Science

Whitehead caught the unhistorical spirit of the scientific community when he wrote, ‘A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost.’ Yet he was not quite right, for the sciences, like other professional enterprises, do need their heroes and do preserve their names. Fortunately, instead of forgetting these heroes, scientists have been able to forget or revise their works.
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 138-139.

In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.
— George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950).

There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table. What is national is no longer science.
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, (1860 – 1904).

If relativity is proved right the Germans will call me German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss citizen and the French will call me a great scientist. If relativity is proved wrong the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German and the Germans will call me a Jew.
— Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) (attrib.)

Whitehead caught the unhistorical spirit of the scientific community when he wrote, ‘A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost.’ Yet he was not quite right, for the sciences, like other professional enterprises, do need their heroes and do preserve their names. Fortunately, instead of forgetting these heroes, scientists have been able to forget or revise their works.
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 138-139.

While there are numerous reports of paranormal phenomena, they are almost without exception anecdotal. Good evidence in the presence of independent observers, preferably including a professional conjuror who could detect fraud, is simply not available for any of the phenomena.
— Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science, Faber and Faber, 1992, 136.

If we define science in the way the term is usually used — by what it is that those individuals we now call scientists do — then we are speaking of a particular form this pursuit has taken in Western society, a form that has been developing since the seventeenth century.
— Evelyn Fox Keller (1936 – 2023), Reflections on Gender and Science, Yale University Press, 1985, 17.

Rather than have Physical Science the principal thing in my son’s mind, I would rather have him think the Sun went around the Earth, and that the stars were merely spangles set in a bright blue firmament.
— Thomas Arnold (1795 – 1842).

Give a scientist enough time and money and he can do anything.
— Ken Barton, quoted in New Scientist 31 July 1993, 7.

Science is a great many things … but in the end they all return to this: science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think. It needs more courage than we have ever found when we have faced our worldly problems.
— Jacob Bronowski (1908 – 1974), Science and Human Values, Julian Messner, 1956.

What would a different science look like? Because science as we know it developed only once in history, the notion of a ‘different’ science is to a considerable degree a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, the history of science also shows us that science, in practice, is not and has never been a monolithic enterprise.
— Evelyn Fox Keller (1936 – 2023), Reflections on Gender and Science, Yale University Press, 1985, 64.

I define science as the organization of our knowledge in such a way that it commands more of the hidden potential in nature.
— Jacob Bronowski (1908 – 1974), Science and Human Values, Julian Messner, 1956.

There are of course people who like to draw a line between pure and applied science; and oddly, they are often the same people who find art unreal. To them, the word useful is a final arbiter, either for or against a work; and they use this word as if it can only mean what makes a man feel heavier after meals.
— Jacob Bronowski (1908 – 1974), Science and Human Values, Julian Messner, 1956.

We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.52

There is no democracy in physics. We can’t say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi.
— Luis Alvarez (1911 – 1988).

The thesis I shall present in this book is that the biosphere does not contain a predictable class of objects or of events but is a particular event, certainly compatible indeed with first principles, but not deducible from those principles and therefore essentially unpredictable.

Let there be no misunderstanding. In saying that, as a class, living things are not predictable upon the basis of first principles, I by no means intend to suggest that they are not explicable through those principles — that they transcend them in some way, and that other principles, applicable to living systems alone, must be invoked. In my view the biosphere is unpredictable for exactly the same reason — neither more nor less — that the particular configuration of atoms constituting this pebble I have in my hand is unpredictable.
— Jacques Monod (trans. Austryn Wainhouse), Chance and Necessity, Fontana 1974, 49.

‘Through selfless service, you will always be fruitful and find the fulfilment of your desires’: this is the promise of the Creator.
— Bhagavad Gita, 3:10, in the translation of Eknath Easwaran, Arkana Books, 1985.

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
— Hans Hoffman (1880 – 1966).

He has considerable gifts himself. He possesses two out of the three qualities necessary for the ideal detective. He has the power of observation and the power of deduction. He is only wanting in knowledge, and that may come in time.
— Sherlock Holmes describes the methods of a French detective in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930), The Sign of Four.

‘To the trained eye there is as much difference between the black ash of a Trichinopoly and the white fluff of a bird’s-eye as there is between a cabbage and a potato.’
‘You have an extraordinary genius for minutiae,’ I remarked.
‘I appreciate their importance…
— Sherlock Holmes describes his methods in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930), The Sign of Four.

Here, too, is a curious little work upon the influence of a trade upon the form of the hand, with lithotypes of the hands of slaters, sailors, cork-cutters, compositors, weavers and diamond-polishers.
— Sherlock Holmes describes his own methods in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930), The Sign of Four.

To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. Every past vision of scientific truth, every model of natural phenomena, has proved in time to be more limited than its adherents claimed. The survival of productive difference in science requires that we put all claims for intellectual hegemony in their proper place — that we understand that such claims are, by their very nature, political rather than scientific.
— Evelyn Fox Keller (1936 – 2023), Reflections on Gender and Science, Yale University Press, 1985, 178-9.

It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
— Thomas Henry Huxley, (1825 – 1895), The coming of age of The Origin of Species in Science and Culture xii.

The doctrine of ‘scientism’ — with its implied belief in the omnicompetence of science — has been steadily gaining ground in our culture throughout this century.
— Mary Midgeley, ‘Can science save its soul?’, New Scientist, 1 August 1992, 24-27.

