8,157 Quotes About Science

In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed.

Hard science alone does not do justice to the cause of fully preserving the past. For that, you also need heart, a capacity for appreciating the drama and tragedy of a ship’s dying moments.

With increasing distance, our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly. Eventually, we reach the dim boundary—the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. Not until the empirical resources are exhausted, need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation.

If a science, such as archaeology or palaeontology, has reached a point where it rejects apparent evidence not on its own failings or lack of merit, but solely on the basis that it challenges the current perception of the past or upsets a carefully constructed framework or timeline, or view held by a ruling body – it has become a belief-based system, not an evidence-based system, and has abandoned reason and scientific principle altogether.

Asked in 1919 whether it was true that only three people in the world understood the theory of general relativity, [Eddington] allegedly replied: 'Who's the third?

It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by the act of learning all the way.

The fundamental laws of the universe which correspond to the two fundamental theorems of the mechanical theory of heat.1. The energy of the universe is constant.2. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.

And to think of this great country in danger of being dominated by people ignorant enough to take a few ancient Babylonian legends as the canons of modern culture. Our scientific men are paying for their failure to speak out earlier. There is no use now talking evolution to these people. Their ears are stuffed with Genesis.

Genius and science have burst the limits of space, and few observations, explained by just reasoning, have unveiled the mechanism of the universe. Would it not also be glorious for man to burst the limits of time, and, by a few observations, to ascertain the history of this world, and the series of events which preceded the birth of the human race?