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The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's
funny...'
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-Isaac Asimov
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*It is idle to expect
any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting
of new things upon old.
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-Francis Bacon
New Organon
I, Aphorism 25
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Science has done more for the development
of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in
eighteen hundred years.
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-Jeff Burroughs
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[On how to look for a new law of physics.]
First you guess. Don't laugh, this is the most important step. Then you
compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it
disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement
is the key to science. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or
how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience,
it's wrong. That's all there is to it.
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-Richard Feynman
Nova
"The Best Mind Since Einstein"
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The thinker makes a great mistake when he
asks after cause and effect. They both together make up the indivisible
phenomena.
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-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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If the ignorance of nature gave birth to
gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.
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-Baron d'Holbach
Systeme de la Nature
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The world is my country, science my
religion.
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-Christiaan Huygens
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As long as every question is answered by
the word "God," scientific inquiry is simply impossible.
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-Robert Green Ingersoll
"The Gods", 1872
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Mathematics is as little a science as
grammar is a language.
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-Ernst Mayr
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Scientific criticism has no nobler task than
to shatter false beliefs.
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-Ludwig von Mises
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The universe is full of magical things
patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
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-Eden Phillpotts
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Science is facts. Just as houses are made
of stones, so science is made of facts. But a pile of stones is not a
house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.
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-Henri Poincare
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The work of science is to substitute facts
for appearances, and demonstration for impressions.
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-John Ruskin
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*[T]he latest doctrines
of the atom. . .tend to show that the physical laws in which we have
hitherto believed have only an approximate and average truth as applied
to large numbers of atoms, while the individual electron behaves pretty
much as it likes. My own belief is that this is a temporary phase, and
that the physicists will in time discover laws governing minute phenomena,
although these laws may differ very considerably from those of traditional
physics.
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-Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not a Christian, and other essays
on religion and related subjects, 1957
"Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?", "Sources of
Intolerance", 1930
Paul Edwards, ed.
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*The scientific world
view works so well, explains so much and resonates so harmoniously with
the most advanced parts of our brains that in time, I think, virtually
every culture on the Earth, left to its own devices, would have
discovered science.
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter VII, "The Backbone of the Night"
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*Modern physics and
chemistry have reduced the complexity of the sensible world to an
astonishing simplicity: three units put together in various patterns
make, essentially, everything.
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter IX, "The Lives of the Stars"
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*Hidden within every
astronomical investigation, sometimes so deeply buried that the
researcher himself is unaware of its presence, lies a kernal of awe.
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter IX, "The Lives of the Stars"
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*There is no other species
on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention,
evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason:
it works.
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter XIII, "Who Speaks For Earth?"
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If any student comes to me and says he wants
to be useful to mankind and go into research to alleviate human suffering,
I advise him to go into charity instead. Research wants real egotists who
seek their own pleasure and satisfaction, but find it in solving the
puzzles of nature.
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-Albert von Szent-Gyorgy
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Discovery consists of seeing what everybody
has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
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-Albert von Szent-Gyorgy
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There is something fascinating about
science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such
a trifling investment of fact. |
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-Mark Twain
Life on the Mississippi
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