Quotes about science

You’ll remember I told you I was interested in the history of science. That involves trying to understand why there wasn’t any science for so long, and why it went into eclipse almost every time it was rediscovered. I think I know why now. I think the human mind goes through a sort of cycle of fear. It can only take so much accumulated knowledge, and then it panics, and starts inventing reasons to throw everything over and go back to a Dark Age…every time with a new, invented mystical reason.

Science is a kind of glorified tailoring enterprise, a method for taking measurements that describe something — reality — that may not be understood at all.

Science is very good as far as it goes. It has certainly produced powerful benefits. It would be crazy to abandon science, or to deny its validity.

But it would be equally crazy to think that reality is a forty-four long. Yet it seems as if that is what Western society has done. For hundreds of years, science has been so successful that the tailor has taken over our society. His knowledge seems so much more precise and powerful than the knowledge offered by other disciplines, such as history or psychology or art.

But in the end one can be left with a nagging sense of emptiness about the creations of science. One may even suspect that there is more to reality than measurements will ever reveal.

Science can't tell you why anything happens.

If you can’t think of an observation that could disprove a theory, that theory simply isn’t scientific.

It was just as Mandrag said: Nine tenths of alchemy was chemistry. And nine tenths of chemistry was waiting.

Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it.

If someone were to discover, for instance, that under hitherto unobserved circumstances stones were able to speak, it would take only a few pages to describe and explain so earth-shattering a phenomenon. On the other hand, one can always write yet another book about positive thinking, and this is far from being of only academic interest, since it involves a method that makes it impossible ever to arrive at a clear resolution of life's most important questions. Human activities might be graded by the quantity of words required: the more words, the worse their character. All the knowledge that has led our species from wearing animal skins to people flying, complete with proofs, would fill a handful of reference books, but a bookcase the size of the earth would not suffice to hold all the rest, quite apart from the vast discussions that are conducted not with the pen but with the sword and chains. The thought suggests itself that we carry on our human business in a most irrational manner when we do not use those methods by which the exact sciences have forged ahead in such exemplary fashion.

Secrecy is a compulsive reflex in this country. It strangles thought, delays scientific progress, and destroys integrity.

We should always admit that we don’t know everything but not be so cautious that we don’t want to admit when we do know things. We know the particles we are made of, and the forces by which we interact. That’s one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of humankind. We can be a little bit proud.

“And there aren’t any.”

“Mmm,” I said. “Awkward.”

“That’s defeatist talk. I’ll cobble something together. A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”

Isaac was still piqued by the ignorance surrounding watercraeft. It brought home to him, again, how much mainstream science was bunk, how much "analysis" was just, description-often bad description-hiding behind obfuscatory rubbish.

“If anything does change man,” he said, “it’s science and technology. Just think about the fact—while it lasts—that parents need not take for granted some of their babies will die. You get a completely different concept of what a child is.”