Science Quotes
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A discovery must be, by definition, at variance with existing knowledge. During my lifetime, I made two. Both were rejected offhand by the popes of the field. Had I predicted these discoveries in my applications, and had those authorities been my judges, it is evident what their decisions would have been.
Albert Szent-Györgyi
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I therefore took this opportunity and also began to consider the possibility that the Earth moved. Although it seemed an absurd opinion, nevertheless, because I knew that others before me had been granted the liberty of imagining whatever circles they wished to represent the phenomena of the stars, I thought that I likewise would readily be allowed to test whether, by assuming some motion of the Earth's, more dependable representations than theirs could be found for the revolutions of the heavenly spheres.
Nicolaus Copernicus
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Science is the refusal to believe on the basis of hope.
Carrie Snow
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Charles Babbage proposed to make an automaton chess-player which should register mechanically the number of games lost and gained in consequence of every sort of move. Thus, the longer the automaton went on playing game, the more experienced it would become by the accumulation of experimental results. Such a machine precisely represents the acquirement of experience by our nervous organization.
William Stanley Jevons
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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
William James
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Geology has shared the fate of other infant sciences, in being for a while considered hostile to revealed religion; so like them, when fully understood, it will be found a potent and consistent auxiliary to it, exalting our conviction of the Power, and Wisdom, and Goodness of the Creator.
William Buckland
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O God, I could be bound in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams.
William Shakespeare
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Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.
Paul Kalanithi
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I certainly do care about measuring educational results. But what is an 'educational result?' The twinkling eyes of my students, together with their heartfelt and beautifully expressed mathematical arguments are all the results I need.
Keith Devlin
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In science as in love a concentration on technique is quite likely to lead to impotence.
Peter L. Berger
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Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
Richard Feynman
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Science fiction is, after all, the art of extrapolation.
Michael Dirda