Quotes about science

The Scientific Revolution... has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery... was... that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions.

What is remarkable is that human beings are actually able to carry out this code-breaking operation, that the human mind has the necessary intellectual equipment for us to "unlock the secrets of nature"...

To a physicist like me, life looks to be little short of magic: all those dumb molecules conspiring to achieve such clever things!

The scientific quest is a journey into the unknown.

The various creation stories of ancient time were not scientific theories in any modern sense. They did not attempt to reveal anything new about the structures of the world; they aimed simply to remove the specter of the unknown from human imaginings.

I ran an experiment and I got a result. That’s more useful to us than fifty years of theorising.

The world had absorbed the dizzying lessons of modern science easily enough, hadn’t it? Reality was a trick of cognition, an illusion woven by the brain. Beneath the apparently solid skin of the world lay a fizzing unreality of quantum mechanics, playing out on a warped and surreal Salvador Dali landscape. Ghost worlds peeled away from the present with every decision. The universe itself would one day simmer down to absolute entropic stasis, the absolute and literal end of time itself. No action, no memory of an action, no trace of a memory, could endure for ever. Every human deed, from the smallest kindness to the grandest artistic achievement, was ultimately pointless.

But it wasn’t as if people went around thinking about that when they had lovers to meet, menus to choose from, birthdays to remember. The humdrum concerns of normal life trumped the miraculous every time.…And the knowledge that humanity was not alone in the universe would be as relevant to most as the knowledge that protons were built of quarks.

A single data point—even a single clutch of measurements—could not usually prove or disprove anything, but it might later turn out to play a vital role in a chain of argument, even if it was only in the biasing of some statistical distribution closer to one hypothesis than another. Science, as Naqi had long since realised, was as much a swarming, social process as it was something driven by ecstatic moments of personal discovery.

It was something she was proud to be part of.

In order to understand bird flight, we have to understand aerodynamics; only then does the structure of feathers and the different shapes of bird's wings make sense.

Science may explain aspects of art but it will not replace the inspiration that art evokes...

A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of depression, but a Beethoven symphony reveals what that depression feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of mind, yet they are rarely brought together.

From the beginning of physics, there have been those who imagined they would be the last generation to face the unknown. Physics has always seemed to its practitioners to be almost complete. This complacency is shattered only during revolutions, when honest people are forced to admit that they don't know the basics.