Science

Table of contents

1 What Is Science? 2 Science And Religion 3 Scientists 4 Science and Culture 5 Mistakes In Science

What Is Science?

• "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." - Ernest Rutherford

• "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - Edsger Dijkstra

• "Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience." - Albert Einstein

• "In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore ... in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. ... There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact." - Mark Twain

• "There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors." - Robert Oppenheimer

• "The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking." - Albert Einstein

• "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." - Albert Einstein

• "To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge." - Copernicus

• "...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought." - Albert Einstein

• "Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it." - Albert Einstein

• "Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do." - Donald Knuth

• "Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification." - Karl Popper

• "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." - Albert Einstein

• "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." - Albert Einstein

• "The discovery of natural law is a meeting with God." - F. Dessauer

• "Those to whom God has imparted religion by intuition are very fortunate and justly convinced. But to those who do not have it, we can give it only by reasoning, waiting for God to give them spiritual insight…" - Blaise Pascal

• "Since religion intrinsically rejects empirical methods, there should never be any attempt to reconcile scientific theories with religion. An infinitely old universe, always evolving may not be compatible with the Book of Genesis. However, religions such as Buddhism get along without having any explicit creation mythology and are in no way contradicted by a universe without a beginning or end. Creatio ex nihilo, even as religious doctrine, only dates to around AD 200. The key is not to confuse myth and empirical results, or religion and science." - H. Alfvén

• "The difference between myth and science is the difference between divine inspiration of ‘unaided reason’ on the one hand and theories developed in observational contact with the real world on the other. [It is] the difference between the belief in prophets and critical thinking, between Credo quia absurdum [I believe because it is absurd—Tertullian.] and De omnibus est dubitandum [Everything should be questioned—Descartes.]. To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly large regions of space and time is science." - H. Alfvén

• "The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails." - H. L. Mencken

• "I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone." - Charles Darwin, The Origin Of Species, 1869

• "All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree." - Albert Einstein

• "I stand before you as somebody who is both physicist and a priest, and I want to hold together my scientific and my religious insights and experiences. I want to hold them together, as far as I am able, without dishonesty and without compartmentalism. I don't want to be a priest on Sunday and a physicist on Monday; I want to be both on both days." - John Polkinghorne

• "The more we know of things, the more we know of God." - Baruch Spinoza

• "Through steady observation and a meaningful contact with the divined order of the world’s structure, arranged by God’s wisdom, - who would not be guided to admire the Builder who creates all!" - Copernicus

• "A contradiction (between science and religion) is out of the question. What follows from science are, again and again, clear indications of God’s activity which can be so strongly perceived that Kepler dared to say (for us it seems daring, not for him) that he could ‘almost touch God with his hand in the Universe.’" - Walter Heitler

• "The wonderful arrangement and harmony of the cosmos would only originate in the plan of an almighty omniscient being. This is and remains my greatest comprehension." - Isaac Newton

• "The order, the symmetry, the harmony enchant us…God is pure order. He is the originator of universal harmony." - Gottfried Leibniz

• "The deepest intelligence of philosophy and science are inseparable from a religious view of the world." - Rudjer Boskovic

• "I am a Christian which means that I believe in the deity of Christ, like Tycho de Brahe, Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, Pascal… like all great astronomers mathematicians of the past." - Augustin Louis Cauchy

• "Overwhelming evidences of an intelligence and benevolent intention surround us, show us the whole of nature through the work of a free will and teach us that all alive beings depend on an eternal creator-ruler." - Lord Kelvin

• "We may conclude that from what science teaches us, there is in nature an order independent of man’s existence, a meaningful order to which nature and man are subordinate. Both Religion and science require faith in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations….." - Max Planck

• "The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of course, of the beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp." - Henri Poincaré

• "Start by eliminating the possibility of empty models by praying that Heaven will no longer put this invention of the Devil in our way. To do this, we add a constant c to our language, ..." -- Proof of the compactness theorem by Henkin's method in page 52 of Poizat: A course in model theory.

• "Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore." - Albert Einstein

• "Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality." - Nikola Tesla

• "You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10^12 to 1." - Ernest Rutherford

• "Tell a man that there are 300 billion stars in the universe, and he'll believe you.... Tell him that a bench has wet paint upon it and he'll have to touch it to be sure." - Raimond Verwei (also credited to Albert Einstein)

• "It's not exactly rocket science" Anonymous (said about something easy or self-explanatory)

• "They said Galileo was a fool. They said Einstein was a fool. They said the Wright Brothers were fools. What you've got to remember, however, is that they also said that about a lot of fools."

• "That Professor Goddard with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react--to say that would be absurd. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." - 1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's rocket work. The remark was retracted in the July 17, 1969 issue.

• "There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." - Albert Einstein, 1932

• "There will never be a bigger plane built." - A Boeing engineer, after the first flight of the 247, a twin engine plane that holds ten people

• "I think that a particle must have a separate reality independent of the measurements. That is an electron has spin, location and so forth even when it is not being measured. I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it." - Albert Einstein

• "The science of Psychiatry is now where the science of Medicine was before germs were discovered." - Malcolm Rogers

• "All models are wrong, but some are useful". - George E. P. Box