Best 9669 quotes in «science quotes» category

Any colour - so long as it's black.

Any chemist reading this book can see, in some detail, how I have spent most of my mature life. They can become familiar with the quality of my mind and imagination. They can make judgements about my research abilities. They can tell how well I have documented my claims of experimental results. Any scientist can redo my experiments to see if they still work-and this has happened! I know of no other field in which contributions to world culture are so clearly on exhibit, so cumulative, and so subject to verification.

Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: 'Ye must have faith.'

Any living cell carries with it the experience of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors.

[...] any fool can make a discovery. Every baby has to discover more in the first years of its life than Roger Bacon ever discovered in his laboratory.

Anyone informed that the universe is expanding and contracting in pulsations of eighty billion years has a right to ask. What's in it for me?

Any man who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.

Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor).

Anyone who has lived through an English winter can see the point of building Stonehenge to make the Sun come back.

Any one who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the "anticipation of Nature," that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with; and, not unfrequently, in spite of a long career of usefulness, turned out to be wholly erroneous in the long run.

Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of facts will certainly reject my theory.

Anyone who has examined into the history of the theories of earth evolution must have been astounded to observe the manner in which the unique and the difficultly explainable has been made to take the place of the common and the natural in deriving the framework of these theories.

Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae. Precisely the opposite impression is obtained from many of our present day text books and publications.

Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.

Any problem can be solved using the materials in the room.

Anyone who thinks science is trying to make human life easier or more pleasant is utterly mistaken.

Any statistics can be extrapolated to the point where they show disaster.

Anything made out of destructible matter Infinite time would have devoured before. But if the atoms that make and replenish the world Have endured through the immense span of the past Their natures are immortal-that is clear. Never can things revert to nothingness!

Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.

A parable: A man was examining the construction of a cathedral. He asked a stone mason what he was doing chipping the stones, and the mason replied, "I am making stones." He asked a stone carver what he was doing. "I am carving a gargoyle." And so it went, each person said in detail what they were doing. Finally he came to an old woman who was sweeping the ground. She said. "I am helping build a cathedral." ...Most of the time each person is immersed in the details of one special part of the whole and does not think of how what they are doing relates to the larger picture.

A page from a journal of modern experimental physics will be as mysterious to the uninitiated as a Tibetan mandala. Both are records of enquiries into the nature of the universe.

A people of scholars, if they are physically degenerate, weak-willed and cowardly pacifists, will not storm the heavens, indeed, they will not be able to safeguard their existence on this earth.

A persistent and age-old instinct makes us want to wander Into regions yet untrod And read what is still unread In the manuscripts of God.

A person who wasn't outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn't understand what had been said.

APOTHECARY, n. The physician's accomplice, undertaker's benefactor and grave worm's provider

Apparently there are three levels of brain activity. Level 1 is the lowest level - the amount of concentration required to, say, delete emails or serve in congress.

[Apollo 7 was] an expedition of the mind, not of the heart.

A premature attempt to explain something that thrills you will destroy your perceptivity rather than increase it, because your tendency will be to explain away rather than seek out.

A professor is one who can speak on any subject - for precisely fifty minutes.

A prolonged war in which a nation takes part is bound to impoverish the breed, since the character of the breed depends on the men who are left.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

A propos of Distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish your selfe here. The Small Pox so fatal and so general amongst us is here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting (which is the term they give it). There is a set of old Women who make it their business to perform the Operation.

A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.

Archaeology is not a science, it's a vendetta.

Archimedes said Eureka, Cos in English he weren't too aversed in, when he discovered that the volume of a body in the bath, is equal to the stuff it is immersed in, That is the law of displacement, Thats why ships don't sink, Its a shame he weren't around in 1912, The Titanic would have made him think.

'Arcturus' is his other name- I'd rather call him 'Star.' It's very mean of Science To go and interfere!

A reality completely independent of the spirit that conceives it, sees it, or feels it, is an impossibility. A world so external as that, even if it existed, would be forever inaccessible to us.

Ardent desire for knowledge, in fact, is the one motive attracting and supporting investigators in their efforts; and just this knowledge, really grasped and yet always flying before them, becomes at once their sole torment and their sole happiness. Those who do not know the torment of the unknown cannot have the joy of discovery which is certainly the liveliest that the mind of man can ever feel.

Are not all Hypotheses erroneous, in which Light is supposed to consist in Pression or Motion, propagated through a fluid Medium? For in all these Hypotheses the Phaenomena of Light have been hitherto explain'd by supposing that they arise from new Modifications of the Rays; which is an erroneous Supposition.

A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later such a religion will emerge.

Are we going to do any thinking today, or is it going to be all math?

Aristotle, in spite of his reputation, is full of absurdities. He says that children should be conceived in the Winter, when the wind is in the North, and that if people marry too young the children will be female. He tells us that the blood of females is blacker than that of males; that the pig is the only animal liable to measles; that an elephant suffering from insomnia should have its shoulders rubbed with salt, olive-oil, and warm water; that women have fewer teeth than men, and so on. Nevertheless, he is considered by the great majority of philosophers a paragon of wisdom.

Aristoteles quidem ait: 'Omnes ingeniosos melancholicos esse.' Aristotle says that all men of genius are melancholy.

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.

Aristotle ... imputed this symphony of the heavens ... this music of the spheres to Pythagorus. ... But Pythagoras alone of mortals is said to have heard this harmony ... If our hearts were as pure, as chaste, as snowy as Pythagoras' was, our ears would resound and be filled with that supremely lovely music of the wheeling stars.

Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.

Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians.

A rock or stone is not a subject that, of itself, may interest a philosopher to study; but, when he comes to see the necessity of those hard bodies, in the constitution of this earth, or for the permanency of the land on which we dwell, and when he finds that there are means wisely provided for the renovation of this necessary decaying part, as well as that of every other, he then, with pleasure, contemplates this manifestation of design, and thus connects the mineral system of this earth with that by which the heavenly bodies are made to move perpetually in their orbits.

ARSENIC, n. A kind of cosmetic greatly affected by the ladies, whom it greatly affects in turn.