Quotes about science

They are great minds, he told himself. These are men who are trying to work out how the world fits together, not by magic, not by religion, but just by inserting their brains in whatever crack they can find and trying to lever it apart. (p. 225)

A great physicist is always a metaphysicist as well; he has a higher concept of his knowledge and his task.

“Healthy skepticism is an essential and treasured feature of scientific analysis,” Gibbons added. “But willful distortion of evidence has no place at the table of scientific inquiry.”

When politicians use bad science to justify themselves, rather than good science to make up their minds, we can safely assume that wrongheaded and even disastrous decisions lie ahead.

The success of science depends on an apparatus of democratic adjudication—anonymous peer review, open debate, the fact that a graduate student can criticize a tenured professor. These mechanisms are more or less explicitly designed to counter human self-deception. People always think they’re right, and powerful people will tend to use their authority to bolster their prestige and suppress inconvenient opposition. You try to set up the game of science so that the truth will out despite this ugly side of human nature.

When you feel like you've learned whatever there is to learn from what you're doing, it's time to change course and find something new to learn so that you can move forward. You can't be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again.

The great thing about dead or remote masters is that they can't refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work.

The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others. [...] Forget about being an expert or a professional, and wear your amateurism (your heart, your love) on your sleeve. Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.

[...] science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity’s powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction. [...] Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man , are the same faculties that'll snuff out Homo sapiens before this century is out!

I became a scientist because... it's like panning for gold in a muddy torrent. Truth is the gold.

“He believed in a mystical connection between the farmer and the soil.”

“And you don’t?” I asked.

“I believe there’s a connection,” she said. “I just happen to believe it’s biochemical.”

Low sample size—one of the reasons why magic and science are hard to reconcile.