Quotes about science

In her little room of a laboratory, everything fit together. She’d met scholars who claimed they needed chaos to function. Perhaps that was true for some, but in her experience, good science wasn’t about sloppy inspiration. It was about meticulous incrementalization.

She knew she shouldn’t let the lack of results bother her. Real scientists understood that experiments like this weren’t failures; they were necessary steps on the way to discovery.

“We proved nothing,” Navani said. “We had a single failed experiment.”

She had been around enough intelligent people to know they worked best in an encouraging environment where study and discovery were rewarded.

That’s the trouble with science. It’s never done. Always upending itself. Ruining perfect systems for the little inconvenience of them being wrong.

Oh, Adolin, Shallan thought. He’d arrived at a theory he liked, and now wouldn’t let it go. It was a common mistake warned of in her scientific books.

The true line is not between “hard” natural science and “soft” social sciences, but between precise science limited to highly abstract and simple phenomena in the laboratory and inexact science and technology dealing with complex problems in the real world.

In the elementary equations of the world, the arrow of time appears only where there is heat. The link between time and heat is... fundamental: every time a difference is manifested between the past and the future, heat is involved.

When two friends meet... after one has lived in the mountains and the other at sea level, the watches... will show different times. ...Neither is truer than the other. ...Times are legion: a different one for every point in space. ...there is a vast multitude of them. ...Every clock has its proper time. ...Einstein has shown how to calculate the difference... The world is not like a platoon advancing at the pace of a single commander. It is a network of events affecting each other. ...Physics does not describe how things evolve "in time" but how things evolve in their own times, and how "times" evolve relative to each other.

Time has lost... its unity.

The World is Made of Events, not Things.

If the evidence says you’re wrong, you don’t have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.

“Count yourself lucky,” the potter went on, “that you have understood this now and not spent your years in vain hope. This much have you learned, and no learning is wasted.”