Quotes about science

“Ummm,” Alicia said, trying to be polite. “Still sounds like we’re just making this up as we go along.”

“We are.” Max grinned. “Invent, then check. It’s really the only way to make progress.”

Data always overruled theory.

The ship of theory could set sail on tides of mathematical grandeur and hope alone, but only data could fill its sails.

To believe anything so far-fetched, I’d have to see a solid calculation.

The desire to find something could provoke what she called “wantum mechanics,” fishing a result out of nothing but noise.

Engineers never liked the unexplained, whereas physicists lived for it.

Maybe is not a theory, you know, it is merely maybe.

In popularizing a scientific development it was always crucial to sail the narrow strait between the Scylla of professional contempt and the Charybdis of public befuddlement.

Yes, perhaps that was it. For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable. Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right.

Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.

It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.

Somehow to them, the press was always the judge of things scientific.