Best 9669 quotes in «science quotes» category

A categorization implies a hierarchical way of seeing things. Life is really relational, not hierarchical. Hierarchical is a human way of looking at things. Relational is much more the way things are. Everything is connected.

Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.

A catalyst is a substance which alters the velocity of a chemical reaction without appearing in the final products.

Accurate and minute measurement seems to the non-scientific imagination, a less lofty and dignified work than looking for something new. But nearly all the grandest discoveries of science have been but the rewards of accurate measurement and patient long-continued labour in the minute sifting of numerical results.

Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence.

According to my views, aiming at quantitative investigations, that is at establishing relations between measurements of phenomena, should take first place in the experimental practice of physics. By measurement to knowledge [door meten tot weten] I should like to write as a motto above the entrance to every physics laboratory.

According to this view of the matter, there is nothing casual in the formation of Metamorphic Rocks. All strata, once buried deep enough, (and due TIME allowed!!!) must assume that state,-none can escape. All records of former worlds must ultimately perish.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

A cell is regarded as the true biological atom.

[A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause.

A chemist who is not a physicist is nothing at all.

A circumstance which has always appeared wonderful to me, is that such sublime discoveries should have been made by the sole assistance of a quadrant and a little arithmetic.

Acid Salts have the Power of Destroying the Blewness of the Infusion of our Wood [lignum nephreticum], and those Liquors indiscriminatly that abound with Sulphurous Salts, (under which I comprehend the Urinous and Volatile Salts of Animal Substances, and the Alcalisate or fixed Salts that are made by Incineration) have the virtue of Restoring it.

A common way to compute density is, of course, to take the ratio of an object's mass to its volume. But other types of densities exist, such as the resistance of somebody's brain to the imparting of common sense.

A Composition on the Piano

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.

A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux ... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing.

A country is not developed by constructing bridges, houses or roads but it is developed only if the brains of the people living in that country are developed, only if their level of culture is raised and only if an infinite importance is given to the science and to the knowledge!

A contemporary poet has characterized this sense of the personality of art and of the impersonality of science in these words,-'Art is myself; science is ourselves. '

Act as if you are going to live for ever and cast your plans way ahead. You must feel responsible without time limitations, and the consideration of whether you may or may not be around to see the results should never enter your thoughts.

Activity is the only road to knowledge.

A day is a miniature eternity.

A designer must always think about the unfortunate production engineer who will have to manufacture what you have designed; try to understand his problems.

Add to this the pride of achievement; the desire to rank among the successful souls on earth, and we have the factors which have brought some of the ablest of human beings into the limelight that revealed them to an admiring world, as leaders and examples.

ADDER, n. A species of snake. So called from its habit of adding funeral outlays to the other expenses of living.

A discovery is generally an unforeseen relation not included in theory.

A doctor who doesn't say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.

A discussion between Haldane and a friend began to take a predictable turn. The friend said with a sigh, 'It's no use going on. I know what you will say next, and I know what you will do next.' The distinguished scientist promptly sat down on the floor, turned two back somersaults, and returned to his seat. 'There,' he said with a smile. 'That's to prove that you're not always right.'

A drug is a substance which, if injected into a rabbit, produces a paper.

Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which man will never be able to cope.

A fact is like a sack which won't stand up if it's empty. In order that it may stand up, one has to put into it the reason and sentiment which caused it to exist.

A fat kitchin, a lean Will.

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.

A discovery is like falling in love and reaching the top of a mountain after a hard climb all in one, an ecstasy not induced by drugs but by the revelation of a face of nature that no one has seen before and that often turns out to be more subtle and wonderful than anyone had imagined.

A discovery must be, by definition, at variance with existing knowledge. During my lifetime, I made two. Both were rejected offhand by the popes of the field. Had I predicted these discoveries in my applications, and had those authorities been my judges, it is evident what their decisions would have been.

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.

A few drops of science will often disinfect an entire barrel full of ignorance and prejudice.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales...

After death, life reappears in a different form and with different laws. It is inscribed in the laws of the permanence of life on the surface of the earth and everything that has been a plant and an animal will be destroyed and transformed into a gaseous, volatile and mineral substance.

After Gibbs, one the most distinguished [American scientists] was Langley, of the Smithsonian. ... He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception. ... Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognizing their existence, while doubting their respectibility.

After reading a paper by a young theoretical scientist, Pauli, shaking his head sadly, commented: That is not even wrong.

A full-spectrum approach to human consciousness and behavior means that men and women have available to them a spectrum of knowing - a spectrum that includes, at the very least, the eye of flesh, the eye of mind, and the eye of spirit.

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, "I refute it thus.

Against filling the Heavens with fluid Mediums, unless they be exceeding rare, a great Objection arises from the regular and very lasting Motions of the Planets and Comets in all manner of Courses through the Heavens.

[Agatha Christie] is fond of quoting the witty wife who once said, 'an archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have; the older she gets, the more interested he is in her. Christie's husband, Max Mallowan, was an archaeologist.

A good method of discovery is to imagine certain members of a system removed and then see how what is left would behave: for example, where would we be if iron were absent from the world: this is an old example.

A good scientist is a person in whom the childhood quality of perennial curiosity lingers on. Once he gets an answer, he has other questions.

A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.

A good simulation, be it a religious myth or scientific theory, gives us a sense of mastery over experience. To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it one's own. But with this appropriation comes the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion.