#science

"The more you delve into science, the more it appears to rely on faith."

"No one, in the world's whole history, ever attempted to substantiate a truth by a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of miracle. Nothing but falsehood ever attested itself by signs and wonders. No miracle ever was performed, and no sane man ever thought he had performed one, and until one is performed, there can be no evidence of the existence of any power superior to, and independent of nature."

"Deviner avant de démontrer! Ai-je besoin de rappeler que c'est ainsi que se sont faites toutes les découvertes importantes.Guessing before proving! Need I remind you that it is so that all important discoveries have been made?"

"We lay there and looked up at the night sky and she told me about stars called blue squares and red swirls and I told her I'd never heard of them. Of course not, she said, the really important stuff they never tell you. You have to imagine it on your own."

"Sadly, my socks are like snowflakes, no two are exactly alike."

"It is a good principle in science not to believe any 'fact'---however well attested---until it fits into some accepted frame of reference. Occasionally, of course, an observation can shatter the frame and force the construction of a new one, but that is extremely rare. Galileos and Einsteins seldom appear more than once per century, which is just as well for the equanimity of mankind."

"Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious."

"Call it "a wonder"or "a mystery"and you have an excuse to never try understanding it - an excuse to not take responsibility for it. People knew about love no more than they knew about Science, but at least most did not jump into Science headstrong, with the hope that they would figure it out as they went, or that some "mysterious"inborn trait would take care of it."

"Alfvén dismissed in his address religion as a 'myth'..."

"I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."

"I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here."

"Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths."

"Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler."

"A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all."

"What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does."

"You must not lie about trilobites, nor yet about time."

"We're very familiar with the idea that some things are so complex they're beyond our comprehension. This not only keeps us solving and experimenting but also distracted. Many things are really so simple we can't see them under our big noses."

"Nothing good was learnt too swiftly. Knowledge should be a purposeful accumulance of observed experience, applied and tested to the full."

"We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose."

"His work seems to confirm my old axiom: it is useless to try to keep the whole body alive."