Sunday, March 8, 2020 – Trusting Science
In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,” and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. ~ Carl Sagan
In a republican nation, whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance. ~ Thomas Jefferson
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. ~ Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776
No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer. ~ Thomas Browne
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them. ~ William Lawrence Bragg
Science does not know its debt to imagination. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about the nature of things. ~ Aldous Huxley, “Wordsworth in the Tropics”
That theory is worthless. It isn’t even wrong! ~ Wolfgang Pauli
Science is a cemetery of dead ideas. ~ Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, 1913
The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment. ~ Celia Green, The Decline and Fall of Science, 1972
I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success because it has such a limited and narrow realm in which to focus its efforts, namely, the physical universe. ~ Ken Jenkins
Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men. ~ Jean Rostand
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. ~ Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny…” ~ Isaac Asimov
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. ~ Edward Teller
Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing. ~ Werner Von Braun
Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind. ~ Marston Bates
In physics, you don’t have to go around making trouble for yourself – nature does it for you. ~ Frank Wilczek
Physics is imagination in a straitjacket. ~ John Moffat
There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a “hottest part” implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible. ~ Richard Davisson
It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms. ~ George Wald
The microwave oven is the consolation prize in our struggle to understand physics. ~ Jason Love
I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them. ~ Karl Friedrich Gauss
Science is the topography of ignorance. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Medical Essays, 1883
Men are probably nearer the central truth in their superstitions than in their science. ~ Henry David Thoreau
Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact. ~ H. L. Mencken
Theory helps us bear our ignorance of facts. ~ George Santayana
It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young. ~ Konrad Lorenz
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination, but the combination is locked up in the safe. ~ Peter DeVries
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions. ~ Oscar Wilde
Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition. ~ Alan Turing
Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings. ~ Victor Stenger
It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure. ~ Albert Einstein
In this house, we OBEY the laws of thermodynamics! ~ Homer Simpson
If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate. ~ Henry J. Tillman
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former. ~ Albert Einstein
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance, the idea that anything is possible. ~ Ray Bradbury
The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers. ~ Lewis Thomas
Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic. ~ Thomas Huxley
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads. ~ George Santayana
Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end. ~ Leonard Nimoy
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. ~ William Butler Yeats
Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it. ~ Rabindranath Tagore
Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic. ~ Lewis Carroll
Fear is a disease that eats away at logic and makes man inhuman. ~ Marian Anderson
Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic. ~ William E. Gladstone
The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational. ~ A. N. Wilson
Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! ~ E. M. Forster
Against logic there is no armor like ignorance. ~ Laurence J. Peter
Better to be without logic than without feeling. ~ Charlotte Brontë
Intuition is a suspension of logic due to impatience. ~ Rita Mae Brown
Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities. ~ Lord Dunsany
Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you. ~ Frank O’Hara
Logic and fact keep interfering with the easy flow of conversation. ~ Mason Cooley
The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random. ~ Robin Marantz Henig
There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined. ~ Albert Camus
If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic? ~ Sam Harris
No, no, you’re not thinking; you’re just being logical. ~ Niels Bohr
There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California. ~ Edward Abbey
Just Above Sunset 