Quotes about science

A skill once acquired — for example, the power to speak and write and enjoy one’s own language, or another — is less easily lost, more quickly recovered, than mere accumulations of facts. And it seems to me more important to go out into life able to think straight and communicate clearly than even to know — and remember — the contents of every English book since Caedmon. Then, like Medea, even if you lose everything else, you can still feel 'Myself remains'. Whereas stuffed geese, even if stuffed with the Universe, remain geese.

One of the troubles with the world is that so few laymen take an interest in science.

“That’s unfair!” said Daphne.

“No, it’s science,” said her father. “‘Could have’ isn’t good enough. Nor is ‘might have’! ‘Did’ is the trick.”

Daphne thought: I’m learning things. I hope I find out soon what they are.

She was always superstitious about remembering useful things she had been told, at least outside lessons. You would be bound to need it one day. It was a test the world did to make sure you were paying attention.

Where the statue stood

Of Newton with his prism and silent face,

The marble index of a mind forever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

“We knew that, though.”

“We suspected it.”

“Do we know it now?”

“We suspect it harder,” Elvi said. “We’re scientists. We only know things until someone shows us we’re wrong.”

It also meant that their reaching out to the artifact had gotten it to reach back. Her experiment was working.

She’d expected success to feel less like fear.

I am nothing but a scientist of sufficiently advanced technology, which is to say a magician.

The reason we can say today that we know all this stuff, that we think our theoretical models represent reality, is not because we have pretty mathematics but because we have done experiments.

[E]xperiments take us to that frightening frontier of vulnerability: the real world.

The basic principles alone often won't provide specific answers, but they'll provide the context needed to ask the right questions. And if we're used to working things out... we won't feel hopeless when the answer isn't obvious...