Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.
Science explained people, but could not understand them. After long centuries among the bones and muscles it might be advancing to knowledge of the nerves, but this would never give understanding
A metaphysical conclusion is either a false conclusion or a concealed experimental conclusion.
Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.
It may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena.
The major credit I think Jim and I deserve. . . is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold. Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene. . . . We could not see what the answer was, but we considered it so important that we were determined to think about it long and hard, from any relevant point of view.
The full impact of the Lobachevskian method of challenging axioms has probably yet to be felt. It is no exaggeration to call Lobachevsky the Copernicus of Geometry [as did Clifford], for geometry is only a part of the vaster domain which he renovated; it might even be just to designate him as a Copernicus of all thought.
It is sometimes easier to circumvent prevailing difficulties [in science] rather than to attack them.
The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are.
The only way to reduce the number of nuclear weapons is to use them.
There is not a single truth of science upon which we ought to bet more than about a million of millions to one.
But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.
While political and cultural factors are important as explanations for differences in national technology policy and industrial practices, emergent trends in science, engineering and management are leading to new paradigms for high-technology innovation in both Japan and the United States.
There can be no ultimate statements science: there can be no statements in science which can not be tested, and therefore none which cannot in principle be refuted, by falsifying some of the conclusions which can be deduced from them.
Since biological change occurs slowly and cultural changes occur in every generation, it is futile to try to explain the fleeting phenomena of culture by a racial constant. We can often explain them-in terms of contact with other peoples, of individual genius, of geography-but not by racial differences.
At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. . . . I had not imagined that there was anything so delicious in the world. After I had learned the fifth proposition, my brother told me that it was generally considered difficult, but I had found no difficulty whatsoever. This was the first time it had dawned on me that I might have some intelligence.
Life is not a chain of events but an area-something spreading out from a hidden centre and welling at once toward all points of the compass.
Willis Rodney Whitney. . . once compared scientific research to a bridge being constructed by a builder who was fascinated by the construction problems involved. Basic research, he suggested, is such a bridge built wherever it strikes the builder's fancy-wherever the construction problems seem to him to be most challenging. Applied research, on the other hand, is a bridge built where people are waiting to get across the river. The challenge to the builder's ingenuity and skill, Whitney pointed out, can be as great in one case as the other.
I would rather enlighten the electorate so that when it's time for them to put somebody in Congress, it will be self-evident that they will embrace the message and tools and discovery of science in a way that can transform our culture and even our civilization.
I think science is about the search for God; it just comes at it from a different angle than religion.