This seductive promise of universal explanation is something new. It outbids the explanatory offers of any religion, both in scope and certainty. The religions habitually admit, indeed claim, that they deal in matters not fully knowable by human beings, whereas science now seems able to offer fully reasoned proof for all answers to all possible questions. People today are far more vulnerable to such offers than they were a century ago, because the world has become so confusing. In today’s desperate muddles, people long for a map, a clear world picture.
— Mary Midgeley, ‘Can science save its soul?’, New Scientist, 1 August 1992, 24-27.

Few people anywhere actually understand science, and outside Western countries it is always somewhat detached from the surrounding culture.
— Mary Midgeley, ‘Can science save its soul?’, New Scientist, 1 August 1992, 24-27.

It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people.
— Jawaharlal Nehru, quoted by Mary Midgeley, ‘Can science save its soul?’, New Scientist, 1 August 1992, 24-27.

The astonishing successes of Western science have not been gained by answering every kind of question, but precisely by refusing to. Science has deliberately set narrow limits to the questions that belong to it, and further limits to the questions peculiar to each branch. It has practised an austere modesty, a rejection of claims to universal authority.
— Mary Midgeley, ‘Can science save its soul?’, New Scientist, 1 August 1992, 24-27.

Scientific education is now so narrowly scientistic that many scientists simply do not know that there is any systematic way of thinking besides their own.
— Mary Midgeley, ‘Can science save its soul?’, New Scientist, 1 August 1992, 24-27.

It is absurd to suppose that because science has been so successful in exposing the workings of the world, it eliminates the responses that one’s brain and the rest of one’s body have to life’s events.
— Peter Atkins, ‘Will science ever fail?’, New Scientist, 8 August 1992, 24-27.

It is not necessary to know all the technical details of how a piece of scientific work is carried out to be able to ask the crucial question: why is it being carried out at all? But a certain degree of confidence is required for the ‘layman’ to ask why; and this confidence is likely to come with some exposure to the purposes and practices of science.
— J. S. R. Goodlad, Science for non-scientists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973, 1 – 2.

The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy (science); for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore, from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never been made), much may be hoped.
— Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), Novum organum.

Conversing with Mr. Herschel on the dark lines seen in the solar spectrum by Fraunhofer, he inquired whether I had seen them; and on my replying in the negative, and expressing a great desire to see them, he mentioned the extreme difficulty he had had, even with Fraunhofer’s description in his hand and the long time which it had cost him in detecting them. My friend then added, “I will prepare the apparatus, and put you in such a position that they shall be visible, and yet you shall look for them and not find them: after which, while you remain in the same position, I will instruct you how to see them, and you shall see them, and not merely wonder you did not see them before, but you shall find it impossible to look at the spectrum without seeing them.”
— Charles Babbage, Decline of Science in England, 1830.

Tyndall declared that he saw in Matter the promise and potency of all forms of life, and with his Irish graphic lucidity made a picture of a world of magnetic atoms, each atom with a positive and a negative pole, arranging itself by attraction and repulsion in orderly crystalline structure. Such a picture is dangerously fascinating to thinkers oppressed by the bloody disorders of the living world. Craving for purer subjects of thought, they find in the contemplation of crystals and magnets a happiness more dramatic and less childish than the happiness found by mathematicians in abstract numbers, because they see in the crystals beauty and movement without the corrupting appetites of fleshly vitality.
— George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950).

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
— Max Planck (1858 – 1947), quoted in Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition, 1970, 151.

It would be impossible, it would be against the scientific spirit … Physicists always publish their results completely. If our discovery has a commercial future that is an accident from which we must not profit. And if radium is found to be used in the treatment of disease, it seems to me impossible to take advantage of that.
— Marie Sklodowska Curie (1867 – 1934), on the patenting of radium, as described by her daughter Eve.

Humanity needs practical men, who get the most out of their work, and, without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit.

Without doubt, these dreamers do not deserve wealth, because they do not desire it. Even so, a well-organized society should assure to such workers the efficient means of accomplishing their task, in a life freed from material care and freely consecrated to research.
— Eve Curie (1904 – 2007), (translated by Vincent Sheean), Madame Curie, Pocket books, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1946, pp 352-253. (7).

In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.
— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi) (1869 – 1948)

Now in my view there is no such thing as induction. Thus inference to theories, from singular statements which are ‘verified by experience’ (whatever that may mean), is logically inadmissible. Theories are, therefore, never empirically verifiable. If we wish to avoid the positivist’s mistake of eliminating, by our criterion of demarcation, the theoretical systems of natural science, then we must choose a criterion which allows us to admit to the domain of empirical science even statements which cannot be verified.

But I shall certainly admit a system as empirical or scientific only if it is capable of being tested by experience. These considerations suggest that not the verifiability but the falsifiability of a system is to be taken as a criterion of demarcation. In other words: I shall not require of a scientific system that it shall be capable of being singled out, once and for all, in a positive sense; but I shall require that its logical form shall be such that it can be singled out, by means of empirical tests, in a negative sense: it must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience.

(Thus the statement, ‘It will rain or not rain here tomorrow’ will not be regarded as empirical, simply because it cannot be refuted; whereas the statement ‘It will rain here tomorrow’ will be regarded as empirical.)
— Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902 – 1994), The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1972, 40 – 41.

It is possible to interpret the ways of science more prosaically. One might say that progress can “ … come about in only two ways: by gathering new perceptual experiences, and by better organizing those which are available already”. But this description of scientific progress, although not actually wrong, seems to miss the point. It is too reminiscent of Bacon’s induction: too suggestive of his gathering of the “countless grapes, ripe and in season”, from which he expected the wine of science to flow: of his myth of a scientific method that starts from observation and experiment and then proceeds to theories. (This legendary method, by the way, still inspires some of the new sciences which try to practice it because of the prevalent belief that it is the method of experimental physics.)
— Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902 – 1994), The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1972, 279.

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