178 Quotes About Scientists

That is why they have poets—to classify all the degrees of love. It is for scientists to classify the maladies arising from the want of it.

Neil Degrasse Tyson says that the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. Surely it's scientists who are under no obligation to make sense.

In these and other respects a discussion of puzzles and rules illuminates the nature of normal scientific practice. Yet, in another way, that illumination may be significantly misleading. Though there obviously are rules to which all the practitioners of a scientific specialty adhere at a given time, those rules may not by themselves specify all that the practice of those specialists has in common.

I don't think she can see her husband very often, for he teaches the university students during the day, and works at the telescope at night. I wonder if she hopes for cloudy nights and then feels guilty.

There were several key American scientists that favorably reported on Nazi eugenics after visiting Hitler's Germany in order to provide it cover.

Don't study science. Play with it.

[About the great synthesis of atomic physics in the 1920s]It was a heroic time. It was not the doing of any one man; it involved the collaboration of scores of scientists from many different lands. But from the first to last the deeply creative, subtle and critical spirit of Niels Bohr guided, restrained, deepened and finally transmuted the enterprise.

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.

Mathematics is the study of analogies between analogies. All science is. Scientists want to show that things that don't look alike are really the same. That is one of their innermost Freudian motivations. In fact, that is what we mean by understanding.