a theory of evolution, that's why it's called the theory of evolution.

The trouble is that all the investigators proceeded in exactly the same spirit, the spirit that is of scientific curiosity, and with no possibility of telling whether the issue of their work would prove them to be fiends, or dreamers, or angels.

Robert Strutt, 4th Baron Rayleigh

Antoine Meillet also noted that imperatives in European languages are typically the morphological root of the verb, and hypothesised that the imperative was the primitive form of a verb: walk! precedes to walk or he walks. This opens up the possibility of an alternative ontology, or pre-ontology, based on commandment rather than assertion, on be! rather than is. While philosophical or scientific statements would fall under the ordinary is -based ontology, fields like law, religion or magic would operate in the imperative mode: let there be…

Giorgio Agamben

In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind. The catch in this criterion lies in the word "simplest." It is really an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or painting. The layman finds such a law as much less simple than "it oozes," of which it is the mathematical statement. The physicist reverses this judgment, and his statement is certainly the more fruitful of the two, so far as prediction is concerned. It is, however, a statement about something very unfamiliar to the plainman, namely, the rate of change of a rate of change.

J. B. S. Haldane

We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible. ("I love you," someone says, and instantly we begin to wonder — "Well, how much?" — and when the answer comes—"With my whole heart" — we then wonder about the wholeness of a fickle heart.) Our lovers, our husbands, our wives, our fathers, our gods—they are all beyond us.