Scientific Quotes

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My father has always held out Scientology and auditing to be based purely on science and not on religious "belief" or faith. We regularly promised and distributed publications with "scientific guarantees". This was and has always been common practice. My father and I created a "religious front" only for tax purposes and legal protection 'from fraud Claims'. We almost always told nearly everyone that Scientology was really science, not a religion, but that the religious front was created to deal with the government.

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

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

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.

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.

Basically, what I believe in is neither capitalism nor globalization... I believe in man's capacity for achieving great things and in the combined force resulting from encounters and exchanges. I plead for greater liberty and a more open world... because it provides a setting which liberates individuals and their creativity as no other system can. It spurs the dynamism which has led to human, economic, scientific, and technical advances, and which will continue to do so. Believing in capitalism does not mean believing in growth, the economy, or efficiency. Desirable as these may be, these are only the results. Belief in capitalism is, fundamentally, belief in mankind.

The claim by the IPCC that an imposed climate forcing (such as added atmospheric concentrations of CO2) can work through the parameterizations involved in the atmospheric, land, ocean and continental ice sheet components of the climate model to create skillful global and regional forecasts decades from now is a remarkable statement. That the IPCC states that this is a 'much more easily solved problem than forecasting weather patterns just weeks from now' is clearly a ridiculous scientific claim.

Roger A. Pielke

There is no doubt that he [Raja Rammohun Roy] was the first who held before us the ideal of freedom. He was the first to sound the note of freedom in every department of life and in every different culture that has met today in India. It may be that we have to modify that, it may we have to analyse that more carefully and more in details for the purpose of scientific study but it is enough for our purpose to say that he inaugurated many reforms – you might call that reforming activity. He inaugurated the reforms which again, in turn, gave rise to reaction which, again, gave rise to further reforms which made the nation turn on itself, till at last, it began to be self-conscious.

Chittaranjan Das

"Global Warming" represents the last gasp of so-called "scientific progressivism", a mass of pitifully transparent falsehoods being employed to justify reducing mankind under the absolute despotism of "experts", the obvious implication being that we can't even breathe responsibly. Environmentalism, Gaianism, is a religion on the basis of which — illegally under the First Amendment — public policy is being generated. Exhaling carbon dioxide is Original Sin, a reliable source of unlimited power and wealth to a Parasitic Class of politicians, bureaucrats, and cops with which our civilization now finds itself infested.

Nothing carries so much authority today as science, but there is actually no such thing as 'the scientific world-view'. Science is a method of inquiry, not a view of the world. Knowledge is growing at accelerating speed; but no advance in science will tell us whether materialism is true or false, or whether humans possess free will. The belief that the world is composed of matter is metaphysical speculation, not a testable theory. Science may succeed in explaining events in terms of causes and effects. In some accounts it may be able to formulate laws of nature. But what does it mean for something to cause something else and what is a law of nature? These are questions for philosophy or religion, not for science.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected. … The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth.

Richard Feynman

The scientific skepticism of our age professes to spring from a sense of the extreme fallaciousness of the human senses, and the liability besetting us all to deceive ourselves into a belief which gratifies the faculty of wonder. It is held as a rare and valuable gift to be able to observe a fact correctly. We are pathetically told that what a man thinks he saw, is often a mere hypothesis of his imagination as to what he saw, and may be wholly wrong.

Robert Chambers

Under these conditions it is no wonder, that the movement of atheists, which declares religion to be just a deliberate illusion, invented by power-seeking priests, and which has for the pious belief in a higher Power nothing but words of mockery, eagerly makes use of progressive scientific knowledge and in a presumed unity with it, expands in an ever faster pace its disintegrating action on all nations of the earth and on all social levels. I do not need to explain in any more detail that after its victory not only all the most precious treasures of our culture would vanish, but — which is even worse — also any prospects at a better future.

Staff standards are not theological abstractions, but scientific approximations, and are evolved for the use of the line, the sole justification of the standards being that they will make line work more efficient. Staff standards being for the benefit of the line and often entrusted to line officials, must be put in the form of permanent instructions so that all may understand what is being aimed at, and deviations by the line be noted and reprimanded.

Harrington Emerson

Communication of science as subject-matter has so far outrun in education the construction of a scientific habit of mind that to some extent the natural common sense of mankind has been interfered with to its detriment.

If there were other people on other planets it would certainly raise theological issues. Further, there is no (zip, zero, nada) scientific evidence of any life of any kind outside of Earth (except maybe angels).

Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers, you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.

Richard Feynman

Evolutionary plasticity can be purchased only at the ruthlessly dear price of continuously sacrificing some individuals to death from unfavourable mutations. Bemoaning this imperfection of nature has, however, no place in a scientific treatment of this subject.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

If we ignore the facts contained in one part of the world, surely we are hampering scientific advance.

Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.

Alfred North Whitehead

The work of Dr. Salk is in the highest tradition of selfless and dedicated medical research. He has provided a means for the control of a dread disease. By helping scientists in other countries with technical information; by offering to them the strains of seed virus and professional aid so that the production of vaccine can be started by them everywhere; by welcoming them to his laboratory that they may gain a fuller knowledge, Dr. Salk is a benefactor of mankind.
His achievement, a credit to our entire scientific community, does honor to all the people of the United States.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

There is always the danger in scientific work that some word or phrase will be used by different authors to express so many ideas and surmises that, unless redefined, it loses all real significance.

Gilbert N. Lewis