quote: science

  • The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. – Albert Einstein

  • The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny…” – Isaac Asimov

  • Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same thing as division. – Unknown

  • Proof: No cat has eight tails. A cat has one tail more than no cat. Therefore, a cat has nine tails. – Unknown

  • Correspondence Corollary: An experiment may be considered a success if no more than half your data must be discarded to obtain correspondence with your theory. – Unknown

  • There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a “hottest part” implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible. – Richard Davisson

  • Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is staggering. – Buckminster Fuller

  • I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong. – Salman Rushdie

  • I do what I feel impelled to do, as an artist would. Scientists function in the same way. I see all these as creative activities, as all part of the process of discovery. Perhaps that’s one of the characteristics of what I call the evolvers, any subset of the population who keep things moving in…

  • The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach…

  • The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of…

  • Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere”. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little…